Borderlands 4's Creative Director Explains How World Events Change The Playing Experience
Thanks to 2K Australia, I had the fantastic 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 World Events in Borderlands 4, how they function, and how they might influence even the most stubborn of players to change their play style.
Paul James: So the World Events. There’s quite a few in some of the media that’s come out so far, you’ve outlined a few of those up to this point, but I guess typically, when we hear about world events and those types of systems, people tend to associate that with a live service game where Borderlands is a bit more closed. Obviously you can play online co-op, those sorts of things, but it’s more contained. How will those these look within the game? Will these events randomly appear or can you be sure that certain events will transpire in certain places? I guess, how does that look within the actual world that players might be exploring at any given moment?
Grant Kao: Traditionally events are associated with live service type stuff, but for our game, we’ve built a system where events are reactive to a lot of the player’s actions and there’s a lot of levers for the brain of the events manager to look at and pull and tweak. And that’s actually one of the awesome things that we made sure we did when we invested in the system was that we wanted designers to be able to say like, hey, when a player does this, whether it’s complete a mission, complete a main mission or side mission, speak to a certain NPC, reach a certain level, attain a certain amount of power, when all these different things, these conditions kind of feed into like, hey, what buckets does that fall under? And the event system can sort of make a, it’s not a random, because nothing’s truly, truly random, but it’s to make a kind of educated guess as to like, what kind of activity or content can we present to the player in a space that they’re sort of regional to or approximate to? And how can we change things up a little bit? And that’s important to us to kind of offer that change because one, we have a large seamless world. and we also want to remind players that like, hey, while traversing this large world, this world is a world that’s inhabited by people. And these people are under duress or under some form of pain or suffering from the Timekeeper. And in addition, the Timekeeper is after you, right? So there are all these like narrative beasts that we can play with.
And there’s all these conditions and player set settings that we kind of read and then we can base our actions off of that. So yes, it is similar to what a live service would potentially offer, but a lot of it is basically focused on the player experience. And that’s the big difference, right? Some live service services typically would look at like a wavelength of like, hey, these are generally, if you’re here in this area, this is what’s gonna happen. Ours is more like, hey, we have large buckets of content and we want to read the player setting stats, or whatever, and then ask, how can we apply those pieces of contents from those buckets that we can pull from multiple things? For example, we can have a migration event which is what we call like a patrol. And that’s a pretty stereotypical trope of a patrolling guard of enemies come.
But in our versions, like a patrol can have, “hey, they’re escorting citizens that you can save” or “hey, they have a red chest or like a supply train” or whatever that the players can take out and loot. So like we offer many variations of the same thing and those variations are the result of questioning, where is the player at? What have they looted? Have they not looted something recently? No? Well let’s offer a thing that they can loot.So it’s based off of your own kind of story and your own actions in the world. So it’s tailored to that personal experience. And that’s kind of our take on that kind of event system.
Paul: No, I really like and appreciate that myself because I can be the sort of player myself who will get stuck in a bit of a rhythm and not necessarily be unhappy doing that, I might add, but be stuck in a rhythm where I am potentially, combat scenario to combat scenario rather than necessarily going and finding that pallet cleanser. And so what you’ve described there kind of essentially acts as a bit of a change of pace sounds absolutely perfect because I lack the self-discipline sometimes to go and find that alternate path. So I think that sounds really fascinating. And I liked just some of the examples there that you’ve cited as well, because again, you mentioned the loot one, that’s one that forever in the Borderlands games, I should be better at. If I see a chest, I’ll get it. But was I always putting in the greatest level of effort to go out and hunt for them? Probably not as much as I should. So I think that’s really, really awesome.
Grant: Yeah, we intentionally don’t want events to be like a forced activity that pulls you toward it. We wanted to almost feel like this is something that just exists naturally in the world. In fact, the less you think about it, the better we feel about it. And the way it is set up, and we’re gonna have to configure it and tweak it down the road too, is that if you’re in a rhythm, as you had said, and you’re constantly doing the same thing, it will look at that and weigh the other sides of it and say, hey, there’s other things you haven’t done. Maybe we can find a piece of content that falls within all these different parameters. Can it fit in the location? Is it fitting for your level, your player power, etc? And sometimes it will even say, “screw all of that, let’s just go one direction and let’s bombard you with something that’s different or hard,” and in that way, it can feel a little random, but it is still reading your character and your progression. And that adjustment that happens, as you could be riding your vehicle through the zone and as you’re riding through the vehicle, it is calculating constantly. That kind of calculation is trying to just make your experience feel a little bit more natural and alive versus saying, “hey, here’s always an event here and you always have to come here and you always should do this and you always get cash or loot or whatever.” We have those, but those feel like obvious content that we want players to do. But we also want players to look at something and say like, “Oh, what is that?” and if you ask that question and if you change your rhythm, as you said, slightly, then I feel like the system is doing its job.
How World Events Will Change Player Behaviours
Paul: Oh, I’d love to hear that. And I’ll see how I go with my own self-discipline when the time comes and how I kind of pivot into that. But the principles, the core pillars of what you’re describing there, I really, really like it. And I hope that it works out really well. And as you said, you’re gonna look at, I guess post-launch, continue to look and iterate and tweak and balance and make adjustments based on data you collect. So I’m really excited to hear that.
One of the things you mentioned along the way, obviously, as one of those potential world events is red chests and loot and those components. We discussed loot quite a bit there. And one of the pieces of feedback that I’d heard or felt when I was playing Borderlands 3 that I’ve heard cited post the launch of Borderlands 3 is that perhaps the drop rates and balancing around the drop rates was a little bit off. And I know there’s been some work put into rebalancing that when it comes to Borderlands 4. What did that look like? What did that process look like? How did you come to the conclusions that you and the team have to balance them in the way that you have? And what does that look like now?
Grant: When we made Borderlands 3, we had a huge shift and I was, you know, I remember being as part of the principal design direction for this. When we made so much gear content for Borderlands 3, and the gear in Borderlands 3 was vastly different than the previous iterations in that a lot of it was chasing new behaviours versus stat-driven kind of growth. So when we said like, hey, players are chasing new behaviours and there’s so many, we built so many legendaries for the game.
We realised that like we could either swing one or two directions. One, we could have it be a little bit strict and we didn’t, at the time when we launched, we didn’t have dedicated drops and whatnot. We just kind of have like large pools of loot and how they were distributed.
There was a formula, but it was different than Borderlands 4. When we released, we had feedback that was like, hey, you know, there’s a lot and we are getting a lot, but we can’t target something that we want. And knowing that, and knowing that what we were trying to do was offer players the wide variety of behaviours that the game offers, all the gear offers, and what we realised was that like, this is actually the opposite of what the players wanted in the sense that like they got everything that they wanted, but they couldn’t figure out exactly, that they couldn’t target the build that they wanted to create.
And so for Borderlands 4, we sort of, you know, again, we’re a behaviour driven game – We even have more behaviours and you can double up on behaviours. Now you can mix and match. So what we have done is, in this aspect, is we’ve created multiple ways for players to attain that loot, but the ways to attain that loot have been drastically pulled back. The chase is now more prominent in the sense that like, “hey, I want to go kill bosses.” Well, the bosses all have a loot pool that the community will, you know, hopefully figure out and, you know, post online. Like, “hey, if you want this gun, go here, if you want this, go here.” But in addition, there are other ways to kind of hunt for that gear that aren’t just killing bosses. And the event system actually is one of those.
In the past, Red Chests and the Rare Chests were all kind of handpicked in specific locations and there was a set amount that you could have per zone. And it was just like a sort of like design philosophy that we kind of upheld. In this game, we still have that in the sense that, in the sense that players can, you know, create a route and find the chest and hunt the chest and then reset that route and do it again. But now with the event system, the events are going to introduce chests, bosses and stuff in the mix of that. So if you are not interested in just hunting the same boss over and over and over to chase the perfect drop, you can play a more like natural flow routing game where you run around the world and then you can hit very specific locations, find the kind of like, and tailor like, hey, I really like this combat encounter or I really like this area, I look at the scenery and the enemies are all weak to my build and whatnot. You can tailor that route to your play style and the event system will interject like some level of spontaneity, some level of dynamicism to that route and it will feel slightly different as you’re running it in circles and circles and circles.
So the loot chase, you know, and we looked at all that, we looked at all of that and that was the core difference between the loot philosophies of old to now is that like we knew we had a behaviour driven loot system. We wanted to have so much of that loot be in the player’s hands and that ended up sort of kind of compounding the issue of just being there’s too much and too many things happening all at once. And now with the things being more targeted, whether you’re boss farming or you’re a route runner or you’re a chest hunter, all of these things now have specific pros and cons, right? To emphasise certain builds, like speed builds probably want to do route running, damage builds will probably want to do boss running.
And so we’re building off of that like, “hey, let’s let players target what they want in a sense and let’s open those loops to make them as fun as can be.”
More on other changes in Borderlands 4 in Part 3 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
