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"&amp;#039;Tiny Tina&amp;#039;s Assault on Dragon&amp;#039;s Keep&amp;#039; - the fourth, and possibly final, piece of DLC for Borderlands 2 - sees players participate in a game of Bunkers and Badasses, a Borderlands take on Dungeons &amp;amp; Dragons. The campaign sees you heading to the Unassuming Docks and stepping straight into an adventure being run by Tiny Tina. Although you can constantly hear the bickering of the whimsical Dungeon Master and her fellow players - characters such as Lilith and Brick - you exist within the gameworld, subject to Tina&amp;#039;s haphazard storytelling and with the occasional D20 smashing through a fourth wall or two.  In short: you&amp;#039;re playing a character in a Borderlands 2 game about Borderlands 2 characters playing a Borderlands 2 game. As you might have guessed from that description, when Digital Spy went hands-on with the DLC what we found was a surreal narrative experience which unfolds against an unpredictable-in-a-good-way landscape and embraces metagaming like a long-lost relative who has just showed up on the doorstep with armfuls of presents.  The idea began life in a slightly different format where an irritating nephew of Handsome Jack&amp;#039;s was stationed in a remote outpost which he had transformed into his own dungeon, as creative director Paul Hellquist explains. &amp;quot;We really liked that part of the concept but we didn&amp;#039;t want another DLC with hours of robots so we put that aside and made a list of a billion themes,&amp;quot; he said.  &amp;quot;The most sticky ones were the pen and paper D&amp;amp;D vibe and fairytales. Why not do both?&amp;quot; The fantasy setting combined with Tina&amp;#039;s haphazard hosting style has the interesting effect of freeing the team from most normal narrative constraints. &amp;quot;The idea for having the character be the omnipotent god of an environment gave us these opportunities to play with the players&amp;#039; expectations and do things in front of them or change things around.&amp;quot; Indeed, in the first few minutes Lilith picks Tina up on the discrepancy between the location and her original description and suddenly the entire area is rewritten from a land of rainbows to a dark and foreboding rocky outcrop. But when any problem could technically be overcome by having Tina just give the word or any action be explained as the whim of a character (the rationale behind one early quest set by Torgue is &amp;quot;because REASONS&amp;quot;), how does the team prevent the story from just being a mishmash of concepts and adventures?  &amp;quot;Torgue likes when things explode,&amp;quot; said writer Anthony Burch. &amp;quot;So if he wants something as simple as an explosion and there&amp;#039;s not the best narrative justification in the world for us having you do that we go, &amp;#039;Okay [because: reasons] is the justification&amp;#039;, and that&amp;#039;s fine - you get to play that card once. &amp;quot;Tina&amp;#039;s goals are more along the lines of, &amp;#039;I want to make a fun campaign for everybody, I want to try to distance my mind from the fact my friends have died trying to kill Handsome Jack as much as possible&amp;#039;. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a character by character thing. You get one [free pass] and if you do it again you have to do a really good job of justifying or explaining it. It&amp;#039;s a crutch - it would be way easier to have the whole plot be hinged on &amp;#039;because f**k it&amp;#039; but hopefully we didn&amp;#039;t do that too much.&amp;quot; &amp;#039;Assault on Dragon&amp;#039;s Keep&amp;#039; is also, by its very nature, story driven, so the question of how to integrate the recently added reckless pyromaniac character Krieg loomed large.  However, Hellquist maintains that the character matches the fairytale setting surprisingly well. &amp;quot;When you&amp;#039;re playing Krieg his action skill is melee so it feels a little more medieval - you&amp;#039;re the barbarian fighting the knight so it works pretty well together thematically.&amp;quot; As the fourth of four promised pieces of DLC for the game, there is also the question of whether it will be the last. Burch is confidant that &amp;#039;Assault&amp;#039; provides a satisfactory ending to Borderlands 2. &amp;quot;It feels like an epilogue because it&amp;#039;s about Tina coming to grips with the fact her friends are dead. It ends in a place that for me feels more conclusive and a moment of grace than the end of the main game which was like, &amp;#039;Yeah! More vaults to hunt, let&amp;#039;s go out there&amp;#039;. I&amp;#039;m very happy with us ending the campaign DLC with this.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;We could do a ton.&amp;quot; Hellquist&amp;#039;s response to the question of more campaigns is less final. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s plenty of ideas out there but are we going to do any more? I don&amp;#039;t know.&amp;quot; Borderlands 2: Tiny Tina&amp;#039;s Assault on Dragon&amp;#039;s Keep will be available from June 25. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/news/a484951/borderlands-2-tiny-tinas-assault-on-dragons-keep-preview/>