Borderlands 3 will show how social media used irresponsibly on a planet full of murderous psychopaths can be an extremely powerful weapon of war.
We know that Borderlands 3 will have a quartet of new vault hunters, returning faces from Borderlands 2, as well as two new villains that you’ll love to hate. Troy and Tyreen Calypso, better known as the Calypso Twins, use their power as social media influencers to create a cult called The Children of the Vault and then send those cultists to do their bidding. And their bidding usually involves violence.
Tyreen is a Siren and uses her powers to enhance her message. Some might call that hypnosis or brainwashing, but to Tyreen, it’s all just a means to an end. And that end is getting access to the vault.
It also has some scary parallels with modern-day social media. Streamers and influencers have a lot of... well, "influence" on a lot of people, and that's still something that humanity is learning how to deal with.
Danny Homan and Sam Winkler, co-writers of Borderlands 3, recently sat down with Polygon to talk about where they got their idea for the Calypso Twins and The Children of the Vault.
“We started thinking, ‘Well, what do bandits do? They murder, they pillage, they do these heinous acts.’ So what if there are these two villains who are basically murder streamers who like held up all the most atrocious acts and said, ‘That’s great! It’s content! We love it. We want to share it. We want to encourage it. We want to make you do even more of it.’ And that’s, that’s kind of the impetus behind them being streamers.”
Homan and Winkler also wanted to modernize the Borderlands franchise. Previous games were all a giant joke on how corporations are evil and capricious, with no regard for the sanctity of human life. And they still are, but the writers wanted to add a social media twist to the Borderlands formula.
"To bring Borderlands into 2019, it felt a little more relevant and fresh to have this grassroots, homegrown, crowdsourced psycho army. I think a lot of our players will recognize some of today in that."
For more on how to crowdsource your own psycho army, read the full interview over on Polygon. Borderlands 3 releases on September 13th.