On Episode 30 of Ready Up, host Joshua Davis was joined by Environment Artist Tirzah Bauer and Game Designer Tyler Bearce to discuss the new desert Borderlands World vs. World map . Tirzah and Tyler—known within ArenaNet as “T&T”—worked together to create the new map; Tirzah built the environments, and Tyler populated them with enemies, events, and other content.
Josh passed along some questions from the community for Tyler and Tirzah to answer. Like the classic alpine Borderlands, home citadels will contain crafting stations and other services. Jumping puzzles will not be included in the map, but there will be flat areas for guilds to fight in, and Tyler and Tirzah hinted that something might be hiding in the sparse areas of water. The desert Borderlands will have roughly the same population cap as the alpine Borderlands.
A tour around the map showed off the three elementally themed keeps, as well as towers styled after their necromantic, charr, or ogre inhabitants. Tirzah and Tyler wanted to make sure that each objective is unique so that the map feels like a real place and capturing and defending remains meaningful and fresh. While this means less parity between objectives, the benefit is more interesting gameplay. Tirzah even built encampments for the sentries so they can wait for players to kill them in comfort!
Each keep will provide a set of bonuses to the team that holds it. The earth keep creates rock walls to halt invaders, powers up earth turrets to cause damage, and summons a massive sandstorm to grant stealth. The lava keep transforms players into lava dogs, activates gargoyles to rain down fireballs, and grants the power to run unharmed over rivers of lava. If you love jumping off high places, one of the air keep’s bonuses will let you fall as far as you like without taking any damage, as Tirzah demonstrated in an impressive way! In addition, all of the keep lords have unique abilities. For example, the air lord is a tengu who creates wind prisons to entrap players, throws slashing boomerang projectiles, teleports, and activates wind turrets.
The Ruins of Power and Borderlands Bloodlust mechanics from the alpine Borderlands will not make an appearance; the desert has its own unique mechanic in the form of the oasis. Every three hours, an event will begin in the lush jungle at the center of the map. Each team can potentially charge up an asuran superweapon by bringing power cells back to their camp. Unfortunately, dinosaurs have swallowed the cells and must be defeated in order to retrieve them. Once one team succeeds in powering up their weapon, the event will end and their superweapon will be deployed, doing massive damage to the doors of enemy keeps. An unrepaired wooden door can be destroyed outright by the weapon, but repairs and upgrades can help mitigate the damage.
To cap off the stream, Josh premiered a video to commemorate the World Tournament Series at PAX East in Boston, where EU team Orange Logo claimed the championship. Check out the recording of the livestream below!
