Borderlands 4 leads discuss "making the best Borderlands game to-date"

This year’s Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle marked the “beginning of the Borderlands 4 journey,” as the project leads all took the stage to give an assembled crowd their first look at the upcoming 2025 sequel.

Borderlands fans assembled at the Main Theater for Gearbox’s presentation, which was initially MC’d by Gearbox’s Chief Communications Officer Dan Hewitt. (Gearbox co-founder Randy Pitchford sat out this year’s show due to illness.)

The first half-hour of the presentation included a trailer for the Seekers of the Storm DLC for Risk of Rain 2, which had just debuted a few days beforehand, and a trivia contest. Then five Borderlands cosplayers were called onstage to answer deep-cut questions about the series’ lore, such as skag anatomy, with audience giveaways on the line.

The last trivia question led to the arrival of Andrew Reiner, Gearbox’s Global Creative Executive Officer, who introduced five of the leads on Borderlands 4:

• Anthony Nicholson, Senior Project Producer
• Graeme Timmins, Creative Director
• Adam May, Art Director
• Sam Winkler, Narrative Director
• Randy Warnell, Chief Creative Officer

According to Reiner, these five people represent “about 100 collective years of development time working on Borderlands games.” They’ve been in production on Borderlands 4 for more than two years, according to Nicholson, who added that they started work on the next game in the series right after shipping the last one.

“Randy Pitchford invited me to be part of the Gearbox team about two years ago,” Reiner said. “On my first day of work, he sat me down and showed me Borderlands 4. You can’t ask for a better first day. I’ve been playing it pretty much every day since, and it keeps getting better and better...I think I can confidently say we’re making the best Borderlands game to-date.”

Note: Borderlands 3 spoilers follow, as Borderlands 4's campaign picks up moments after the previous game's ending.

The Borderlands 4 presentation began with a short trailer that showed meteors raining down on the surface of a strange alien planet. After impact, an unseen person picked up debris from one of the craters and dusted it off to reveal the trademark Borderlands bandit mask.

This trailer, which is full of subtle Easter eggs, gave fans a first look at the unnamed setting for Borderlands 4. You might recall that at the end of Borderlands 3, Lilith flew off into space in an all-or-nothing attempt to keep the Great Vault from opening.

“The moon of Elpis was going to destroy the planet Pandora, and our hero, Lilith the Siren, sacrificed herself in order to teleport away the entire moon,” Winkler said.

“You wonder where the moon went?” Warnell asked.

He revealed that Elpis ended up “somewhere in the six galaxies.” It's still the same universe, but in a patch of space that “no one has seen in a long, long time.” Here, in the skies above a previously unexplored alien planet, Lilith’s Hail Mary kicks off the events of Borderlands 4. This new planet was bombarded by showers of debris from Pandora, and the ensuing damage disabled a “cloaking veil” that had previously kept the planet hidden from the rest of the universe.

May’s art team originally depicted these chunks of moon hitting the veil as something like a digital projection, but they eventually decided to do “something more physical” with the effect. The final version of the shattering veil is based on photo references of the icebreaker ships that were used for early polar exploration.

The process of creating that effect led to a discussion about the overall creation of Borderlands 4 and the “initial spark” behind it.

“We sit down and work together and commiserate on being creatives,” Nicholson said. “We start with that empty whiteboard, that blank piece of paper, and we start thinking. We start asking ourselves [questions]. It starts at a really honest place.”

Part of that process was determining what Borderlands 4 is, what it isn’t, and how it differs from the games that came before it. Borderlands 2, at its core, was a revenge story. Borderlands 3 was a race between the player(s) and the Calypso twins to get to the Great Vault.

In Borderlands 4, Gearbox wants to “bring it back to the player,” centering the experience on you and your Vault Hunter. While Borderlands 4 will keep the series’ trademark humor, the goal is to “make sure it is situational” with a reactive, grounded in-game world.

The new planet also offers an opportunity to get away from Pandora and create a very different sort of world, a first for Borderlands. May calls the style “high-tech but lo-fi,” without the trademark decaying desert landscapes or corporate dystopias that have characterized Borderlands to-date. Borderlands 4 isn’t a reboot, but it’s a fresh start and a new arc for the series with a brand-new cast.

This includes four new playable Vault Hunters—which is apparently still the in-house term for playable characters, even in a game where there might not be a Vault. While the team didn’t reveal anything about the new Hunters, they did discuss the design process, along with what Timmins called the “fantasies” that go into a playable Borderlands character.

“When we look at the Vault Hunters,” Timmins said, “the first thing that we always try to look at is what fundamental promises that players might have. Some examples might be, starting way back on [the original] Borderlands, you have a soldier, a fairly straightforward FPS-style character, right?”

That eventually led to the creation of Vault Hunters like Roland and Axton. Sirens, such as Lilith and Maya, were more of a mage/sorcerer class fantasy. With later games, the team tended to ask how they could flip these concepts on their head. Borderlands 3’s Amara, for example, was an attempt to take the ranged gameplay of Lilith or Maya and adapt it to a close-range brawler style of play.

The baseline is to make characters “approachable and interesting” with a decent balance between comfort and complexity. The Hunters are also always “as different as we can make them,” with an eye towards making characters that the developers themselves would want to play.

The team was careful not to say much more than that, citing a fear of Gearbox “marketing ninjas” that would attack if they made any big reveals onstage. They did promise that they’ll have a lot more to share in the future as Borderlands 4 prepares to launch next year.

You can wishlist Borderlands 4 right now on the Epic Games Store.