Has Borderlands run out of gas?

When did Pandora become so boring?

My guest for this week’s issue of Multiplier is David Smith. David was the editor of Kotaku Australia before it was tragically shuttered earlier this year. Prior to that, he was the games editor at The AU Review. What comes next is up in the air but in the meantime you can find David on Twitter, TikTok and Threads.

Fergus: Borderlands was far from the first game to blend first-person shooter with RPG elements or Diablo-inspired loot progression. However, it was just good enough at both that it managed to strike a chord and resonate with much wider audiences than either genre usually managed at the time. Two months after it first hit physical and digital storefronts in 2009, the game managed to sell a solid 2 million copies. This continued in the months to follow and in the years since then, the series has received myriad sequels, spin-offs and more. As of November 2022, Borderlands as a series is said to have shipped 77 million copies.

It’s hard to imagine what Borderlands would be without its chaotic and cartoon aesthetics, the game famously spent much of its development with a grounded and more generic look before the art team pulled a fast one. On the other hand, all it takes is a few seconds of the trailer for the recently released film adaptation of the series to see how easily history could have turned out differently. And with the disastrously poor critical reception for the Borderlands film and the saturation of the loot-shooter sub-genre that the series has built its lucrative legacy on, it’s hard not to wonder how eager audiences are for more.

Given that publisher Take-Two acquired Gearbox in early 2024, Borderlands 4 seems like a matter of when rather than if, but at the same time the future of the franchise seems shakier than ever.

Source: 2K

David: Any Borderlands 4, which Take Two will certainly push for at some point, will need a ground-up rethink.

When Gearbox announced Borderlands 3 in 2018, fans hoped that it would help the looter shooter franchise shed the trappings of the 2000s. Certain design elements had limited players' desire to re-run its campaigns -- it had no real interest post-game content (while its players did), suffering from an over-reliance on unskippable triggers, dialogue and cutscenes that brought the game to a crashing halt no matter how many times you'd beaten it. In the intervening years, other similar games had innovated in the space. Destiny 2 built a long and effortlessly grindable post-campaign tail. Diablo 3 introduced a post-game Adventure Mode that let players rapidly re-run zones, bosses, Nephalim Rifts and bounties to collect ever more powerful and bizarre weaponry. Would Borderlands 3 embrace any of this?

The answer, as I discovered at a preview event in 2019, was no, of course not. Borderlands 3 was built almost exactly the same way as its decade-old predecessors. It was filled with the same old problems and various new, related ones. Though Gearbox made some attempts to give it an interesting post-game loop, it wasn't enough to keep players hooked like Diablo and Destiny could. It also made the bewildering move of issuing dramatic nerfs to certain character builds, despite it being a PvE experience. Borderlands has no PvP, thus the only party getting hurt is the computer. Was the creation of absurdly overpowered builds not the entire point of a game like this? Why cut into their ability to do that? Fans were baffled.

With Borderlands 3, Gearbox proved that it didn't understand what players wanted from the modern Action RPG, and maybe never really had. Were it to take another crack at the franchise, it would need to back to square one or, at least, pay attention to what its contemporaries have been doing.

Source: 2K

Fergus: It's funny because I remember having much the same read on Borderlands 3 when it first came out, but then looped back to it years down the line and ended up having a surprisingly good time with it. I suspect this was partially due to how fed up I was with how live-service gaming had seeped into every corner of the gaming landscape. 

Given the ire with which things like Suicide Squad and Avengers have been treated in recent years, I don't think that Borderlands going full live service or MMORPG is necessarily going to be a winner with the gaming public. If anything, I'm shocked that the franchise never managed to get anything off the ground in the mobile gaming space. Still, if I were going to play armchair game designer for a minute then there might be something in stealing from more sandbox-y survival games like ARK or procedural-generated stuff like No Man's Sky. 

I don't know if you need to go full Shadow of Chernobyl with it but even something as simple as doubling the player count could go a long way towards making the next Borderlands hit different and feel like an evolution rather than an encore. As the series has gone, it's become more character and story-led but one of the things that's always kept me coming back to the original Borderlands is that it's narratively lightweight enough for the friends you're playing with to fill that space. A version of Borderlands that returns to that approach could be cool to see.

As things stand though, every new Borderlands game rarely strives to be anything but more of the same. There might well be wisdom in how Gearbox has stretched out the development time between releases, to leave audiences hungry for their next jaunt around Pandora. It's their golden goose, after all. However, when the gameplay and systems of each installment are almost as iterative as something like Call of Duty it feels crazy that the development of a new one takes as long as it does. That longer development time gives room for larger expectations and then, once it arrives, a misalignment between the appetites of audiences when the project was greenlit and where they are when it releases.

Source: 2K

David: I am writing this response a little while after the earlier pars in this newsletter. In that time, the Borderlands movie has come to theatres, bombed spectacularly, and fled just as quickly to streaming. Gearbox has also announced Borderlands 4 at Gamescom, what Randy Pitchford clearly assumed would be a personal victory lap after a successful few weeks astride the global box office.

The response to the Borderlands 4 announcement was ... I don't even know if you could call it muted, because that would suggest that anyone made a sound at all. The announcement trailer has racked up 3.2 million views on YouTube, but I didn't see many talking about it at the time, and I haven't heard a single soul mention it since.

I'm sure the movie's woeful performance soured the vibe around the announcement, but it may also be that Borderlands 4 has finally run up against its greatest challenge: a generational shift in taste. Gen-Z audiences will almost certainly find its humour cringe. If it continues down the path trodden by the first four games, they will doubtless consider it horribly dated too, compared to flowing, beautiful looting and shooting in games like Fortnite. I don't know what Gearbox's plans for this new installment look like yet, but it may need to make series changes to the established formula if it hopes to tempt a more youthful audience and ensure the franchise's survival.