It’s been nearly six years since Borderlands 3 debuted during the previous console generation. This fall, Borderlands 4 is taking advantage of the power of the current consoles by thrusting players into a large “seamless world” that doesn’t need many loading screens during the long hours it will take to explore it all. That’s a major improvement over Borderlands 3’s Pandora, which had enough loading screens to test the players’ patience.
While speaking with Game Informer, senior project producer Anthony Nicholson noted that the Borderlands 4 team didn’t initially set out to make Kairos an open-world environment. However, the power of Unreal Engine 5 “gave us other advantages to be able to do things and kind of went into being able to make a seamless world and things of that nature.”
World-building director Jason Reiss added that there are “a lot more 360 combat areas where players can enter into spaces from any direction, including from the air–and we have to account for that now with all these crazy movement abilities. It’s been all about, ‘Let’s create a large, dynamic, awesome place where players can feel like badasses.'”
In this expanded world, enemies can be spotted from further away, and they aren’t just waiting around to fight players. Instead, an effort was made to make the enemies “be alive and doing things from… far away, where they need to look like they’re naturally a part of their environment whenever you’re looking at them through your scope from a mile away,” said lead game designer Josh Jeffcoat.
One of the side missions will involve players helping Claptrap recover some of his mementos from previous adventures, while others will vary between story-based missions to specific activities related to Kairos’ various regions.
Gearbox recently debuted a new story trailer that put the spotlight on the game’s villain, the Timekeeper. The Borderlands 4 team also revealed that there are more skills per-character than the last two main games combined. In part because of the sheer amount of new content in the game, Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford has warned that it may be several years before Borderlands 4 has a significant drop in price.
Borderlands 4 will hit PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on September 12. It will also be released on Switch 2 at a later date.
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