Borderlands 4's Creative Director Discusses The Influence Of Handsome Jack On The New Title
Thanks to 2K Australia, I had the fantastica opportunity to chat with Grant Kao, the Associate Creative Director on Borderlands 4. He shared a range of fascinating insights into the game’s design, it’s World Events, the loot grind, and the heroes and antagonists found within Kairos.
Today, we talk about the influence of Handsome Jack upon the future of Borderlands
Grant Kao: My name is Grant. I’ve been at Gearbox Studios for over a decade, I think 12 years almost. And my experience has been basically from character design to combat to gear.
In the last Borderlands, Borderlands 3, I was part of the gear team that delivered most of the guns. And then for this project, I started in gear and moved around the systems and then kind of took over as like the associate creative director for large swaths of the design as we try to transition to a seamless world and to just broadening the game’s reach in terms of world and system design in general.
Paul James: And I guess you’ve kind of led in perfectly what I had as my first question there. So obviously you’ve seen the franchise through firstly, a few different renditions, beginning with Borderlands 1, and so you’ve seen the franchise through a range of different iterations at this point and through a range of different perspectives as well. So with that said, what do you identify as some of those core pillars that make the franchise what it’s been over many years?
Grant: I think the strength of Borderlands has always been, like, there’s three big pillars. One is the narrative element. Borderlands has always had strong characters, whether it’s the antagonists in Handsome Jack, or protagonists such as the Sirens and then the Siren storyline.
Like, when people think about Borderlands, we want them to think about, “hey, what are the motivations of these characters?” And, you know, from Handsome Jack to the twins in Borderlands 3 and to the Timekeeper in [Borderlands 4], these strong antagonists and the kind of motivator of whatever change the players offered in the game. That’s part one. And then the second part is the merging of first-person shooter and RPG elements. It’s pretty common nowadays to have this genre being the way it is. But, you know, when Borderlands started, there was none of that. Like, there was very little merging of those two, like, very big FPS and RPG genres.
And Borderlands was like, yeah, that’s our niche. That’s our goal is to kind of merge these two. And then finally, being able to provide awesome loot, whether it’s, you know, billions of guns or other pieces of loot like shields, gadgets, and all kinds of doodads that we’ve added throughout the different iterations of the game.
Paul: I guess for myself as a consumer of every game in the franchise up to this point, I guess they’re some of the things that really stick out to me the most. And of course, one of the things you highlighted there has been the characters, and you obviously mentioned specifically some of our antagonists, and there’s been this big celebration of Handsome Jack in particular, for many, many years. And I guess outside of some of the gigantic statues that he built of himself, probably also casts a fairly enormous shadow.
How, when you’re developing new characters or new antagonists, as you have in Borderlands 3, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, and now even with Borderlands 4, when you’re trying to build out the Timekeeper and other characters you’ve introduced along the way, does that, looming presence of Handsome Jack, play some sort of part in the influence and the direction that you potentially go in?
Grant: I think, and I don’t want to overgeneralise, but yes, obviously, we look back at all of our games and try to have a continuity in our storyline from Borderlands 1 all the way to Borderlands 4. And in addition to that, to try to make sure that we have strong antagonists and motivations for players to go and tackle some of the obstacles we want them to tackle. In this game in particular, the Timekeeper being the kind of dictator that he is, to present the conflict of order versus chaos, we really wanted to use the tone of BL2 and some of BL1 as an inspiration for creating that sense of control and rebellion.
And one of the systems that we do use to kind of link the narrative to the gameplay is the event system. And a lot of these world events, dynamic events, and ambient events, we try to make sure that the antagonist is always present and there’s always examples of control versus rebellion or chaos in some cases, to try to present that story of the antagonist always being omnipresent in your face.
More on the World Events system in Part 2 of our interview, coming soon!
Borderlands 4 will be available on PS5, Xbox Series, and PC on September 12, 2025, and to Nintendo Switch 2 on October 3, 2025.
Thank you very much to 2K, Gearbox Software, and of course Grant himself for providing this time and insight into one of the holiday season’s most anticipated titles
