The director of Borderlands 3 criticizes game companies of playing it too safe with their big franchises – Is he right?

The director of Borderlands 3, Paul Sage, recently founded a new studio called Ruckus Games and began the production of its debut video game: an unnamed co-op third-person shooter that sounds both promising and ambitious.

In an interview with GamesRadar, Sage reflected on his career and talked about the trials & tribulations of working with AAA video game companies. One of the main points he made was about how studios care too much about the expectations of new entries in established franchises – which doesn’t surprise us considering he worked on big IPs like Borderlands and The Elder Scrolls – and that they often play it too safe as a result of these precautions.

“We can’t move in a direction that the creative people who are working on it want. You start to go back to the mechanics that you’ve had before, before introducing new mechanics” Sage stated, further confirming that creatives often have to jump through a lot of hoops in order to implement the fresh & new gameplay mechanics that they want.

Sage continued with his criticisms by claiming, “This happens all the time in franchise development, I can’t mention the specific mechanic, but it’s something that gets really frustrating. Again, when you walk about the way some of these huge franchises work, you’re getting people who don’t need to be a part of the creative process explaining how the creative process works”. Sage clearly didn’t want to point any fingers, but considering that he worked on Borderlands 3, Borderlands: Game of the Year Enhanced, Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour, Battleborn, and more, it’s most likely that he often clashed with higher-ups are either Gearbox Software or it’s publisher, 2K.

The director of Borderlands 3 is not the only famous creative who criticized AAA companies for their aversion to risk

Paul Sage also revealed that AAA game companies tend to interrupt the production of new games in order to do focus tests way too early in development: “The best of intentions are there. But there’s a point in time where, if you’re halfway through a feature, you don’t want people to look at it, because what they’re seeing is not going to be the full picture (…) So you want to get those evaluations done at the right time, but you have people who get nervous because big money is involved”.

Curiously enough, he’s not the only game director who recently criticized AAA companies of being too controlling and playing it safe. A few months ago, Suda51 revealed that game studios pay too much attention to Metacritic scores and that this usually affects the development of many projects. This statement is not a surprise, since Suda experienced this harsh supervision firsthand when he was making Shadows of the Damned with Electronic Arts, and the publisher controlled and changed his product in ways that “broke his heart”.

The worst part is that it seems that most gamers agree with the director of Borderlands 3. On social media websites like Reddit, some users said that this is an issue that is plaguing AAA game production, and it often leads to a ton of rewrites and delays that result in blander and safer games that don’t innovate at all. Others even compared AAA game companies to Hollywood since movie companies are arguably having a similar problem nowadays. Fortunately, indie studios are thriving because they tend to experiment and deliver unique new products, so AAA developers could learn a thing or two from them.