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Borderlands 4 has some clear runway now that Grand Theft Auto VI is coming next year instead of this year.
The action role-playing first-person shooter looter game (now priced at $70 instead of the previously floated $80) is coming on September 12 on the Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and the Windows PC.
I visited 2K’s Hangar 13 studio in Novato, California, and played a couple of hours of Borderlands 4. I have been writing up my impressions this week. I also interviewed the creative director of the game, Graeme Timmins, about what his goals were for the game and the kind of characters we’ll counter.
Like with GTA VI, there is a lot of pentup demand for this game. Gearbox’s Borderlands 3 came out six years ago in 2019. And Borderlands 4 was in the works even before that title debuted. Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox, said the fourth title was the “most open and free game in the franchise so far.
It takes place on a planet named Kairos, and players assume the role of a Vault Hunter who must lead resistance against a dictator named the Timekeeper and his army of synthetic followers.
Kairos has four distinct, seamlessly connected regions to explore: the rolling hills of the Fadefields, the frigid peaks of Terminus Range, the shattered lands of Carcadia Burn, and finally the Dominion, the Timekeeper’s impenetrable fortress city.
The game has a new planet and an all-new cast which has nothing to do with last year’s forgettable Borderlands movie. I found the Vault to be particularly difficult, while the Fadefields were more open and relaxing.
There’s a lot of at stake in this title, as Take-Two acquired Gearbox in March 2024 for $460 million. That’s a lot of cheddar, though it’s much less than the up to $1.3 billion that previous owner Embracer paid for it. I enjoyed playing both the single-player game, the time in the Fadefields section of the game and the very difficult (at least from my perspective) section of the game called The Vault.
These new open world and competitive sections of the game may help gamers see the value of the $70 price, as the suggestion by Pitchford that it might be an $80 game didn’t go over so well.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: Can you go over some of the goals, what you wanted to do with Borderlands 4?
Graeme Timmins: My biggest goal was to make it the most seamless player experience ever. Not from just moment to moment, but also getting into co-op. I wanted to make sure our lobby system was very user-friendly, seamless to jump in. Once you’re into the game, as few load screens as possible, no interruptions there. Same thing for missions and rewards. Instead of having to drop whatever you’re doing to get the reward, now it goes into your inventory in the reward center.
I love combat. I want people to be in combat nonstop. Sometimes I have to remind myself that it’s okay for people to take a break. I wanted it to be seamless, like getting out of your vehicle at any time to go wherever you want. The key term for me was seamless in that player experience.
GamesBeat: You’re picking up ammo, for instance. You click once, but everything flows through from there.
Timmins: Right.
GamesBeat: On the different parts we’ve played, can you add context to those two? The Vault and the Fadefields?
Timmins: The Fadefields, that’s earlier in the game. In a real game, you would have completed a lot of the tutorialization at that point. At that point you’re ready to go enjoy the game. We wanted to introduce players to new characters. That’s where you meet Rush. We wanted this game to be more friendly to new people coming into Borderlands than ever before.
As you continue in the Fadefields, there’s that side mission with Claptrap, though. You still see familiar faces from previous Borderlands. But you don’t have to have played previous Borderlands to come in and enjoy this one. The Fadefields kind of sets that up. Everyone’s on the same playing field in terms of the game.
For the Vault, that represents difficulty, challenge, a great loop. We wanted to provide players with a chance to test their builds and experience a bigger, more badass boss. That boss represents a real big step for bosses in Borderlands. It has multiple mechanics. It’s not just a wall of damage. You have to dodge and grapple. We test you in more ways than just whether you have good guns. That’s a good example of how we’ve leveled up the bosses here in Borderlands 4.
GamesBeat: Echo made me think of Dead Space. You could just leave it on the whole time. The user had the choice to leave it on or leave it off. Here you use it where you want.
Timmins: This build is already three or four weeks old. The game changes a lot right now in a few weeks. People will see this in future demos. We’ll let players, in the options, determine how long that echo path stays on. When you tap it, you can have it stay a bit longer if you want. You’ll also be able to see a path drawn on the big map as well. “Oh, I want to go to this place,” and you’ll see the path drawn out on the big map.
Again, I didn’t want it to be intrusive to the player experience. Just tapping it quickly when you need it is great. It’s not just an element that’s always distracting you. Really, if we’ve done our job well, you might have a goal, but I really hope that something else gets your attention and drags you off to go do something completely different. To me, a successful experience is–you would have walked the whole area on foot and never even done a side mission or main mission, because there was so much stuff in the world that kept your attention. Then you’ll be on the opposite side of the map thinking, “Okay, I want to go back and do my mission.” Get on your vehicle and use that echo path to take you where you want to be. That, to me, would be a successful experience.
GamesBeat: The Fadefields, it felt like I could be successful just using one weapon. Shooting and not paying attention to more things going on. If that didn’t evolve–it felt like constantly switching weapons against some of these enemies that are very different was necessary. Even cryo versus radioactive–
Timmins: The Fadefields is more standard combat. You can take it at your own pace a bit. But yeah, the Vault, we wanted to test your gear, test your action skill. You do have to pay attention to those elemental effects and really play into those more in the Vault than in the open world.
GamesBeat: Is part of the Vault that you need to identify exactly what you’re up against and match up your weapons?
Timmins: We want you to discover it and learn from it. We don’t want to give you the answers up front. After a couple of attempts, you should have an idea. This is the type of enemies. They tend to have shields or they tend to have armor. You can go and optimize your gear. I really need a shock weapon. I want a corrosive weapon. Maybe I want a piece of gear that helps me spread effects. You might have a Maliwan weapon with ricochet bullets from Jakobs. Now you can spread that elemental damage to more enemies by shooting just one. There’s a lot of gear game there. You can further and further optimize your play style and eventually work on that challenge.
We still want players to have fun. We’re not a punishing game. If you die you respawn and just spend some cash. Then you try again. You’re never punished for failure. It’s just a question of what you can learn from that and how you can optimize your build and try again.
GamesBeat: What are veteran players going to notice that’s different?
Timmins: Traversal is a big change. It’s been leveled up. I still have Borderlands 3 open. I’ll go back and reference something. Not being able to jump, not being able to glide or grapple, those hurt. It hurts my soul not to have those. The traversal has leveled up in a way that’s fundamental. Having the vehicle always available–as soon as you want to do something, jump on your vehicle and go do it. That’s really different.
I think our action skill system is super approachable, but it’s way more expansive than ever before. It’ll let players optimize their character build. The goal is you can play Vex and have Trouble out, but in a four-player game, if all four of you have Trouble out, it could all still be fundamentally different, how Trouble works. Your action skills could still be different. There’s way more expression through the skill trees than we’d ever had in the past. Those are the big tickets.
GamesBeat: In the Vault you could get three Spectres out at once, I think?
Timmins: For her Dead Ringer skill, you could have any combination of Spectres or Reapers. The idea is, Reapers are a little more about taking aggro, but they’re only melee, whereas the Spectres are ranged and they do a bit more damage, but they don’t get as much aggro and they take damage faster. It’s about recognizing what’s in your combat. What do I need? I have too many melee guys coming at me. I’ll use a bunch of Reapers to suck up their aggro. There’s just one badass? I can spawn all Spectres and we can try to keep that at range and melt it down. That’s an example of how you can use your action skill on the fly and think about it more than in the past.
GamesBeat: The environment here, can you talk more about that? The setting and the planet.
Timmins: Kairos is an all-new planet. As part of breaking off from the past and making this more approachable, we wanted everyone to start on a new planet. You don’t have to have that history with Pandora. This planet had been under the role of the Timekeeper for a thousand years. He used those Vaults to lock down humanity on this planet and force them into his little perfect order.
Six years ago, Elpis teleports into the sky and breaks this perfect veil of harmony. People realize there’s more to reality than they’ve seen. Like the Truman Show. At that point people start to question. There’s more than this little world I know. What’s going on? They start to explore their own Vaults. If you survive it, that’s great. You might go crazy. But the planet starts to realize there’s more than this little world, more that they can go out and see. The Timekeeper starts to lose his super-tight grasp. He gets a little more desperate. He’s willing to do some more nefarious things to keep control.
The Vault Hunters–this hidden planet shows up in space and they come looking for a Vault. They find more than just the Vault. They find the Timekeeper. They find this whole civilization. They get wrapped up into the story, breaking this group of people free as well as finding Vaults.
GamesBeat: Can we tell how big, how long this is yet?
Timmins: I don’t want to talk about the length of the story. We like to tell good stories. We have a fairly lengthy campaign that takes you through all of Kairos. It is our biggest world. We’ve packed it with the most stuff to do. It was important to me that in the seamless world, it wasn’t just big for the sake of being big. That’s not entertaining to me. I wanted there to be meaningful activities and things to do that are fun. Like I said, hop and skip around the whole world.
The portion of the Fadefields you played was a pretty small part of the game. You didn’t even go to the edges. There was even more in the demo that you didn’t see. Players should expect a big world that’s worth exploring, that rewards exploration with new missions, new characters, new activities, new gear. At every step there’s something to do. You’re not checking off things on a list. I hate that type of gameplay. I wanted it to be–naturally, what is a seamless experience for Borderlands? Borderlands is about combat, about loot, and about leveling up. Everything should circle back to that.
GamesBeat: Did you get in any intersection with the film, or inspiration from the film?
Timmins: No, I was not involved in that. The game is the game and the movie is the movie. They’re completely separate. I was too busy working on the game to worry about the movie.
GamesBeat: How did you think about the kind of characters you wanted to build this around?
Timmins: When it comes to the Vault Hunters, what was really important–we always have these archetypes, like the soldier or the Siren. We wanted them to still be approachable. The soldier is an approachable character, kind of point-and-shoot. We wanted to have those archetypes, but then also within those archetypes, play with different fantasies. The Siren is our first kind of minion master. The soldier has a third-person action skill with the Arc Knives. Even though, on the surface, they have those same archetypes, we wanted to twist them and change them and do something new while still satisfying the core promise of a soldier as a point-and-shoot guy, or the Siren using magic powers.
We wanted to meaningfully change it up, do something big and new this time. It might feel a little foreign at first, but it’s a Borderlands game through and through. You’re killing dudes and getting gear.
