It’s no accident that Borderlands opened with a story about treasure hunters. Seeking out treasure is core to both the story and mechanics of Gearbox Software’s 2009 game. The developer sets this up from the very first words—this is a game about loot. Even before Borderlands was released, the sheer amount of stuff to sort through, largely in the form of guns, was central to Gearbox Software’s messaging: “Borderlands has 87 bazillion guns!” 

Borderlands may not have been the very first looter-shooter (some credit 2007's Hellgate: London for first blending shooter gameplay with the loot-driven gameplay of Diablo) but it is the game that defined the genre. You can’t talk about looter-shooters without talking about Borderlands. 

And conversely, it's hard to talk about Borderlands without talking about genre. Gearbox Software CEO Randy Pitchford said genre—specifically, a genre that didn’t quite exist yet—was at the forefront of Borderlands’ development. “The fundamental thesis that I started with on Borderlands was, ‘Let’s blend the moment-to-moment fun of a shooter with the long-term, compelling feelings that we get from the growth and progression of role-playing games,” said Pitchford. “That was the beginning. All concepts tend to start with story, style, or design. Borderlands started with the design, and then story and style followed.”

It’s been more than a decade and a half since the original Borderlands released, and Gearbox Software has put out a whole bunch of different games since, including sequels, spinoffs, and a mobile game. Looter-shooter is a bona fide genre now, made all the more popular by Gearbox Software’s Borderlands 2 in 2012, Bungie’s Destiny in 2014, and Ubisoft’s The Division in 2016. 

Now Gearbox Software is preparing for the launch of Borderlands 4 on September 12—a game that Pitchford said will be the “culmination of a huge part of [his] life.”

Borderlands 4 has a familiar look, but is set on a new planet called Kairos—a planet under dictatorial rule, on the cusp of a revolution that’ll free the planet from the tyrannical Timekeeper. It’s also a planet that’s been largely untouched by the rest of the Borderlands universe. 

Gearbox Software intentionally struck a darker tone with Borderlands 4, wanting something that can stand up to the chaos of its world. “Borderlands 4’s story is about the balance of law-and-order versus free will,” said Lin Joyce, Gearbox Entertainment Managing Director of Narrative Properties. “We place these two things in conflict at the start of the story.” 

There are four new characters to play as: Vex the Siren, Rafa the Exo-Solider, Harlow the Gravitar, and Amon the Forgeknight. Though they’re new to the series, they’re also distinctly Borderlands. You can see it in their stories and design, and of course in the fact that they’re Vault Hunters—mercenaries deadset on resistance, yes, but also on loot.

“You can’t forget where you came from,” said Anthony Nicholson, Gearbox Software Senior Project Producer. “What is the thing that made players fall in love with the franchise in the first place? There’s a throughline. We know that the dynamism of this type of gear and loot system will continue to evolve, but at its core, it’s that dynamism that we had in the first game.” That dynamism is at the core of the entire looter-shooter genre, really.

Defining the looter-shooter

To understand Borderlands as a series—and therefore Borderlands 4—we first have to define the genre. Marshall Needleman Armintor, the University of North Texas principal lecturer who published Capitalist Surrealism: Grind, Loot Boxes, and the Work of The Looter Shooter in Acta Ludologica in 2024, said in an interview that the looter-shooter is often a roleplaying game with science fiction elements that emphasizes the “plunder, exchange, and surfeit of weapons (mostly guns, gun, guns), armor, and ammunition from loot boxes.”

“A number of elements carried over from roguelikes and roguelites are important to the looter-shooter, namely their procedurality with both loot and hordes of enemies, thus keeping playthroughs novel,” Armintor said. “Similarly, the quality of the loot generally improves over time, dependent on the character’s level. Loot overall is the reason for playing, and this can supplant or substitute for narrative beats. And most importantly, the player accumulates loot as they grow in skill and burnish their characters.”

The looter-shooter pulls in many different details from other genres, including straight roleplaying games, dungeon crawlers, and (of course) shooters, which makes it hard to create “hard-and-fast boundaries,” he said. “But I would say if a majority of players call a game a looter-shooter, then it is one.”

Indeed, Pitchford is open about the games that influenced the original Borderlands. “Before I played Wolfenstein 3D, I was strictly a roleplaying game guy,” he said, “both in the games I loved to play, but also in the games I was making. When Wolfenstein came out, it really changed something. It made me find a thrill and a joy in action games.” 

Diablo is the other game Pitchford mentioned for the long-term play of it all, the ambition of growth via the loot that’s constantly being dropped. “These two genres can’t be further apart,” Pitchford said. “The skill to play Diablo is the same skill that is required to launch the application.” In comparison, action games often require a lot of physical skill, like precise aiming and movements—but he found that these differences weren’t necessarily incompatible with the core of Diablo. 

“What we did [with Borderlands] is we committed to the shooter aspects, our shooter gameplay, and that moment-to-moment fun holds up. All that skilled play works,” said Pitchford. “Meanwhile, all that long-term play, the ambition of progression, and the feeling of progression has to work, too.”

And then there’s the tone. Borderlands is known for its irreverent, sarcastic, and sometimes immature humor. The lightheartedness is mimicked in the game’s design—the wild colors and distinctive style—and sets the game apart from more realistic and gritty military shooters. Both Nicholson and Gearbox Software Art Director Adam May said that Borderlands has a serious amount of “ridiculousness” to it.

“What’s a Borderlands player going to expect for how to do this?" asked Nicholson, giving an example. "Most games, you probably walk up to an elevator and press the button—but in a Borderlands game, you might kill a guy to destroy some other thing that makes the elevator move.”

Subsequent games in the series built off of Borderlands. Other games took inspiration from it too, and thus a genre was born. 

“The ruined planet of Pandora, destroyed by the ravages of extraction, is echoed in the similarly wrecked landscapes of the Destiny and Risk of Rain series,” Armintor said. “The live service aspects, multiple DLCs for each title, and Golden Key giveaways help to create a sense of community, and that’s something Destiny does also. I think Borderlands is also about nostalgia, in that it takes things that were always present in certain types of RPGs and recasts them for a new audience.”

 

Honoring the looter-shooter in Borderlands 4

Excess is essential in a looter-shooter—and somehow, it feels like Gearbox Software is doing even more with Borderlands 4. Armintor said the looter-shooter player should feel “as if they’re inside a hyperactive pinball machine."

"Lots of disorienting stimulation, and lots of enemies who come at the player with numbers flying through the air, recording damage inflicted,” said Armintor. “Given the piles of ammo to be consumed, it all has to be used somehow. Players need to make decisions quickly, perhaps instinctively, based on the amount of damage being dealt. Similarly, there is the disorientation of sorting through loot, the split-second decisions that the player often makes about whether certain things should be saved or sold.”

This is, of course, core to Borderlands 4 even as Gearbox Software looks to bring something new to its players. Gearbox Software has tweaked several systems in Borderlands 4 as a way to bring in more: more loot, more guns, more options.

 “The biggest commitment we made in Borderlands 4 is to give the players what they want,” said Pitchford.

Part of that was dropping this sort-of fear around justifying gameplay decisions—to get rid of the need to make sure that those little game-y details made sense. “We just said, ‘F— it. You can double jump,’” Pitchford said. “There’s no rationalization for how that works. You’re literally in the air, and you hit the jump button again, and you’ll get another jump out of it. Does it feel good? Is it fun? Then I don’t give a s— if it makes any sense.”

And it’s not just double-jumping, according to Pitchford. The movement in Borderlands 4 is just more. “We get all kinds of fun stuff like dashing and gliding and using a grappling hook, not just to pull objects into your hands and throw them—causing an interruption on certain enemies—but to even bounce around the environment a little bit.”

Nicholson said that the loot system is one of the pieces of Borderlands 4 that is core to the genre, but different enough to feel fresh. He pointed to a new type of loot in Borderlands 4—the Rep Kit, which is essentially a healing item. It’s a quick way to replenish health and add bonuses to your character. To Nicholson, it gives the player more agency and control, something that makes it so players don’t have to scrounge for health. 

“But because it’s Borderlands, we add buffs to that, like damage reduction or fire rates or decreasing cooldowns,” Nicholson continued. “It really plays with your style as a player. If you’re specced into action skills and you want to be able to pop those more often, you probably want a Rep Kit that gives you a lower cooldown or increases your attack damage.”

The second piece Nicholson mentioned is Ordnance—new weapon slots specifically for grenades and heavy grade weapons. Ammo is irrelevant here. It’s “charge-based or cooldown-based,” he said. “Do you want to go in with a bunch of homing transfusion grenades, or do you just want to mow somebody down with some type of homing rocket?” he asked. “It lets the player choose what they want to do, and heavy weapons no longer take up a weapon slot, so you can play that way and have more guns.”

Making bazillions of guns

Borderlands 4 Art Director May said there are more than 30 billion guns in the new game. Thirty billion. 

And with the speed at which a player finds, uses, and rids themself of a weapon, there has to be a lot of them. “There’s so much stuff available, but since weapons are always being upgraded, discarded, or sold, nothing ever sticks around for very long unless it's rare,” Armintor said, discussing the looter-shooter's core loot loop. “But even those purple items can be sold. ‘All that is solid melts into air’ is never truer than in Borderlands.”

Still, 30 billion—it’s a number that’s hard to conceptualize. Procedural generation is the reason that number is even possible. There are all these different parts, the bodies and attachments, that all fit together and switch and change to create new, randomly generated mix-and-match options every time a player opens a loot box. 

For Borderlands 4, there are a bunch of different weapons manufacturers: Daedalus, Jakobs, Order, Ripper, Vlador, Torgue, Maliwan, and Tediore, all with different in-world specialties. Then there’s the weapon types, be it pistols, assault rifles, shotguns, snipers, or SMGs. Each manufacturer and weapon type can then have different attachments or firing modes. The variables go on and on.

May said Gearbox Software starts with the distinctiveness of its manufacturers and goes from there. “Players have some recognition when they’re picking up a certain manufacturer’s weapon and have a rough idea of how it’s going to function,” he said. “It’s a back-and-forth with the design team and art team, making sure that visually things line up with how they're supposed to work mechanically. If you want a real fast shooting weapon, you shoot for sleeker, more angular, more aggressive-looking shapes. If it’s shooting giant rockets every time, you want something that's bigger and rounder and more bulbous.”

Then the team starts breaking those pieces off and mixing them around. According to May, it’s important early on for the team to establish the different connection points of the guns so that they can mix-and-match endlessly. This process was even harder for Borderlands 4, because, for the first time, manufacturer parts can cross-pollinate. “You can have a Daedalus underbarrel on a Maliwan shotgun, and suddenly you have Daedalus and Maliwan visually on one weapon.”

Nicholson said Principal Artist and Art Director Jimmy Barnett created a “wall of guns” in Unreal Engine—something kind of like the stockroom in The Matrix. 

“It was this really large gun map where you could see all of the individual parts for all the individual guns, for all the individual manufacturers,” said Nicholson. “It made it so you could see how each of those things were and how we could have those combinations roll together and how they would work—the slides, the animators, the actions, the art all fitting together. Because a certain gun, if it pumps one way, but there’s a long barrel that goes on the bottom, obviously those parts can’t go together.”

The narrative team plays a big part in Borderlands' weapons too. Weapon names and the accompanying flavor text are the little details that pull players into the world. 

It’s probably even more important for a series like Borderlands because of the insistence on more, more, more weapons. Borderlands games usually have a narrative that supports that loop of more, too. “The consumers—even down to the branding of different in-game weapons manufacturers, which also has an impact on the game play—are front and center,” Armintor noted.

Gearbox’s Joyce discussed how Borderlands 4’s manufacturers and corporations are built out and how that impacts weapons. “When we make a corporation, we are deciding what that corporation's pillars are, and those pillars are then pulled over into all of the theming around the weapons,” she said. “It’s a way to reinforce or to build character onto corporations in a pretty light-touch way. As an example, people get the vibe of Jakobs before they’ve ever met the CEO.”

 

Telling Borderlands 4’s story

Borderlands 4 began back in 2018 or 2019 with Pitchford planting a few “thematic stakes” in the ground. “What do we want to do?” he asked. ‘What do we have to say? What are we feeling? What’s the zeitgeist of the environment we’re in?”

He was thinking about Gearbox Software’s legacy, its history—how it grew from an independent studio into its acquisition by Embracer Group, and then the subsequent sale to Take-Two Interactive. “We did the deal with Embracer Group and became part of a publicly traded company,” he said. 

“There’s this cultural and emotional shift in me, personally, and at the studio. What does it mean to trade some autonomy for organization?," he continued: “What does it feel like to move up and down the scale between autonomy and being organized or even being controlled? On one end of a spectrum you have anarchy, and on the other end of the spectrum you have fascism, totalitarianism, zero freedom. It’s not just about societies—that’s all of us as individuals, to imagine where we want to be on that spectrum and how comfortable we are. And we were going through that as a company.”

That’s where Borderlands 4 got its themes of, as Joyce put it, chaos and order. “You come to this world ruled by a dictator who you know believes in pure order,” she said.  “But what does that look like, especially for humans who have free will? And in a world of entropy, how do you uphold that over centuries of time? What is the right balance between order and free will? An overabundance of free will, with no law and order, can be just as dangerous.”

The Timekeeper, indeed, is a cruel, tyrannical leader who forces his rule over the people of Kairos by implanting them with dangerous, controlling devices. But the Borderlands 4 story really begins, according to Nicholson, when Pandora’s moon of Elpis is teleported into Kairos’s orbit. It brings that element of chaos to the Timekeeper's reign, and the player sees the impact, “the fallout and cataclysm,” immediately.

Narratively, this is several games deep into the series, but Borderlands 4 is friendly to players unfamiliar with its past, according to Gearbox Software. “It’s the perfect place for players to jump in,” Joyce said. “It’s a new planet. It doesn’t assume you’ve played the previous games.” There are details here and there that link the games together, but those details are not essential to understanding what’s going on.

Regardless, it sounds like the perfect setting and narrative to once again reinforce the themes inherent to the looter-shooter genre—an abundance of guns and reasons to use them.