Credit: Gearbox Entertainment
The fourth mighty iteration of everyone’s favourite vault-huntin’ fantastical looter shooter is upon us! Set to release for Playstation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC (with Nintendo Switch 2 at a later date), Borderlands 4 seeks to impress with elevated scale, story and of course gunplay among many new features for you harness in a brave new world with the classic familiar hijinks and charm that we all love from the franchise.
Courtesy of Take-Two Interactive, we were invited to become some of the first people in the world to play Borderlands 4 and with that came the incredible opportunity to talk to two very important brains behind it – Andrew Reiner the Global Creative Executive Officer at Gearbox Entertainment, and the don himself, Randy Pitchford, Gearbox’s Founder and President.
What are you most proud of in Borderlands 4 that players might not notice at first glance?
Randy Pitchford (RP): Oh my God, interesting… What am I most proud of? The players, I mean, they won’t notice it at all. We did it… We’re shipping the game. This is a colossal- You have to understand that the scale of this effort is more than Borderlands 1, 2, and 3 all added together. So, from my seat, to organise all this human energy into this effort is quite a thing. And it worked. We did it. So that’s really, really exciting. I think that people that are familiar with Borderlands can’t quite expect how free and open the game is and what that leads to, what that means. Anyone who’s played Borderlands before has kind of their expectations in their head, but until it’s not going to be, until people have played dozens of hours or realise, oh wait a minute, this is a whole different thing. It’s kind of impossible to go back after this. You know what I mean? Whereas Borderlands 2 kind of holds up, but not after Borderlands 4…Sorry!
Credit: Gearbox Entertainment
Fair enough. Me and my mates, we played Borderlands 2 for at least a hundred hours. It’s just a good bonding experience.
RP: Yes. Well, that’s what co-op gets us. My wife and I play. It’s awesome.
Andrew Reiner (AR): For me, it’s just how much thought and care goes into every little thing in the game, whether it’s the guns you’re using, the areas you’re exploring, the balance of the fights. We have no idea. We’ve worked on these over and over and over. I think that’s something fans probably don’t realise. It’s just that we iterate on these things.
RP: Still iterating.
AR: For years… one battle!
RP: Iterating over and over, it’s getting tighter and tighter, but there’s still tweaking happening right now.
AR: So we’re trying to get it just right, get everything just right, whether it’s the sense of discovery or just the intensity of battle.
Yeah, you can definitely feel the ambition and the sheer attention to detail for so many awesome things – it’s incredible. What lessons from past Borderlands titles directly influenced the approach to this one?
RP: Oh wow, so many. We learned a lot about how to, not just how to do storytelling, but how to organise around storytelling at this scale with Borderlands 4. One of the things I’m really proud of is how much autonomy any given developer has for what they’re doing. And you could feel the heart of it, you could feel the game makers in what you’re playing with. You can feel us, we’re there. You can tell that, oh, somebody did this and they did it with care and love and their passion. But in Borderlands 3, we weren’t as coordinated in that. So sometimes we would just step on each other and ourselves with the work we were doing, particularly when it came to the storytelling and how rapidly dialogue was coming and how much voiceover was just flying at you. And even though this game is much bigger and there’s more dialogue, it is not just constantly talking at you, and there’s no repetition. It’s all really well organised and curated, and crafted in terms of how we’re presenting it to you. So a lot of the extra effort is going into dynamicism, but also in just a huge amount of cool things to do that are off the main path. Whether that’s events that can happen, situations that could arise dynamically or quests that we’ve crafted for you. There’s way more of that content than there’s ever been…
I really appreciate stories in our games, so I’m glad you brought that up.
RP: Thanks, I think this is the best Borderlands story we’ve told, and I think it’s the best way that we’re telling it. Just the nature and how we’re delivering that information. And it’s a harder problem because it’s the most nonlinear or landscape we’ve ever made. You don’t have to do things in the order we want you to do them in. You can just do stuff. So it was a harder problem, but I think because of that, we really dove in there and organised around doing it right. And there were definitely lessons learned from the past games. Yeah.
AR: What is it, 20 years of working on these games?
RP: Been working on Borderlands games for 20 years roughly, starting to get good at it haha!
Yeah, I guess you guys dabbled a bit on it now.
RP: Turns out if you do a thing a lot, you start to get good at it.
AR: I think through that, there’s in this iteration in particular, a lot of quality of life things, less friction between the player and the game. It just feels the way you want it to. Yeah, that’s a good point.
Credit: Gearbox Entertainment
So we love loot, and the grapevine said that loot is going to change a bit. Any comments on that?
RP: Well, we’ve got a whole lot more loot, and we’ve added some different kinds of gear that you can equip. The whole Grenade system is now this robust thing we call Ordinance, and there’s all kinds of stuff from big heavy rocking launchers to throwing knives… Everything in between!
The gun system, too, has iterated quite a lot, where we have our manufacturers and we love them, but they can now licence parts from other manufacturers. So you can get attributes from a TDR gun, which is throwable, and you can put that in, say, an alley elemental weapon that you’ve got. And this isn’t crafting, you’re not going to have to worry about figuring all this out on your own. It’s just possible with what the manufacturers have done so when you find weapons in the game, they could have these interesting parts, which means that if you get really into it and you’re trying to find the perfect combinations, well you’ll learn where to go to farm those weapons and to you’ll kill a boss and see if it drops the wind you were looking for. And you’ll get really, really good at that loot chase if you’re into that. I love the loot chase, so I get really, really gnarly in that. But you could also take it casually and have plenty of fun.
AP: On top of that, Borderlands 3, the loot chase was awesome, but you got a lot of legendaries, and it kind of devalued ’em a little bit.
RP: Legendaries, everything else devalued everything.
AP: Yeah. Borderlands 4 legendaries are going to matter. Again, you’re not going to see as many, but when you get ’em, they’re going to be thumping in your hands, kicking like mules. These things are awesome. So when you see that orange light on the ground, it’s going to be a really special, meaningful moment.
RP: We’ve been playing for a couple of days now, and with the boss fights and we’ve seen two drops.
Novelty is a beautiful thing in itself. So, how has the art pipeline changed with advances in engine tech and AI and stuff?
RP: Oh, well, I mean, AI hasn’t really, we have our own pipeline, so we don’t really use AI, but we have developed and gotten really sophisticated with our inking process because when you look at a Borderlands environment, you can tell that it’s hand-painted.
You can just look at a rock and it’s cool because an artist went in there and did that, and it’s a fricking rock.
But what a rock, right?
RP: Haha, yeah, and we’re proud of that. But we’ve gotten really good at that, and we have developed. We’re getting better and better at our processes and our tools for that personal touch that we like to put on everything. And that’s helped us do a lot more. I don’t know that you could use AI to help with Borderlands, frankly. I don’t know that it’s that kind of game, but I don’t think it crosses our minds. We just love making it so much, or we’re not trying to get something done. We’re enjoying the process. We like building, we love making, it’s fun. You can feel that. You can feel that not just in the art, but in everything in Borderlands, that humans are building this because we love building it.
AR: As Randy said, you could feel pieces of the team in there. And yesterday, we had a player go on this journey. He was just kind of exploring the world at the end of the day, and he went up on this hillside and he found just this folding chair, and there was just a basket of fruit on the folding chair, and it just kind of blew his mind. He is like, “What the heck is this?” And he was walking around, he was like, “Are you thinking about that too?”
RP: It was an impossible place to get, but once you’re up there, it was like this insane vista.
What he discovered is someone else had gotten up there and they set up a little lawn chair and they had their fruit ready to go, and they’re just enjoying you eating their apple. But
AR: It’s the little touches.
RP: There’s a little story there, you know? That’s a human touch.
We love cheeky bits of environmental storytelling.
RP: Yeah, we’re all about that.
Credit: Gearbox Entertainment
What’s been the biggest production or technical challenge on Borderlands 4 so far?
RP: Scale and scope. One of the smartest things we did was that we tackled all of our hard innovation upfront, like all of the new technology inventions. And we got really lucky. It all worked, but we bit off this massive thing that we wanted to do. And so it was really a group force challenge to just organise all of us around doing all, just making all of this stuff. And we’ve never made a game of this scale. If you combine the hours and the people involved in this effort, it’s more than Borderlands 1, 2, and 3 all added together, which is a lot. So that is a monumental achievement and something I’m proud of, but something that was really daunting as we get into it. And I will say, I’ll scream from the tallest mountain and say, I think we have the best producers in the world, the people that organise us and help us keep our head above water as, because as an artist, we’ll just get in there and we’ll tinker and we’ll want to make it cool. And art isn’t ever done. It’s abandoned. You know what I mean? So it’s the producers that help us go, that’s awesome. Hey, maybe put some attention on this other thing and keep us excited about spreading our attention around so that we can make a project this big. And I’m really proud of our production team. I think that they’re the real heroes here.
Shout out to production!
AR: Yeah. I think we found the fun early on when I started three years ago, the first time I jumped in the build before there was even a texture in there, I was like, this is awesome. Let’s ship it. This is just a lot of fun to jump around.
RP: We had the fundamentals going pretty good.
AR: And it’s just a product of iteration. It’s only gotten better from there. Over three years of just tinkering with it and kind of finding what it really needs to be. It’s been impressive to see the team work on that and kind of hone their craft.
RP: We’ve gotten pretty good at the first-person fundamentals. Just the feeling of moving, and it’s weird, we kind of take it for granted now, and every once in a while I’ll play a game, and you could say, oh, they’ve never made a first-person shooter before. There’s just stuff that’s wrong, and I know what it is, but I don’t think a lot of people can articulate those differences. But we feel them, and we kind of take them for granted. We probably shouldn’t. We’ve just gotten really, really good at those. We’ve been making first-person shooters since we created the genre. When I say we, I mean those of us in Dallas who worked on Duke Nukem 3D. That was my first commercial video game. My neighbour worked on Doom.
AR: But I guess in terms of something that’s new to more fully answer your question, from my perspective, it was the world itself populating that, finding that proper density of flow and gameplay and elements of discovery.
The storytelling.
AR: Yeah. When should it be open? When should it be jam-packed with stuff? And
RP: That was hard. Something we’re still… that was hard. There are some nervous moments too, because we made a big world.
RP: Possibilities. Yeah, it’s a nonstop thing. It’s still going on. It’s still happening.
Borderlands 4 is scheduled to release on September 12th 2025, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. A Nintendo Switch 2 version can also be expected later this year.
