After 12 years with Gearbox Software, audio director and composer Raison Varner has announced on Twitter that he will be moving to Obsidian Studios. Varner has worked on all of Gearbox’s flagship games over the years, as well as voicing various Borderlands psycho enemies and the Loader Bot in Tales From The Borderlands.
Time for a big move! I’m excited to announce that I will be joining Obsidian Entertainment in Irvine CA. This week was my last week at Gearbox. I’m eager to see what’s over the horizon as we plan for new adventures, new potential and new experiences with the awesome people at OB!
— Raison Varner (@raisonvarner) May 9, 2020
Varner was the music director on Borderlands 3, working with a team of composers to push the game’s soundtrack to be unique and creative, while still belonging cohesively to a single game. Under Varner’s leadership, Borderlands 3 pushed the possibilities of what a game soundtrack would do. In an interview with GameSpot, Borderlands 3 composer Jesper Kyd said the game featured “a really deep interactive music system with many layers and modular pieces that are randomly put together in-game, so the music sounds a bit different every time you play the game.”
Obsidian’s latest game The Outer Worlds launched in October 2019, with story DLC planned for an as-yet unknown date in 2020. The Nintendo Switch release of The Outer Worlds was pushed back due to coronavirus, now with a release date of June 5 2020. The future of Obsidian was made more concrete with Microsoft’s purchase of the company in 2018, with a focus on allowing the studio to make the kind of games it wants to make.
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