Maya the Siren - The Siren class plays like a glass cannon character focused more on her magic ability. If Gunpowder is a player's favorite, they should decide between dealing more damage and feeling more safe and sturdy. If Guerilla is the favorite, putting a couple of points into Survival will help them stay on the battlefield for longer and vice versa. With this in mind players will likely want to mix and matched based on their favorite Skill Tree. Survival - Focuses on defensive abilities and healing, along with increasing the frequency at which the turret can be pulled out.Gunpowder - Focuses on making Axton better with explosives and mid-ranged guns as well as making the turret more of a distraction from the player.While being very damage-heavy, this skill tree doesn't offer much in the way of healing or defense. Guerrilla - Focuses on making the turret deal high and continuous damage.The three skill trees for this class are: Except this commando's special ability is to bring out his own Dahl Sabre Turret which can be upgraded throughout the player's skill set choices and class mods. Each of these classes only belongs to the specific character and cannot be changed.Īxton the Commando - The Commando class plays much like a standard warrior or soldier class. Not only does that make for good drama, but it also makes the fictional world compelling for audiences.The four base character classes are Axton the Commando, Maya the Siren, Salvador the Gunzerker, and Zer0 the Assassin. “Making her so breezily at ease with her sexuality is also a way of hitting those two key elements I mentioned earlier – making her interesting and pushing this sub-textual idea that people in the Borderlands universe are often more at ease with themselves that we are. “She’s not only gay but also totally comfortable with that like it’s no big deal,” said Suckling. But if you’re controlling Athena, Springs helps to awaken your character’s sexuality. Once we did that, it gave us an interesting angle to push on depending on which character you play as.”įor example, if the player is controlling Nisha (who is straight), Springs won’t make advances.
“Eventually, we decided it’d be cool to make her a lesbian as well (as franchise director Matthew Armstrong pointed out we had lots of bisexual women characters, but no lesbians). “They wanted to make a friendly, likable, not-homicidal character for the player to befriend,” said Burch. In The Pre-Sequel, this diversity also includes a queer character, Janey Springs, the first character you meet on Elpis and the creation of Suckling and his 2K Australia colleague Marek Walton. “I got irritated about the gender imbalance, and everyone else agreed we needed another woman.” Wanting a character with some morality to balance the group, and not having seen Athena since a first game DLC, they decided Athena would be the best choice. “When Randy Pitchford, Matthew Armstrong, Brian Martel and I were in a meeting about the playable characters, the initial plan was to have Nisha, Wilhelm, Claptrap, and another male character,” said Burch. We asked Burch and Suckling how they came to the unusual (but awesome) decision to have parity in the playable characters’ gender, and they said that while including Nisha was an easy choice because of her relationship with Handsome Jack, deciding on Athena wasn’t quite so simple.
#BORDERLANDS PRE SEQUEL CHARACTERS AND ABILITIES SOFTWARE#
So we spoke with Gearbox Software writer Anthony Burch and 2K Australia writer Maurice Suckling to ask them about representation, female characters, and awesome guns in the new Borderlands. Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel came out last week, and we here at The Mary Sue were thrilled to see a game with an equal number of male and female playable characters (unheard of!).