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Borderlands 3 creative director says he left Gearbox partly because creativity can get stifled on 400-person teams: 'There'd be great design ideas that would never bubble up to the top'
Borderlands 3's creative director left Gearbox to found Ruckus Games, a developer-first studio focusing on creative freedom and avoiding the communication issues and creative limitations of large AAA teams working on established franchises.
The creative director of Borderlands 3 says part of the reason he left Gearbox to start a new studio is that huge teams don't always leave space for creativity to flourish.
Earlier this month, Paul Sage announced Ruckus Games and its new project - a co-op shooter set in the American Heartland of the 1980s. In that announcement, Sage and his team said they were striking out to get away from a AAA environment that tends to recycle the same ideas. Speaking to GamesRadar+, Sage offers a little more insight into why that recycling could happen.
"[When] we started out, all of us had worked on these huge, massive projects that had 200 to 300 to 400 people on a team," Sage explains. Having worked on both Borderlands 3 and The Elder Scrolls Online, Sage was familiar with the team sizes that went into massive franchises and says that "what we've ended up seeing is that there were just communication errors with teams that big. There'd be great design ideas that would never bubble up to the top or that get tossed in favor of other things."
According to Sage, that's not necessarily a problem inherent to AAA development, but it's certainly one attached to ongoing successful franchises. "If you have a successful franchise," he says, "you don't want to do anything to hurt that franchise. That's not a bad thing. That's just a reality. But the problem is that when you get into that mindset, you're not in the creator mindset of really trying to push the boundaries or doing something of that nature."
Collectively, that prompted Sage - who left Gearbox long before the Borderlands 4 announcement - and the six devs he started Ruckus Games with to come together, creating a "developer-first" team where they don't have to be "restricted so much [by] having to worry about 'are we potentially going to alienate some potential players by introducing this one system?'"
"That was really the start of things for the team, and that's how we built the studio. We're able to just get on a call and say, 'hey, I'd like to try this' with somebody else, and then we can just try that thing out on a very quick basis versus having to set up five meetings about it, discuss it, 'is it going to be right?' So that was one of the things that just really attracted us to doing something like this. Becoming a developer-first studio was really big for us. That was part of why we started Ruckus, and that's what the team was about."