This week, Gearbox kicked off a series of Borderlands 4 character deep-dives with a delightfully gory story trailer for new Siren Vault Hunter Vex, and the game’s narrative director says the bloody scene was his biggest question mark working on the project.

Vex’s origin story begins at “Mass Market Appeal,” some sort of doomcore mercenary market where she’s forced to sell guns and $20 two-year warranties, when suddenly a Black Friday-style sale is announced and all hell breaks loose.

“I hear in this one, a guy gets cut in half sideways, and you can see his brain and stuff,” Vex unknowingly prophesies to her apparent work crush, soon to be said cut-in-half guy due to her newly and unwittingly awakened Siren powers, which turn the whole store into a terribly mismanaged butcher shop.

Anyway, it’s a pretty wild scene, and Borderlands 4 narrative director Sam Winkler reckons it’s the one part of the script he was most hesitant to turn in.

“This was probably the biggest ‘I have no idea what’s going to happen when I turn in this script’ moment for me on this project,” Winkler says on Twitter.

The best part about all of this is the snippet of script Winkler shares that explains what’s happening in the scene.

“SHING. The scythes come down once. Twice. Three times! Then… the crowd falls apart like that guy in the cube who gets cubed in the movie Cube,” reads the actual, real-life Borderlands 4 script, referencing the 1997 sci-fi horror flick Cube, in which a guy in a cube gets cubed.

Of course, Winkler’s trepidation with the script was ultimately unwarranted, as Gearbox went ahead and brought the scene to life without compromise. Moreover, Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford responded to Winkler’s tweets, saying, “You crushed this one, Sam. It was so fun having all of us in the writer’s room again to crack this. You absolutely crushed this script!”

If there’s anything to learn from this, it’s that aspiring screenwriters should just embrace their most unhinged impulses and hope for the best, especially when their boss is Randy Pitchford.

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