Fans of the franchise have a certain hero shooter game to thank for Borderlands 3, and no, it’s not Overwatch. It’s actually Borderlands developer Gearbox Software‘s very own 2016 title, Battleborn, which fizzled out and was overshadowed by Blizzard’s success with Overwatch.

In an interview with Metro UK, Borderlands 3 art director Scott Kester discussed how it felt like to develop the only AAA game with stylized visuals instead of photo-realistic graphics, amongst other topics.

“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.

I’ve worked on this game for over four years now, it’s been in development for a while.

The second I finished Battleborn I essentially started going into this. To us it wasn’t about, ‘Hammer it out, hammer it out! Let’s punch it out, let’s punch it out!’

It was like, ‘Let’s make the right thing. Let’s get it there and then we’ll take our time’.

But also, we’ve put so much junk into this game. It’s frikkin’ huge. It’s considerably more content than we’ve put into anything else.”

While Battleborn ultimately failed and later transitioned into being a free-to-play title, the experience and lessons learned to develop that game was invaluable to the folks at Gearbox Software. Without Battleborn, Borderlands 3 could have been just another derivative sequel with nothing new to show for.

For more on Borderlands 3, check out how SHiFT codes and VIP codes work or learn more about Moze The Gunner’s skill tree here.