Borderlands 3: Every New Vault Hunter Explained

At a big preview event for Borderlands 3, Den Of Geek had a chat with Gearbox’s Chris Brock, who is serving as a senior producer on the long-awaited looter-shooter sequel.

One of the things we were eager to ask Brock about was the four new Vault Hunters that players can choose from in the game. These, of course, are playable characters that have their own unique abilities.

Brock’s answer to our question was lengthy and interesting enough that we decided to spin it out into its own article. So, ahead of our publication of the rest of the interview, here’s Brock’s explanation of each new Vault Hunter and why they were worked into to Borderlands 3…

Moze, The Gunner

“So, to kind of like start at the beginning, the first one we developed was Moze. And she was kind of a natural evolution of the soldier classes we’ve had before. So we’ve had Roland in the first game, and his thing was he could throw down a turret, right? And then we had Axton in next game, he could stick a turret to other places, and he could set the turret to do different things. So it was like, what’s the natural evolution of a turret? Like, well, the most badass version of a turret we can think of would be one that you just kind of, like, deploy and get into like a mech. And so we went off to the races with that.”

Further Reading: Borderlands 3 Hands-on Impressions: The King of Loot Shooters Is Back

Amara, The Siren

“With Amara, which is the second one we moved into development on, that idea there was not necessarily to get away from what Sirens have been doing in previous games, but to do that, and also other things. Like, we wanted to have a Siren that could get in close and kind of mix it up, and didn’t have like a waify kind of appearance – more like a solid, stocky, tank-y, tough, powerful woman.”

FL4K, The Beastmaster 

“And then FL4K [pronounced Flack] was the third up, and is kind of a natural evolution of Gaige from Borderlands 2 with Deathtrap. So we liked the idea of, if a player wants to play by themselves, then it’s good to have a way that they can play by themselves but also still have someone else there to kind of rely on. So that was the general kind of idea behind that.” FL4K, if you were wondering, can summon a variety of powerful beasts to aid him in combat.

Further Reading: 45 Best Video Games to Play in 2019

Zane, The Operative

“And then Zane was actually the last character that we really nailed. And the idea with him was: he kind of changed looks a lot, and the specific parts of his kit changed a lot, but the impetus for him is that we wanted a spy. Gadgets-based, you know, and he’s got a whole bunch of cool tools and you can use them in tandem to do really cool battlefield-controlling things.” One of his abilities is deploying digital clones of himself that will distract your enemies on the battlefield.

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