It seems work on Borderlands 4 really has gone according to plan. Not only has the game pulled its release date forward, but it also has gone gold well over a month before launch. Gearbox announced the completion status for the game on social media, where now it seems all we have to do is wait for the release date to roll around.
What does going gold mean? Well, in layman's terms it means the game is basically done. All the major work is completed and while patches later down the line will work to eliminate some bugs and boost performance, the game is in a state ready to be released to the public.
<social>https://x.com/GearboxOfficial/status/1948488401554124886</social>
As Randy Pitchford explains, going gold used to have a proper reference to the way in which games were completed when they were only played on discs. "When we were ready, we'd submit a build of the game as a candidate to be the 'final' version," he wrote. "The 1st party would receive the game and make master discs that they would run through their tests and, hopefully, approve it for licensing and manufacturing."
"When the first parties approved the build, they would create a new master copy of that software to be sent to the physical media manufacturer to be replicated onto the discs that would be packaged and sold to customers," he continued. "Those master discs were literally gold coloured."
<social>https://x.com/DuvalMagic/status/1948495446348804316</social>
While gold discs might not be involved in today's game development process, the phrase has stuck around and we're glad for it. It's nice to have a way for a game to say it's done without a developer just saying "hey, we're finished." Gives us a bit of sparkle in our lives.
Borderlands 4 launches on the 12th of September for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. A Nintendo Switch 2 version will launch on the 3rd of October.