Everything you can see in Borderlands 4 should also be accessible – and this might not only apply to the planet you are on. This comes from an interview with Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford.
What is this interview about? Jordan Ramée from GameSpot was allowed to talk with Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford and Creative Director Graeme Timmins about Borderlands 4 a week before the Game Awards. The game was presented with a new trailer at the show.
You can see the trailer for Borderlands 4 from the Game Awards here:
An open world without loading screens
What was the focus of the interview? A key theme of the interview was the game world. According to Pitchford, it should be as open and free in Borderlands 4 as it has ever been in the franchise. This indicates a different approach than in part 3, which, despite different planets, feels less open.
During the interview, a trailer was also shown. At one point, Pitchford paused it to reveal more about the construction of the game world.
If you look at [this] scene [in the trailer], you can see the characters looking at a view. In every video game you’ve ever played, that’s a backdrop, right? In Borderlands 4, you only see playable space that you can reach without loading times.
Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox Software
When Pitchford said this, a moon was also visible in the background. The interviewer jokingly addressed this, stating that such a claim seemed a bit exaggerated, especially with that image. Pitchford only replied: “Everything in the scene, Jordan. Everything in the scene.”
So can you seamlessly travel to this moon in the finished game or not? The CEO’s answer remains quite vague. However, Jordan Ramée seems to assume that Pitchford meant exactly that.
The CEO does not speak of an “Open World”
So does Borderlands 4 have a classic open world? According to Pitchford, certainly not. He himself does not refer to it as such, as it would differ too much from what other games have established as open world. There are things that they deliberately do not do because they are Borderlands.
The game world of Borderlands 4 is said to be seamless, extensive, and larger than anything they have ever made, but it should not feel systemic or like it was filled by an algorithm. Whether this is just marketing talk or not cannot be assessed without real gameplay.
When exactly Borderlands 4 is set to be released is still unknown. However, a fan has already been allowed to play a prototype of the shooter. You can read the whole story in this article on MeinMMO: Borderlands developers fulfill the wish of a terminally ill fan to play Borderlands 4 before anyone else
