When Borderlands 3 launched in 2019, fans liked it a lot, but there was concern among some critics and players that the series had not innovated enough, and the game felt too similar to Borderlands 2, despite the five-year wait after The Pre-Sequel. Now that Borderlands 4 launches this September, six years after Borderlands 3, we wonder, will history repeat itself?
I asked Chris Brock, Executive Producer at Gearbox, his thoughts on that during a visit to 2K Games' headquarters in Munich, and they are confident that Borderlands 4 will surprise players in ways Borderlands 3 couldn't.
"The time between Borderlands 2 and Borderlands 3 was about seven years. We had been gone for a while", Brock explains, explaining that it was their intention that Borderlands 3 didn't feel too different. "We wanted to make sure that when we came back it was familiar. When people say it feels like more Borderlands, yeah, that was the goal. We wanted to make more Borderlands. We wanted to evolve, but we didn't want to change the formula so much that it didn't feel familiar."
Things, however, will change a little with Borderlands 4. "Going from Borderlands 3 to Borderlands 4, one of the things we wanted to focus on was the traversal abilities and exploration. And that has led to the series evolving, I would say, more between 3 and 4 than it did between 2 and 3, for sure".
You can read more about Borderlands 4 and our thoughts on the new gameplay innovations in our full preview of Borderlands 4 here, including new gameplay from the early stages of the story and exploration of what they call "seamless world", and our full interview with Brock and Senior Writer Taylor Clark here.