Aaron Linde, the lead writer of Battleborn, has announced that he is leaving Gearbox Software. He got an awesome opportunity in the North West, which he can talk about real soon. Aaron posted this on Twitter where he thanked the team over at Gearbox and is incredibly proud of the work they did together.
Aaron signed up for lead writer at Gearbox in October 2013, he kind of got the job because of his friend Anthony Burch who was Lead Writer on Borderlands 2 at the studio. Before that Aaron Linde worked on narrative design at Monolith Productions and Microsoft Game Studios, where he wrote for Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Gears of War 3.
As I got the feeling that some websites are writing about Aaron’s departure as Battleborn failing against the mighty Overwatch I contacted 2K Games about this manor.
Aaron stayed on to see Battleborn through to completion and has already finished a great deal of work on upcoming content. His departure has been carefully planned and he has transitioned writing duties to Sam Winkler, who wrote the character Alani and has been helping with the writing on Battleborn since February.
2K Games
It’s not uncommon for people to get hired per project or jump from project to project themselves. Tim Turi from Game Informer talks to Gearbox’s lead writer on Battleborn, Aaron Linde, about his past at Destructoid, his friendship with Anthony Burch, the role of battle chatter, and more.
UPDATE: Aaron was burned out while working on Battleborn. The project became bigger and bigger over the course of the development and the amount of work was overwhelming for 1 lead writer. Gearbox Software recognized the situation and started assembling a full narrative department to ensure these things wouldn’t happen again.
