Borderlands 4 hands-on preview and interview – ‘some people have a negative reaction to the tone’

The first Borderlands sequel with a proper open world is almost here but how does it play in solo and co-op and is it still funny?

It seems like an eternity since the last Borderlands game, but it’s only been six years. That was before Covid, which explains why it seems so long ago, but it means that the series is earning a reputation for unusually long gaps between its numbered sequels. We’ve had spin-offs Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands and New Tales From The Borderlands in the meantime, but it’s only now, 17 years after the release of the original game, that we’ve finally got the sequel everyone’s been waiting for.

As successful as it’s been, Borderlands has a right to feel underrated, as it popularised the concept of the looter shooter long before Destiny, and yet it’s often not even mentioned when the sub-genre is discussed. It did have two main problems though, in that for a first person shooter the gunplay wasn’t very good and while it acted like it was an open world game, on a technical level it wasn’t.

Borderlands 3 addressed the gunplay issues, but it is only now, with Borderlands 4, that we get a proper, modern open world to explore. And from what we’ve played of the game, it was worth the wait.

Although it’s made with Unreal Engine 5, the distinctive cel-shaded visuals of Borderlands means the graphical improvements between each new entry are much less obvious than with other franchises. Nevertheless, the open world of the planet Kairos looks suitably vast, with a silky smooth frame rate no matter what’s going on.

The plot of the game involves a dictator named The Timekeeper, with the developers keen to emphasis a dystopian setting and what they describe as grounded, dry humour. As we explored in our interview later, that’s not the sort of thing we’d normally expect from Borderlands and we can’t say it was particularly evident in anything we played – with lots of shouty voiceovers and comically inept boss characters.

We had a few sensible chuckles at some of the one liners, but our ribs never felt in much danger of cracking, although that’s a considerable improvement from the mercilessly unfunny Borderlands 3, which was so convinced of its own hilarity it never shut up.

Without that frustration, we were able to enjoy Borderlands 4 a lot more, and while the gunplay is still nowhere near as good as Destiny it’s a step up from Borderlands 3 and feels very tangible when you get a weapon that suits you.

We would’ve liked to see something a bit wackier than just machine guns with a freeze effect but maybe we just got unlucky with the random drops. Although we did like the gun that turned into a turret (in that it floated in mid-air and fired itself) and another one that spat out spare ammo.

The switch to a proper open world brings with it some practical considerations and the first story mission ends up with you being given a hover bike that you can summon at any moment. But there’s also a lot more traversal abilities than normal, to help you get around, including a double jump and mantle ability, the chance to glide through the air, a grapple hook, and swimming.

All of that felt fun to try out and while we didn’t see any particularly complex architecture or landscapes, that demanded their use, there was a bit more platforming than normal for the series.

You’ve also got a little robot drone with you, called Echo-4, which can do a lot of donkey work for you, including highlighting objectives with a detective vision style overlay, collecting side quest rewards for you, and hacking doors and turrets.

We played around with two characters, both of which are new: exo-soldier Rafa and Vex. Rafa is more of a melee expert, with close-up special attacks revolving around big metal scythes that come out of their back. We never get on with that sort of character in a first person shooter, so preferred Vex. Despite being a siren like Lilith she has quite distinct powers, with the ability to summon a big magic sabretooth tiger, as well use a variety of elemental attacks and the chance to drain health from enemies.

It’s all good fun but basically you are still just shooting bad guys with relatively ordinary guns, with the sequel relying on the open world element for much of its novelty. We did get into some good scraps though, especially when taking control of the characters at level 20, instead of 5, with a save from a bit later in the game.

This featured a nicely escalating battle on a floating island, where there’s nowhere to hide for long, culminating in a fun boss battle against a jungle monster that floods the area with toxic waste, forcing you to swing around on vines, looking for a weak spot.

If you’ve never liked Borderlands we don’t think any of this is going to change your mind – even if a co-op open world shooter is always inherently appealing – but if you did enjoy Borderlands 2 and were put off by the last one, then Borderlands 4 is looking like a welcome return to form.

Formats: PC (previewed), Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC
Price: £69.99
Publisher: 2K
Developer: Gearbox Software
Release Date: 12th September 2025
Age Rating: 18

After the hands-on we got to speak to executive producer Chris Brock, who’s worked on every entry in the series, and lead writer Taylor Clark, whose only previous involvement is New Tales From The Borderlands.

GC: I was going to start off facetiously, by saying I don’t understand why in the artwork he’s not holding up four fingers. [The main artwork for Borderlands 2 and 3 featured a Psycho holding up an appropriate number of fingers.]

CB: We actually talked about that.

TC: We asked the same question.

GC: Is that a secret reference to the fact that you’re trying to get back to Borderlands 2? [He does have two fingers extended.]

Both: [laughs]

CB: Man, you’ve thought about it more than I have.

TC: If you count the veins on his arm there, there’s four. [laughs]

GC: [laugh] But my first real question, and I don’t mean this in a negative way, but who is your audience for Borderlands? Because I feel Borderlands 2 was a long time ago now…

CB: Yeah, 2012.

GC: [resigned sigh at the passing of time]

CB: Yeah, I know. I feel the same way.

GC: I enjoyed Borderlands 2, but Borderlands 3 was a long time coming and by then I assumed it just wasn’t for me anymore. The sense of humour felt a lot more obnoxious…

CB: [laughs] Yeah.

GC: Like it was meant for teenage boys, which is fine, but it wasn’t for me. But I got the sense from when you were talking earlier, that you did see that as an issue, that had perhaps narrowed the audience a little.

TC: Personally speaking, as a writer, sometimes people get a little confused by the tone, because Borderlands is tonally… the voices of the characters are over the top a lot, in performances, that you kind of miss the subversiveness of a lot of the jokes. And I recognise that that’s not for all people.

Some people have a negative reaction to the tone. Part of the fun of writing for Borderlands in general is that, especially in 4, I think we’re trying to subvert the cliché as much as we can with humour. So, I guess that is a recall of BL2, which was often like that, in terms of subverting the cliché.

GC: Did you work on Borderlands 3?

TC: I didn’t work on Borderlands 3.

GC: Okay, so I can say what I like.

Both: [laughs]

GC: Borderland 2 was genuinely funny, but in 3 I could see the jokes, but I never laughed at them.

CB: Yeah. BL3 also had kind of a comedy machinegun approach to it as well. And I think that’s something we can do in BL4… humour is a pillar of the franchise. We don’t want to ever get away from that but just pacing it differently… and we’ve talked about some… the stakes of the story are different, which requires kind of a different approach tp the humour.

TC: So Pandora, as you will recall, was a Wild West kind of place.

GC: Yes, I recall that. Just don’t ask me some complex question about the lore.

TC: [laughs] I won’t! But thematically, tonally, it was a place where kind of anything went. And so, the gunslinger comedy approach made more sense there. In the context of a totalitarian dystopia ruled with an iron fist by this ominous villain…

GC: Which is not the obvious thing I would’ve expected from a Borderland sequel.

TC: No, no…

GC: When you were saying the humour’s dry and grounded, again, that’s not how I would think of Borderlands. But then after playing it, I kind of see what you mean. It is quite dry, it is sarcastic.

TC: Yeah. I think wit rather than wackiness might be the distinction, where the knob gets tweaked a little bit.

CB: Also, over time, it just practically takes longer to make a game. So for BL2, for example, we could make references to internet jokes and memes and stuff. And between the speed of the dev cycle and the speed of the internet moved, that could be timely. Right?

GC: I don’t want to seem like I’m discouraging Borderlands from being funny. So few games have a decent sense of humour, I guess because comedy is hard.

TC: Comedy is hard.

GC: But also, as you’re saying there, it takes so long to make a game now. So, one obvious question is are there any references to the movie in the game? Have you even had time to add that?

CB: Not really. There might be an Easter egg of a gun or something, but I don’t think…

TC: Yeah, barely.

CB: Maybe if we’d had more time, maybe you could make it.

TC: Yeah. I mean the game is so big and has to be localised to so many different languages that the lead times for dialogue and stuff are longer than you would think. So yeah, we just can’t be reactive to… and we wouldn’t be, I mean the movie was its own, we really didn’t have…

CB: Yeah, there was not a ton of crossover between the two efforts.

TC: I mean, some of us were consulted, just sounded out on various… to make the movie world feel accurate to the game. But other than that, they were completely separate productions.

GC: And you say you’ve worked on all of them?

CB: Different capacities in all of them, but yeah.

GC: Because I think the other thing with Borderlands 3 is that people were surprised it wasn’t open world. It feels like only now have you done what everyone assumed you would’ve with a sequel.

CB: It’s interesting, actually. So for BL3, I don’t think there was ever really any… we actually don’t think about BL4 as really an open world… with BL3, it had been so long since BL2 it kind of felt like we needed to make the Borderlands people are familiar with. Let’s return with a vengeance, or whatever, and that means that it’s structured in these ways. And then jumping off from 3 to 4, we were like, ‘The big improvement we want to make here is in exploration.’

We want to have all these movement abilities, all this traversal stuff. We want to give the player more reasons to explore. And so that kind of led to the structure of the world. When we say seamless world instead of open world… open world means different things to different people. And to us it does not mean crafting, it doesn’t mean X, Y, Z, right?

GC: Oh no, no. To me it just means a contiguous world.

CB: We just wanted players to not be impeded. We don’t have to load all the time, so we don’t.

TC: I would say Borderlands 3 opened up the galaxy. You did go to different places.

CB: Yeah. That was our way of blowing it up in that one.

TC: This is finally expanding the map to feel like, for the first time, I think, like a real planet. You don’t see it in the build that you played necessarily, but you can take a straight line where you go through a forest and then a grassy part, and then the snow starts to appear, and then suddenly you’re in the mountains. That’s an experience that was not available before.

GC: You get a vehicle very early on but is that something that just comes naturally with a seamless world? Because it sounds like you’re doing it the other way around, you’re not thinking, ‘Oh, I want to have an open world. What can we do in it?’ Is it like…

CB: We want to do these things, what’s the world going to be like? Exactly!

GC: So the open world is just a means to an end, essentially.

CB: A means to end might be a good way to put it, actually. We have all this extra space now to do all this extra exploration. Do we want to have to go to a Catch-A-Ride [terminals where you collected and customised vehicles in the previous games] all the time? No. It’s like, well, what would be more convenient to a player? Just give me a vehicle.

TC: It made so much more sense before, you would load into a new map and the Catch-A-Ride station would be there. So you would naturally get on there. Here you can be anywhere at any time. It just makes sense; more sense than before.

GC: Okay. And this is slightly awkward if you’ve worked on them all…

CB: [laughs]

GC: But I would not say that Borderlands is particularly noted for its gunplay. It’s kind of the inverse of Destiny, where that’s the only thing that’s interesting in the game. Whereas in Borderlands it’s fine but a lot of other stuff is more notable. Do you see that as a major problem for the series?

CB: That was actually a big effort of 3. So going from Pre-Sequel to 3 was like, ‘Hey, we have all these great guns…’ It’s actually much like what you just said, we have all these great guns, we need to start having best in class gunplay as well. It needs to feel great to fire that gun. I think we’ve continued that. I think that 4 is an improvement over 3, but I feel like 2 to 3 was kind the big level up there.

GC: I agree but I would’ve liked to see guns that did more crazy video game type things. A lot of what I was playing with was still basically a machinegun or whatever.

TC: You may be the only one to say that borderlines guns aren’t crazy enough.

GC: They do some weird things, like that turret one, but do you even want to get crazier than that or is it still important to keep things relatively grounded?

CB: That’s a good question. I think you largely want it to feel familiar. Like, ‘Hey, the icon says that’s an SMG, I roughly know what an SMG does.’ I think you do want a percentage of your guns to be very weird. And where we tend to do that more is with Legendary weapons.

If you see an orange gun drop, sometimes they’ll be very strange. There’ll be unnamed guns, wild stuff. And we tend to try to save those for later in the game, like Legendary weapons, mission rewards. Sometimes we’ll give those.

TC: That’s when it gets really experimental.

GC: I was playing some co-op just now but we didn’t have mics so it was really more like playing with a human bot. Do you do anything to try and encourage more communication and teamwork or do you have to assume people won’t be talking?

CB: We try for both to work, right? We have data. Most people who are playing online, they’re not chatting as much, especially in pick-up games. If you’re just matchmaking, chances are good you’re not going to be talking with everybody in your party. So it has to work in that way, where we’re not communicating super in-depth. It needs to still be fun and it still be worth it.

Also, between the character classes covering off 10 different areas, once people are communicating and working together, we want that to also feel rewarding in a way. And I find the game far, far easier if you’re doing those things and can chew through more of it; you can grind, more bosses get better loot. So yeah, you basically just have to do both.

GC: But you weren’t stopping them from being the same class, were you?

CB: No, we’re not. They could all be the same class. You could all be Vex if you want to. And hopefully the character skill tree depth is enough to where that actually is meaningful too.

PR guy: I’m sorry, we’re out of time.

GC: That’s all right, that’s fine.

CB: It’s good to talk to you, those were good questions.

TC: Love the questions.

GC: Thank you.

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