The overwhelming consensus among the first hands-on demos with Borderlands 4 earlier this summer was that it’s more of the same. If you already like Borderlands, the sequel is likely to provide everything fans usually show up for. If not, well, TBD on how many nonbelievers Gearbox Entertainment manages to win over with its most ambitious looter shooter yet. Much of that will come down to the details, and the studio has been sharing a lot of them recently. Here’s a bunch of stuff we learned about Borderlands 4 this week.
Split-screen co-op returns
Senior project producer Anthony Nicholson wrote on Xbox Wire this week that in addition to supporting local co-op, Borderlands 4 will also let you play with another pair of people in split-screen mode. Two TVs, four-player sessions, tons of chaos. Teaming up has also apparently been streamlined with a better lobby system and improved dynamic level scaling, including the option for each player to set their own difficulty.
Switch 2 won’t have couch co-op
“Switch 2 players will have the same exciting Borderlands 4 experience as other platforms minus the split-screen option, and yes, it will have full cross-play with Epic, Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox X|S,” reads the Nintendo version’s support page. The port targets 30fps and arrives on October 3, roughly three weeks after the platforms.
There are over 30 billion guns
Yes, that’s a real stat Gearbox is pushing. One of the reasons for that big number is that Borderlands 4 lets you mix-and-match elements from different in-universe weapons manufacturers. Then there are all of the RNG stat and perk drops you can get. According to Nicholson, the studio created a Matrix-like gun rack to help conceptualize all the possibilities and prevent the game from spitting out combinations that wouldn’t work.
“It was this really large gun map where you could see all of the individual parts for all the individual guns, for all the individual manufacturers,” he told the Epic Games Store blog. “It made it so you could see how each of those things were and how we could have those combinations roll together and how they would work—the slides, the animators, the actions, the art all fitting together. Because a certain gun, if it pumps one way, but there’s a long barrel that goes on the bottom, obviously those parts can’t go together.”
Borderlands 4 has “more passive perks than all the previous Borderlands combined”
Size matters, at least for Gearbox’s marketing guys. The Borderlands 4 map is bigger than the last two numbered entries combined. The guns have four times as many polygons as Borderlands 3. All those billions of guns. You get the idea. The skill tree follows a similar pattern. It sounds more advanced, and potentially overwhelming, than any game prior—more Diablo 4 or Path of Exile than your traditional RPG shooter.
“The Augment and the Capstone system that we have forces you to make a choice and all of them drastically change the ability that each player has,” character designer Nick Thurston told Polygon. “That alone would create more build diversity than we’ve ever had. But then we also have more passives than all the previous Borderlands combined. I think Amon alone has 87 passives, and most Vault Hunters have about 80.”
Techno Viking Amon is Borderland‘s “most complicated” Vault Hunter yet
Amon is the guy with the big fire and ice axes you see in all the Borderlands 4 trailers. But looks can be deceiving. He’s not just a tanky melee character. He’s apparently the poster child for the new game’s build variety. Everyone in a squad could play as Amon, but the styles might all be different, Gearbox claims. Melee, ranged, support, he can do it all. Unlike most of the franchise’s Vault Hunters that pop abilities and then just shoot stuff, Amon’s skills can be deployed in more ways.
“He just has more abilities than any other Vault Hunter numerically because of his trait, which allows him to have forge skills,” Thurston told GameSpot. “I wouldn’t say he’s super complicated, but he has a lot more going on in the middle of combat, and he’s a lot more active than I think a lot of people historically expect from Vault Hunters.” He sounds like a more advanced archetype than some of the others, though Gearbox says he’s still approachable to new players.
Borderlands 4 is inspired by mergers, acquisitions, and fascism
The game takes place on a prison planet called Kairos. Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford suggests that’s a not-so-subtle illusion to the studio’s rocky period during which it was sold to the poorly conceived Embracer holding company, before trying to escape again. The studio group is now owned by longtime publishing partner 2K Games, part of the broader Take-Two portfolio that includes Grand Theft Auto VI maker Rockstar Games and mobile maker Zynga.
“There’s this cultural and emotional shift in me, personally, and at the studio. What does it mean to trade some autonomy for organization?” he told the Epic Games Store blog: “What does it feel like to move up and down the scale between autonomy and being organized or even being controlled? On one end of a spectrum you have anarchy, and on the other end of the spectrum you have fascism, totalitarianism, zero freedom. It’s not just about societies—that’s all of us as individuals, to imagine where we want to be on that spectrum and how comfortable we are. And we were going through that as a company.”
