When a new Borderlands project arrives, the question is never whether it will work well or not. The Borderlands series is always fun from a gameplay standpoint, and in some cases, like the first two games, results in excellent shooter RPGs that have yet to be surpassed in some aspects.
The problem is always in the tone. Some people love Borderlands’ humor, others find it jarring. The games have the vibe of an HMV Rick and Morty t-shirt. They are a 3 for 2 deal on vape refills. It seems almost impossible to imagine a Borderlands game without it, but what we’d love about Borderlands 4 is something that’s much closer to the first game in the series than the third in terms of writing.
Sure, the first game had some Internet humor, but this was in a pre-Marvel dialogue climate, one before the Internet and meme culture had parasitically infected everything. Compare that to Borderlands 3, where the entire game was desperately trying to rely on internet memes and references that were probably outdated when they were written.
We don’t think this is an ‘old man yells at the cloud’ thing, we just think it feels like a game written for an audience that doesn’t exist. Games take a long time to create. Memes are born, live and die in a week. When the internet was a kinder, newer place, you could get away with a Leroy Jenkins or 40 joke, but in the age of TikTok, leave internet humor to the internet.
We’d love to see Borderlands 4 rely on the characters and their relationships as a basis for the humor. It introduces more excellent side characters like the first two games did, and leaves out the jokes about Rizz and Skibidi Toilet.
This won’t happen entirely (because we already know Lilith will probably return), but we’d love for Gearbox to completely cut ties with the established story and characters and try something else with the same gameplay base. Sure, you can stick with Claptrap (we were all 14 once and found his quest for dubstep in Borderlands 2 hilarious), but we’d be happy to pay £600 for a version without Tiny Tina.
From a gameplay perspective, we wouldn’t change much from the recent entry. What the series has never wavered about is how well it distributes the loot. No other game except Diablo has so expertly captured drip-feeding new weapons, and we want the exact same system to return.
Create new grenade modifiers, crazy effects, weapons that fire 100 bullets at once in all directions, we don’t care much. The act of picking up a gun and shooting something while the numbers explode is still fun, we just want to be given a more compelling reason to do it.
Borderlands is an absolutely huge franchise for Take-Two and we imagine the game will be huge, so we’d love to see the series regain its place. An absolutely horrible movie aside, there’s a lot to like about Borderlands, and while the third game was a step aside, a sequel in the mold of 1 and 2 could be excellent.
