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It's been a long wait for Borderlands 4, but it's nearly over. The FPS looter shooter is set to launch in a few short weeks, and the hype has been building steadily for months.
Destructoid sat down with Gearbox developers behind Borderlands 4 at Gamescom this week, and the discussion centered around the game's new location of Kairos and what sets it apart from the planet of Pandora, which has been a focal point of the franchise up until now.
The full interview can be found below.
Note: Parts of this interview were edited to avoid repetition and allow for better text clarity.
I wanted to first of all talk about this new world you're creating, and I want to have an idea from the both of you about how this world, you feel, differs from Pandora and other locations we've seen in the franchise so far.
Jason Reiss (Borderlands 4 World Building Director): I mean, it all starts with the seamless world. It's all interconnected, we're actually building a fully realized world. So, in the past, you would pretty much teleport to another location every time you would transition to a new area. This time, everything's got to kind of fit in the world and so it feels that much more real when you're actually going through it. You've recognized spaces, you get used to traveling the world, and we've opened it up so that players can tackle it in any order that they want with the nonlinear progression. I would just say that we are tackling exploration in a whole new way than we've ever done in Borderlands, and we have all of the traversal skills to do that and we have all of the other goodies that we get to hide out in the world in order to tackle that. There's so many ways that the game differs as far as dynamic events and things like that, but that's some of the stuff that calls to me.
Anthony Nicholson (Borderlands 4 Senior Project Producer): I think for me, Pandora is very destitute. It's very dry, it's very sandy, and we have some of that in [Borderlands 4] because we wanna make sure that people can see and get that same feeling. But, if you notice, if you play over there in the Fade Fields map, it's very bright, lush, and green, and looks very welcoming. It is not.
Obviously you're pushing this non-linear storyline and structure. What are the challenges you've found with doing this non-linear story to allow as much freedom as possible for the player but still keep that core Borderlands experience?
Nicholson: Well, you wanna make sure that players are able to enter missions at the right point and exit missions at the right point. So one of the challenges that we had was, how do we make it to where you can just drop in the world and go do whatever you want to do but still be connected and the narrative and the missions that you're playing through actually make sense? So, it's not completely non-linear, you get to a point and then the world just opens up for you. And then of course, at the end, it comes together and kind of ties itself together, so it's making sure that the characters that you introduce, the danger and the sense of despair that you introduce all make sense whenever you're kind of tying into those individual missions so that it still makes sense. Because, it's a really, really big world, and there's a lot of different factions and NPCs and different characters that you meet, and you want to make sure that they're in it in a consistent way so that it's not just telling a bunch of different stories at one time, and now you beat the game.
Reiss: Balance was an issue, you know, if players went all the way to one side and played the whole area and then came back and it was too easy or something like that. So, we had to develop a whole system, a back-end system that understood if you work this hard over here, we need to elevate this other one, but we still want to give you that sense of power at the same time. So, it needed to almost be like an elastic band that kind of moved with you because we want to challenge the player, but we want you also to feel like a badass because you're gaining power and things like that. And so, we had to come up with a system that we lovingly call Infamy, that adapts to the player and grows with the player, and introduces new enemies whether you've been in one zone or the other, and it advances with you so you actually explore this world, but also still feel like it's still a Borderlands game, it's still an RPG.
Nicholson: And it's all done under the hood, so it doesn't feel like it's a task or a chore or anything like that. The game just responds, like Jason talked about in the presentation with the systems that react to the player and that are dynamic in nature. As you go through and you progress through these things and you start destroying all these different people, you'll start to see new enemies spawn, harder looking enemies, bigger badasses. And then whenever you go to a different area, you're just one-shotting everything, it's still lifted and balanced for you without it having to be a chore. The world just knows and feels you as you move throughout it.
It very much just feels from the time I played that this world is alive, like it's not just set in stone. Like the events that can happen sporadically or from player interactions in such. How do you balance having these events feel very natural, a core essential part of the world, but also have events that are like "oh, I as the player caused this event to happen"?
Reiss: I think that is obviously a huge challenge, and we had to work through a lot of the systems there. I think one way we approach it is looking at different types of possibilities, you want the quick "popcorn" ones and those can spawn around the player, and we can kind of pepper the landscape with those. But then, you want to have this large world event that shows up every once in a while, and that attracts a different type of playstyle or amount of time that you want to dedicate. And then, something that actually really helps the world feel real is our migrations and patrols that move from town to town. That becomes more of a, you understand where these guys are going, you understand that they're on the move, and it makes sense. It makes the world feel real because, of course they're moving from the supply depot over there to their headquarters on the other side. And, of course the cats are walking through the forest, and we make sure to populate those near the player and around them wherever they're located.
Nicholson: One of my goals early on in the project when we first got started was, we need to be able to have something that you can engage with or that happens in the world every 30 seconds or so. You don't want the world to feel empty, and if we're trying to push and give the player the agency to claw forward and explore and do these different types of events and activities, you want to have those things that just happen. For me, there's this personal thing that I've always been pushing in our games that we haven't been able to realize until we started the power of Unreal 5, which is the weather system and our critter system. There's lots of games that have been doing this for a super long time. But Borderlands, we have it to where there's so many different avenues for the player to be able to go out and explore and engage in this type of content, now we have the foliage and the fauna of all these different things that can happen throughout the world. Like, a snowstorm comes in, or if you're in [one area of Kairos] there's a huge sandstorm that happens, and it feels really good and really makes the world feel alive on top of all the actual gameplay things that you can engage in.
When it comes to the open world, was there anything that you really wanted to implement originally, like an idea or concept, but it sadly just didn't work?
Nicholson: I don't think that there's anything that I would consider like a big ticket feature or anything like that, but what I can say is, this Borderlands has given us the opportunity to do some of the things that we weren't able to before. In the same vein as your question, like mission replay. Now, this is the first time, and we've been wanting mission replay since Borderlands 1. So now you're able to go in, do a main mission if you really liked it, you can go back into your menu seamlessly and hit the button and run the whole mission again. I was head of DLC for Borderlands 3, and people for years have been save-loading, save-quitting. Now you can just walk straight to the arena after you finish the mission, use Moxxi's Big Encore Machine and spawn the boss right there without having to go back to the main menu, and jump in and farm that legendary. I think we used this as an opportunity with the technology that we have now and the brawn and everything that we've learned over the years with the team, to be able to say "what are some of those things that we've always wanted to do," and get those.
Reiss: We had those activities going early on where you would go and do the activity, but it wasn't a mission before, and so it didn't feel quite fulfilling. Over development, we've been able to evolve that so that the player seamlessly gets a mission when they show up in these activity areas, they're able to press forward and complete it quick, and get the reward right then and there. So, I'd say we started down some paths that we were like, "that's not quite clicking," and then we were able to figure out activities need to be hanging out in this sphere.
Nicholson: Yeah, like really refine it. So it's a mission to us. Under the hood, it's a mission, but it's really like going into a room and now the room says "do these things," but if you leave that room, it just goes away. So, you don't have to feel like you have a time sink or, if you're like me, I don't wanna opt into this, it's just like 'oh, here's this crawler, go get this battery, go find this part,' and you just do it right then and there.
Reiss: And it's this subtle thing. It's subtle, too, because it's not clogging your mission log also. It's inviting you to explore the world and "let's go check out the seamless world and check it all out."
Thinking of moments like a Minecraft mention in Borderlands 2, or a Penn and Teller reference in Borderlands 3, are there any easter eggs in Borderlands 4, and if so, how well have you hidden them?
Nicholson: There's always easter eggs. Always easter eggs.
Reiss: There absolutely are.
Are you expecting players to not find some of these easter eggs for a while?
Nicholson: For sure, there's definitely some that you have to spend time doing or seeking out. And then there's my favorite, easter egg that I bothered this guy about to create that's his own, that people will get to experience also. What do you think?
Reiss: It may include Tannis, as always.
The post Borderlands 4’s new Kairos location offers a more active open world through adaptive mechanics, devs say appeared first on Destructoid.
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