Paul Sage, the Creative Director for the highly-anticipated Borderlands 3 set to release in September, says that the game should take roughly 35 hours to complete. However, this amount of time basically only involves engaging in the main story, with no investment in the countless side quests that will be available to players.
In a recent interview with Venture Beat, Sage went on to discuss various aspects of the game relating to what players can expect going in. Although some players may certainly rush through the main story mode, there is so much more to see.
From the beginning of the project, he had a couple of points to follow. First, he needed to respect the franchise, and then, he needed to take the next game to planets beyond what we know, which refers to planets past Pandora. This is where the expansive potential really began to take shape for the next game in the series. When asked to speak more about the planets, Sage opened up about not only what types of places are going to be in the game but also what was simply too large in scope to fit, even if it would have been amazing:
“We just did a huge pitch from across the team. Here’s the different environments we want to play in. We talked about it a lot, and there were a lot that were awesome, but that we couldn’t do. There were some that didn’t fit the franchise, even though I thought they were cool. One person was talking about this big turtle island, where the whole thing is on a living creature. I thought that was really cool, but I don’t think we could have pulled it off in the time we have. It’s great to dream, but the time just wasn’t there.”
Together, the idea of expanding to new worlds with what Sage describes as 35 hours to complete the campaign while ignoring everything else likely means that we as players are in for a massive game with much to do. If we consider The Witcher 3, for example, some players consider that a 50 hour game when only doing the story, whereas a speedrun might be 25. This of course means not doing any of the additional content in that game, which is unthinkable to fans of the series.
With all the side quests and loot to grind for in Borderlands 3, we could easily be getting a 60 or 80 hour game. Moreover, if history is anything to go by, we can expect plenty of additional DLC in the future to add to that runtime.
On top of that, players already know that the games in the series often have great replayability through different classes and because weapons are dropped from such broad loot tables that one can never be sure what they will get. Overall, Borderlands 3 is shaping up to be bigger than Borderlands 2, which seems to be exactly what the developers were hoping to achieve.
Borderlands 3 will be available in September for the Google Stadia, PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.