The use of quotation marks in Gearbox’s game is no coincidence, as the new Borderlands may take a slightly different direction.

Last year, Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford said in an interview with GameSpot that Borderlands 3 was fragmented because of planetary travel, but in comparison, Borderlands 4 will be the most open and free-flowing. Gearbox’s Senior Project Producer Anthony Nicholson then contradicted this to GamesRadar, revealing that the latest episode of the franchise will have some open-world elements as you can move seamlessly between zones.

That doesn’t mean that Gearbox wants to copy Ubisoft’s towers or vast, empty open worlds with Borderlands 4. That’s why Nicholson said it’s not the studio’s goal to make an open-world game in the traditional sense. So he didn’t want to say en bloc that it would be an open world game, but it sounds like that’s where the new Borderlands is headed. So what can we expect?

Borderlands 4 will have side missions and events to explore, as well as new modes of transportation, including a hoverbike and a pickaxe. We haven’t seen much of the game yet, but so far the story is set on a single planet and possibly its moon. According to Nicholson, the world of Kairos is not like Pandora because it’s a world where the outlook is grim, the stakes are real, and the characters deal with them as such, but there’s still room for the silliness, weirdness, and mayhem that makes a Borderlands game a Borderlands game.

We wouldn’t be surprised to see Gearbox parody the Borderlands movie at some point, which almost no one has a good opinion of. We tend to see good adaptations these days (Nintendo’s Super Mario animated film is a great example, but SEGA’s three Sonic movies didn’t disappoint either), so compared to that, Borderlands is more of a 1990s/2000s quality.

We’ll see how good Borderlands 4 turns out to be.

Source: PCGamer