New Tales from the Borderlands writer is approaching the game as an ‘interactive sitcom’

There aren’t too many games that take a stab at comedic elements, and that’s likely because comedy is an incredibly hard art to nail. That goes for any medium, but it might be toughest of all in games. We’ve certainly seen it done before, but the amount of failures as compared to successes is astronomical.

The next game to try its hand at humor is New Tales from the Borderlands. The Borderlands series is certainly chock-full of humor, so taking a narrative-based Borderlands game and dialing up the laughs seems like a natural fit. That’s the goal for lead writer Doug Lieblich anyway, who spoke to GamesRadar about their approach for the experience.

“In terms of story structure, it was important to us to structure it sort of like an interactive sitcom, like a game that focused on comedy; which I really rarely see these days. And also we wanted to ensure that every choice felt important, and it wasn’t just a player pressing a button because they had to. We wanted the player to feel like, oh, the game respects me. And I’m here for it. We also, just as people who love games and love this genre, wanted to take risks with how we do things, subvert expectations of what you might see in an interactive narrative.”