With Borderlands 4, Gearbox Software is pushing toward a far larger, seamless world, and that factored into the developer’s decision to drop the minimap seen in previous installments.

During the PAX East 2025 panel, Gearbox founder and president Randy Pitchford explained:

This is the biggest (by far) universe that we’ve built, and it’s seamless. There’s no load times. You see something anywhere on the screen, a mile away up in the sky, and you will be able to get there. We made a big freaking world. And a lot of the things you do can be local space, but a lot of the things you do or want to do are out there, and a local space map is not a good way to navigate when you’re thinking about objectives and opportunities, several at the same time, that might be miles away. A compass really helps us do that.

The other aspect that played into Gearbox’s choice is that Borderlands 4 will be much more vertical than its predecessor. Pitchford added:

The other thing that the team really wanted to commit to is to push the boundaries of design and environment. Instead of just a single flat plane, they embraced a lot of verticality. You’re going to have more verticality in Borderlands 4 than you’ve ever seen before in a Borderlands game by far, and when you have a layered environment, a top-down two-dimensional view is extremely confusing. With a compass with arrows that tell you if things are up or down, you have a much better sense of spatial awareness, and we want you to play the game, not the map. So, we made a commitment, and we put all of that investment into this compass system.

You still have the big map. It’s one click away and we put more cool stuff in there than we’ve ever done before. We even have an AI-driven kind of navigation system that’ll give you a GPS on the big map to show you the line of where you can go, and there’s even an in-world companion, Echobot, that has some features there that’ll help you navigate.

Pitchford didn’t rule out adding a minimap to Borderlands 4 at some point in the future (presumably after launch), but told fans to play the game first before judging. That’ll happen on September 12, when the game is planned to launch on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X. A Nintendo Switch 2 version will release later, and Pitchford talked about that, too, as you can read in our previous report.