Borderlands 4’s Creative Director Discusses How New And Old Systems Combine To Improve The Game

Paul: Linking what we’ve discussed with World Events to other core pillars of the Borderlands franchise, there’s been a range of changes beyond just the tweaks and retooling of loot, there’s also been a bit of balancing going on when it comes to skill trees and the guns themselves and the way they work, new mechanics like the glide, the climbing and the point grappling. How do all of these things, with the number of new systems or elements or gameplay elements introduced, how do all of these feed into the various different cogs that we’ve already discussed so far?

Grant: Yeah, great question. If we had just said that, like, hey, go kill this boss to get what you want for your build, right? and we added new movement tools, new weapon behaviours, new all whatever, you would very quickly funnel your decisions into how you wanna build your character, how you play your character, into what the combat arena that we said like, “hey, go here and do this” offers. You’d find that core players would optimise as best as possible, but very quickly the amount of decisions that they’re making sort of funnels into various limited sets of things to do. So we realised that like we have a behaviour driven game where our passive has special behaviours, our character skills are so diverse and now we’re increasing our base movement skill toolkit. All of this was a reaction and also a cause to the seamless world design and all the systems that go into the seamless world. We want players to be able to move around the world and be able to teleport to your co-op buddies instantly as part of that ease of accessibility.

We wanted all of these elements to kind of work in tandem in that sense that like if you just wanna play and you wanna play a certain way, there is content for you to do so, and we don’t want you to be isolated to just thinking like, “I have to farm this one boss”, right? We want you to enjoy the missions. So we have mission replay. We want you to run the bosses. So we have quick boss replay. We don’t wanna take you out of the game. We don’t want you to, Borderlands fans will remember like if you kill a boss, you hit quick back to main menu, go back to the main game, restart the run, run back to the boss, kill the boss, restart the main menu, right? We looked at that and we eliminated that aspect. We said like, look, there’s just a machine right outside. You can just go and respawn the boss, right? So all of these work is investing in the kind of underlying systems and tools to make sure that like when players play Borderlands 4, the sense of freedom, which is like a core theme, like a core direction of break free, the freedom is what players have. And that direction permeated to the world and the world then kind of allowed us to create these loops and these systems that allow the player to just play the way they want, you know, in the Borderlands fashion. You’re still gonna be shooting things. You’re still gonna be looting things, but the way you do so now, you know, and it might seem minor on paper, but I really hope that when players play it, they’re not feeling like, ‘oh, it’s like, run to the boss room, kill the boss, click the main menu, run to the boss room, kill the boss, click the main menu” right? It’s a sense of like, “what do I wanna do today?” And then if your buddy’s around, you say, “hey, hop in my game, teleport onto me, we’re gonna run this thing and we’re gonna get a boss, we’re gonna get some chests, we’re gonna get some whatever.”