Tiny Tina's Wonderlands' DnD Structure Makes It A Game-Within-A-Game

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands DnD structure has been explained a bit more. The Borderlands series has always made for a chaotic amalgam of tones and influences, and with the upcoming Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, Dungeons and Dragons is supposedly the main driver behind the game's structure and has pushed it into more hardcore RPG territory than previous entries. 

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands DnD Structure: How Has It Been Influenced?

The groundwork for this new spin-off in the Borderlands' universe was lay during an expansion for Borderlands 2 called Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep. Essentially, Tiny Tina acts as a DM (or BM in-universe) for a Dungeons and Dragons inspired tabletop game titled Bunkers and Badasses that your character took part in. This time however - as a full standalone title - the developers can lean more heavily into the DnD structure and aesthetic.

This news comes from an interview with some of the key developers from Kotaku Australia. "The game-within-a-game set-up was a fresh way to tell a story, and we wanted to build on that…" said Matt Cox, the Creative Director, continuing "we wanted to have features that were 100% ours. So the first thing that we did, obviously, in the spirit of tabletop RPGs, is we had a character creator." This is a new feature for the series, which previously had premade characters to select from.

Carrying on further, the Art Director, Adam May, talked about the structure of the game, stating "there's a sort of layering to what's going on in the world." He carried on, "There are players at the board itself, and they're playing the game, right? But then, down inside the board, there's the actual fantasy world you're playing at. So there’s this disconnect and this constant reminder that hey, this is a game inside of a game, inside of a game."

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands DnD Structure: What Else Did The Interview Reveal?

The developers also talked about how setting the game as a tabletop scenario lets them "make some very, very wild and diverse locations." Borderlands has had plenty of environmental diversity in the past. This time the devs aren't limited by the planet of pandora, but instead Tiny Tina's imagination, calling it an "amusement park map". There's also the inclusion of choosing your own voice, where you can pick the voice actor and then a specific pitch to personalise your character a little. 

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is set to release on March 25, 2022. It will release for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and select PC platforms.