With less than three months until the launch date of Borderlands 4, Gearbox is starting to share a lot more details. Yesterday, the game became available for pre-order, and fans learned the pricing and the PC system requirements. Now, Executive Producer Chris Brock has been interviewed by Gamereactor. Among other things, he reckons that the new game is more of an evolution for the franchise than its predecessor was when it launched in 2019.
The time between Borderlands 2 and Borderlands 3 was about seven years. We had been gone for a while. We wanted to make sure that when we came back it was familiar. When people say it feels like more Borderlands, yeah, that was the goal. We wanted to make more Borderlands. We wanted to evolve, but we didn’t want to change the formula so much that it didn’t feel familiar.
But going from Borderlands 3 to Borderlands 4, one of the things we wanted to focus on was the traversal abilities and exploration. And that has led to the series evolving, I would say, more between 3 and 4 than it did between 2 and 3, for sure.
In the same interview, Senior Writer Taylor Clark explained why Borderlands 4 will feature a different brand of humor than previous installments.
The most important thing for us is to have a tone that feels like it makes sense in the world we’re building and in the story we’re trying to tell. On Pandora, like the Wild West, the shotgun approach made sense. Because this was a world where anything goes. A world where everything was trying to kill you and corporations were trying to cut each other’s throats. And Handsome Jack always looked at you and was talking shit to you. The slightly nastier tone made sense in that world. On a totalitarian, dictatorial planet ruled by this person with an iron fist, it makes less sense.
It makes less sense to have a tone like that. It wouldn’t feel appropriate (like firing jokes from a T-shirt cannon) when we are under a horribly oppressed world. We tried to find the humor. It wouldn’t be a Borderlands game without humor.
Borderlands 4 is coming on September 12 to PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X, while the Nintendo Switch 2 version will be released at a later date.
