2K Games invited me to the Borderlands 3 reveal event. If you watched the live stream of this event you know there was a presentation and then streamers could play the game up on their channel. Well, that wasn’t actually the first presentation, it was actually the third. I know this because I was also invited to both press presentations the day prior. However, I must say that the 3rd presentation was the best if you look at the response of the crowd. Passionate fans going crazy over the gameplay. Which resulted in Randy Pitchford excitedly jumping on stage. The standing ovation was also an emotional moment. You could see that the dev team was overwhelmed by it. Because 1) it was enormous and 2) it didn’t happen in the previous two press presentations. Gearbox Software had been getting a lot of slack for their previous missteps, I was happy for them to finally score a win again.
Changing The Firing Mode
During the introduction of the new mechanics the creative director, Paul Sage, talks about the new alt-fire feature. At the first presentation, I heard him say that you can switch from shooting regular bullets to shooting grenade launchers. I thought that Paul misspoke there. However, during the second presentation, I noticed that he said the exact same thing. In the context of the sentence, he was talking about the projectiles shooting from the weapon and not that the weapon itself transformed into a grenade launcher. While in some matters that is what’s happening but it wasn’t clearly presented in my opinion.
Avoiding Marketing Nightmares
I remembered the Battleborn presentation of Toby the destroyer at PSX. He was the 16th character that Gearbox Software was going to announce. But because 2K Games had a partnership deal with Sony they agreed to give PlayStation players the 26th character for free. Basically, those who owned a PlayStation would get the 1st DLC character for free because Battleborn was going to have 25 heroes at launch. However, reading is hard, and there was confusion due to the numbers 16 & 26 being too similar. This resulted in media outlets saying Toby was the first DLC character, nr 26 instead of 16.
Therefore – with this in mind where small things like this are going wrong –, I went to my buddy Scott Pytlik, Director of Global Influencer Marketing at 2K, as it seemed that he was keeping track of everything. I told him about my interpretation of a weapon shooting other weapons, grenade launchers in this case, which sounded ridiculous and completely untrue.
Scott listened and thanked me for my feedback. It’s kinda weird thinking back about it, that you can simply walk up to the big folks in charge and point these things out. That said, I have built a great relationship with 2K Games over the years.
Plot Twist
During the 3rd presentation – which was the one that was being live-streamed – I noticed that the sentence about the alt-fire was changed. Nice! I had an impact on the presentation. I avoided the potential miscommunication. Marketing achievement unlocked.
However, a few weeks later Gearbox Software and 2K Games showed a new Borderlands 3 trailer at E3. And to Scott’s and my surprise, there was a short clip of the ‘Gun Gun’, the Eridian Fabricator. A weapon that literally can shoot other weapons. Sooooo… that whole thing about trying to avoid miscommunication of a gun shooting grenade launchers didn’t need to be fixed because it’s actually in the game. LMAO!
I later spoke to Scott about this and we had a good laugh because he didn’t know that this was something in the game. This is a fun story due to the plot twist but it also shows how much impact you can have.