Borderlands 4: A Chat With Randy and Andrew
During my recent visit to 2K Australia, I not only got to play some of the highly anticipated Borderlands 4 (which you can read all about here:) but I got to chat with two key members of the development team. The first was Andrew Reiner, ex-Editor of Game Informer and now Global Creative Executive of Gearbox Studios. The second hardly needs any introduction at all, but I will give him one anyway. Founder and President of Gearbox, Randy Pitchford. So, what do you ask these two big names and big personalities first? Well, why Borderlands, of course.
More specifically, I asked why Borderlands 4 instead of a sequel to the cracking and surprisingly successful Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. Randy was quick to jump in. “It’s so tricky when you love making games like I do, because you get ideas at a much faster rate than you can build them. The philosophy for me that I’ve come to, and I didn’t start there, but I came to it, is we have something that we love and that is great, and we have to absolutely commit to it. We’ve done that, but what that does is prevent us from trying new things. So what I have done in my time is try to work out how to both double down on what we are doing and still have the energy to do something new and do you know what? We are finally feeling that.”
Randy went on to explain further. “The fact that we were about to launch Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands when we did, as we mostly worked on that during the Pandemic, and then to launch and it worked, and suddenly we have another thing we love and that we can get behind. That is a culmination of 25 years of Gearbox to get to that point. Nothing about Wonderlands took away from the development of Borderlands 4, and what’s even cooler is that some of it even became a proving ground for things we wanted to do in Borderlands 4. I have to say it is neat when we can start feeding multiple things that we are working on in parallel.”
One of the things that Borderlands 3 lacked over Borderlands 2 was the absolutely delicious villain. Handsome Jack was one of a kind, and the follow-up couldn’t compete. So I had to ask, how was Borderlands 4 going to tackle that issue? Once again, Randy was ready for me. “I think the Calypso Twins in 3 were perfect for what they were trying to do. They were basically streamers, so they cracked jokes and that made it impossible not to make comparisons to Handsome Jack. Jack was the best, sorry but we made the greatest villain ever made that’s that class of snarky asshole villain. So with 4, the new baddie, the Timekeeper, is completely different. When you meet the guy, when you feel the wrath, this is not a dude that is joking around.”
When I asked Randy if this made The Timekeeper Borderlands’ Darth Vader, he had quite the reply. “Darth Vader would be like, oh fuck, I’ve stumbled into the wrong room, I need to go now” Quite the statement but one Andrew backed up with “He’s intelligent, confident and a towering entity. He is making the future, and the only reason you get to keep breathing in the game is because he has other things on his mind.”
One of the things I love to ask developers about is the rise of handhelds, from the Switch to the PC formats, and how it affects development. Randy’s response was quite interesting. “That’s one of the coolest things about Unreal 5 and the changes we’ve made to it. It is designed to be scalable. We are developing it for the Switch 2, and it feels amazing. I hate to even bring it up in this context because the Switch 2 is actually a really, really powerful machine. What it can do, in many ways, beats my Xbox Series S, especially from a developer perspective. It is scaling beautifully and we can’t be happier.”
Being a man of the game’s media myself, I just had to ask Andrew how his transition from press to developer was panning out and what sort of unique view 20 years of games coverage brings to his role. “It’s having a different perspective than the team.” Said Andrew, “I have a different set of eyes and I don’t think I will ever be fully developerised, I think I will always have this background way of viewing games. I think critically and think about the player’s perspective at the same time. Every time I boot up the game, I am looking at different things, and that allows me to go to the creative team with different ideas.”
“I was worried coming in”, Andrew mentioned. “Am I going to be an outsider? Are they not going to like hearing from me? But we immediately bonded and had some great synergy, and I think that is paying off in development.” Randy went on to back Andrew up. “To Andy’s credit, he didn’t come in with the vibe of a judge. We built this concept at Gearbox called Perspectives, the idea of being objective about what we have and who we need to communicate with, and Andy is the head of all that.”
And with that question, my time was up, but I have to say it was a fascinating chat. Randy is the larger-than-life personality you see in the news bites, but in person, he also comes across as someone who genuinely cares about what he does, and I can certainly appreciate that. His eagerness is quite infectious, and it looks like he has picked a great right-hand in Andrew for Borderlands 4.
Borderlands 4 is coming to PC, PS5, Switch 2 and Xbox Series on the
