With a seven-year break between Borderlands 2 and Borderlands 3, it seemed like the game wasn’t happening. Most fans knew it would be announced when people let their guard down though. In an interview with GameCentral, art director, Scott Kester, explained why they waited so long to make another mainline game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-o3cuQo5as
Turns out, it was literally just them wanting to take a break from the main Borderlands games.
Okay, so we made 1 and we made 2 pretty back-to-back. I was on both of those games and we were tired. And we were like, ‘Should we make another one?’ And we didn’t want to, we needed a break. Because if we didn’t have a break I think we wouldn’t have made something as good.
Kester even believes that their hiatus and Battleborn were the best things for the Borderlands franchise as it made them think differently.
By the grace of the beautiful 2K they allowed us to say, ‘Hey, we want to try this Battleborn thing, we just want to kind of reset our palette, we’re gonna try this thing’. And we did it and… you know, if we didn’t make that game Borderlands 3 wouldn’t be as good as it is now. It made us think about things a little different.
Fans weren’t left in the dark, though. Through those seven years, Gearbox released Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel which has surpassed five-years-old.
Tales from the Borderlands was also released, though, it’s currently unplayable.
Borderlands 3 is coming September 13, 2019, for the PS4, Google Stadia, PC (via Epic Games Store as a 12-month timed-exclusive), and Xbox One.