Borderlands 4 is coming on September 12 on the Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and the Windows PC. I had a chance to play it for a few hours in a preview session, and I liked how familiar it felt.
The action role-playing first-person shooter looter game is now priced at $70 instead of the previously floated $80, per Gearbox Software CEO Randy Pitchford’s tweet this week. At a Gearbox event in Novato, California, I also interviewed the creative director of the game, Graeme Timmins, about what his goals were for the game and the kind of characters we’ll counter. I’ll have more on that later.
This is the first major game that Gearbox fans are getting since Borderlands 3 came out six years ago in 2019. And its focus is on combat, loot and about leveling up.
It takes place on a planet named Kairos, and players assume the role of a Vault Hunter who must lead the resistance against a dictator named the Timekeeper and his army of synthetic followers. The Timekeeper has ruled Kairos for a thousand years.
Kairos has four distinct, seamlessly connected regions to explore: the rolling hills of the Fadefields, the frigid peaks of Terminus Range, the shattered lands of Carcadia Burn, and finally the Dominion, the Timekeeper’s impenetrable fortress city.
There’s a lot of at stake in this title, as Take-Two acquired Gearbox in March 2024 for $460 million. That’s a lot of money, though it’s much less than the up to $1.3 billion that previous owner Embracer paid for it. Here’s my impressions of the beginning of the campaign and the Fadefields open world section.
The game has seamless co-op play and an convenient lobby, with few loading screens. The missions and rewards are also quick. When you pick up ammo, you don’t have to click on every item. You move over it and everything you need flows into your inventory. You don’t have to drop something upon getting a reward and now just goes into your inventory in the reward center.
In the campaign, the combat is nonstop. In Fadefields, it’s an open world so you have to wander a lot to find the action. But you can easily hop into your vehicle at any time to get where you want to go.
The Fadefields come relatively early in the game, after you’ve completed a lot of the tutorials. You meet characters like Rush in the Fadefields, and it is all part of the friendly onboarding for the game. In the Fadefields, you can do a side mission with Claptrap, though.
You still see familiar faces from previous Borderlands. But you don’t have to have played previous Borderlands to play this one. The Fadefields kind of sets that up. If you’re lost at any given point, you can press a button that brings up the Echo path, which is the path to the next point in your mission.
The combat is pretty standard, where I felt I could succeed in the Fadefields with just my main weapon. You can also traverse more easily. Besides getting the vehicle at any time, you can also use your grappling hook or glider. There are new action skill trees for melee or ranged combat. You can send out companions to either attack or distract enemies: the Spectres or the Reapers. If there’s one boss fighter, you can spawn a number of Spectres to take it out. If you have a lot of melee enemies, you can use Reapers to take them out.
Part of the plan for making the game more approachable was to create a brand-new planet in Kairos. The Timekeeper has bent reality and kept the planet under control, but rogue characters are disrupting the peace as they teleport into the world and reveal there is more to reality than what they have seen. The Timekeeper starts to lose his super-tight grasp.
He gets a little more desperate. He’s willing to do some more nefarious things to keep control. Breaking into Vaults is a way to free the population.
I found that maneuvering around was good. You can jump in the air and then hold down the jump button to glide and land where you want. In firefights, it’s good to pop in and out of cover and send your Spectre or Reaper out when you’ve got a lot of enemies. Then just keep shooting until the battlefield goes quiet.
Overall, I liked the preview. After four major iterations, Borderlands knows what it is.
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