Borderlands 2 scribe answers the question, “Hey, Ant, whatcha writing?”

Borderlands 2 is way better written than it needs to be. It’s one of the last places I expected to find some of this year’s best videogame writing. Anthony Burch (pictured, figure it out) deserves much of the credit.

So what stuff did he write that didn’t make it into the game? In one of those Reddit “Ask Me Anything” verbal moshpits, Burch, who claims to have never been stoned or drunk in his life, explains that you missed out on a Scottish granny with a machinegun and Ellie with the body of Brick and the legs of Moxie. And then there’s this bit:

There is one thing that got cut from BL2 that I really really miss. After a certain character dies, you get a quest to go tell all of that character’s friends that the person is dead. Originally, you were going to go tell Tiny Tina and she — for the first and only time in the game — would lose her insane manic tone and actually get really solemn. She’d thank you for telling her and ask you to leave, before disappearing into her workshop. And then, if you moved really close to the workshop, you could hear her quietly sobbing.

One of the marks of a good writer is that he cares about his characters enough to make them actual people instead of just joke delivery systems.