Trivia / Battleborn

• Actor Allusion: Rath's catchphrase calls to mind a certain infamous line from Dragon Ball that is associated with a character that his voice actor, Christopher Sabat, also played.
  Rath: IT'S AFTER NINE-THIIIIIIIIRTYYYYYYY!
  • For added allusion, the Spider Sentries in Incursion will sometimes bug Rath to say this when the latter's nearby. Spider Sentries in the game happen to be also voiced by Christopher Sabat.
• Approval of God: Jt Machinima, the creators of this Battleborn Rap, were invited at Pax East where the song was played in public and where they were congratulated by the makers of the game. ^note Song begins around 1h10min
• Dueling Works: In direct competition with the vaguely similar game Overwatch. It was not even a REMOTELY close contest, and despite the fact that the two games really don't have that much in common with each other, asides from being colourful sci-fi team-based FPS games, Battleborn was given a critical blow on release by Overwatch. When the game tried going Free-To-play with a "Free Trial", it came into direct competition with Paladins, which was also free-to-play and ended up siphoning players who would've otherwise went to Battleborn. Overwatch suffocated the playerbase on the games' release to life-support, and Paladins put the final nail in Battleborn's proverbial coffin.
• Rule 34 – Creator Reactions: Randy Pitchford once retweeted◊ the Battleborn Rule 34 subreddit on his twitter account. Due to being seen as a desperate attempt to promote the game (particularly since Pitchford is heavily suspected as being the one who created the subreddit in the first place), this led to trolls filling the then-recently created subreddit with mocking messages and (ironically enough) Overwatch porn.
• Stillborn Franchise: Battleborn was released with every intention of being the next Borderlands. Unfortunately, the fact that it was practically dead on arrival makes any chance for a Battleborn 2 look unlikely.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Remember Gearbox's trailer for a Brothers in Arms game called Furious 4? Oddly enough, Battleborn grew out from that. Randy Pitchford even lampshaded the bizarreness of the change in the article we just linked to, referring to it as "an absurd convolution."
  • Originally Kelvin was pitched as an alien trapped inside an ice golem, where the two entities would combine powers. The idea for an ice character was one the team liked, so that element was pulled out for further exploration. At around this same time also, the idea for Toby was being pitched as well. Since penguins and ice go together like Montana and Oscar Mike, an early concept of Kelvin incorporated Toby. Instead of having an alien inside the ice golem, Toby's crashed space glider was lodged in Kelvin's body◊.
  • An interview regarding Ernest and his reveal stream reveal some info of what could have been in relation to the Demobird. As a Demolitions Expert which uses grenades, Ernest was actually one of the first character archetypes that the development team wanted to add however for certain reasons he was not able to be included among the first 25 characters and thus he became a post-launch character. His very early concept design was actually something the development team really liked very early on though they didn't exactly have a very defined role for him at that point. One of the early ideas for him however was being a flamethrower wielding character.
    Ernest being a grenadier came from another character the team was prototyping. Said character was a gnome, a bombardier with a somewhat weird passive in which he dug into the ground whenever he stopped and became invincible. While the gnome had nice grenade play, his skills weren't really that good and needed some rework hence the reason why a grenadier type character was tabled out from the first 25. When the team decided to do the 5 post-launch characters, they got the cool idea of giving that early undefined bird concept they liked the grenade launcher gameplay.
    When the development team decided to make a bird Demolitions Expert, they went through a reconcept process wherein they toyed with various ideas of what bird he exactly would be such as making him an owl. This process wasn't limited to birds though and thus one of Ernest's early concept designs was being a honey badger. The team however decided to stick to birds as they were still very much attached to the early bird concept. In the end, they decided to go with the original bird concept everyone liked as Ernest's final design.
  • The Kid Ultra reveal stream provides some info of what he could have been. As Kid Ultra is based around the idea of being a "sidekick", he went through a number of design concept. His initial concept made him look more like a UPR aligned character than LLC one. Other concepts explored the whole sidekick angle (one concept of which was even a straight forward Robin-like character) as well as how human is he, whether he's a human being in a robot suit or a straight up robot. Aside from different early concept designs, Kid Ultra originally had a different passive which was stated in the Pax West 2016 Gearbox panel and an interview with Mental Mars, something which Randy apologizes for in the stream. The passive was that if any of his allies shot a target, that target would be highlighted and if he shot that target, he would do extra damage. This was changed because it was too reactive rather than proactive and that it was useless in single player as there wouldn't be any allies to help the player with extra damage.
  • In an early promo art for the game, there were a couple of characters in the background at the right that aren't in the game proper, a fireball wielding witch character and a giant monster character. The witch was actually an early design concept for Orendi. The monster's deal meanwhile is explained in depth in an interview by Mental Mars with Randy Varnell. His name was Ejo-Lorr and was this big monstrous guy who had two things going on. He had a gravitational beam that would act like a pull attack similar to Ghalt and Shayne & Aurox; and he had this big vomit attack where he would vomit on the ground and enemies he pulled in would kinda melt and corrode when they came in. Battle dialogue for Ejo-Lorr was actually recorded which hysterically showed he was this big disgusting Hulk Speaking beast who thought he was a ladies' man. He however got cut and repurposed because the team couldn't get his art right and also because he was a centaur-like quadruped.
    Related to Ejo-lorr being a quadruped, Randy also mentioned another cut character in the interview, Anabelle & the Iron Fist. They were kinda almost like a Shayne & Aurox concept about this little girl who rode this massive mech around. The mech turned into ISIC which the development team did a little differently. Anabelle and fellow cut character Ejo-Lorr were actually beyond prototype, the development team had them in game with their early models done and developed out. However there was a huge problem with quadruped-like characters like these wherein they kept on tripping and getting stuck on stuff on collision. When the team made the decision to expand the game's roster from 15 to 25, they kinda had to simplify the characters they were making and thus they had to make the hard decision at that point to drop all the characters at that time who were quadrupeds including another one mentioned by Randy that was in the prototyping phase. Parts of Ejo-Lorr though can still be seen in spirit in Aurox and Ghalt.
    Additionally, when asked whether Ejo-Lorr had any connection to Oxo-Lorr, a character whose name appears in a certain piece of gear, Randy explained that they are Lorrians, a race that he compares closest to being like the Hutts from Star Wars as the Lorrians all do shady businesses such as dealing in black market technology. In a similar vein to Jabba the Hutt and other similar Hutt names, Randy explains that the Lorrians use a hyphenated name thing but -Lorr is more of a tittle or a nod to their race.
• Word of Gay: Jythri a.k.a Randy Varnell provided some massive lore dump at the Battleborn Discord server. Among the info, he revealed the sexual orientation of certain characters. Shayne is gay. Reyna is Bi but doesn't talk about her sexual orientation at all, much to Ghalt's chagrin. She really doesn't have time for that anyway as she like Ghalt is too caught up in work. Mellka is still exploring as she's had a multi-year anger agenda to tick off first. Additionally when asked if any of the gendered/biological characters are asexual, Randy replied with "Hmm. Kelvin sorta?"