Borderlands 4 is set to release in September 2025. Joining the fray: four new vault hunters for you to try out. One of them was recently introduced in detail by lead character designer Nick Thurston in an interview with MeinMMO.
Vex, the Siren. Rafa, the Exo-Soldier. Harlowe, the Gravitar. And Amon, the Knight of the Forge. These are the four characters we will be able to explore the new planet Kairos in Borderlands 4 starting September 12.
Each of the characters brings unique abilities and exciting backstories. In an interview with lead character designer Nick Thurston, we talked about one of the new characters and Borderlands 4 itself.
Of course, the following question had to be asked:
Who will be your personal main character among the vault hunters if you had to choose?
Nick Thurston’s answer: “I am the character designer, so they are all sort of like my children. You’re asking me to choose my favorite child. But I really have to say it’s Amon. And that’s for a variety of reasons.”
What do those reasons look like? You can read about that here in the interview – and also which thoughts went into the character design for Borderlands 4.
Nick Thurston from Borderlands 4 in an Interview: Amon was the opportunity to incorporate all the ideas I thought were really good that didn’t fit anywhere else.
Why is Amon a favorite?
Amon was actually the last vault hunter to be fully realized. And when you go into such a development cycle, you have a lot of leftover ideas that just couldn’t be implemented in previous versions, but you thought: this is a really good idea, but I need to fit it somewhere.
And Amon, due to his nature of being at the end of the cycle, ultimately got many of those things. So I think Amon was the opportunity to incorporate all the ideas I thought were really good that didn’t fit anywhere else. And I feel that in the end, everything came together wonderfully.
Also, Amon is 1.95 m tall, just like me. In that regard, I can also relate to him.
Amon is described as the most complex yet accessible vault hunter. In what way?
All vault hunters exist somewhat on a spectrum of complexity, style, and gameplay. I like to think of them like ice cream flavors.
When we talk about complexity with Amon, it’s really just that he is the most focused on his abilities and has the most to do in combat. He has a lot of things that require a lot from the player to really effectively fight through battles. You have to approach it tactically.
So Amon has, compared to the other vault hunters, the most abilities in terms of visual effects and things he can do. That doesn’t mean the other vault hunters aren’t good, just because he has more to do. But it’s just that he’s the one who can draw a sword and do five different things with it. He’s the one who has a variety of weapons that no other vault hunter has. While the others are usually focused in one particular direction, Amon has a whole arsenal to unleash destruction.
What type of player is Amon intended for?
If you love being the brutal fighter who dives right into the action, stands in the spotlight, and leaps directly into the faces of enemies, then he is just the right choice for you. No other vault hunter, with perhaps one exception, wants to jump into the heat of battle as much as he does. Amon is a character who prefers a very close and personal playstyle.
Would you recommend Amon for a first playthrough in Borderlands 4?
That really depends on what kind of player you are, I think. If you are a min-max player like me, who enjoys the essential elements of RPGs a lot, then you will find plenty of that here, and I think he is a great experience for a first playthrough.
He is not one of the easier vault hunters. If you want to just jump in and have a great time immediately, then he is good at that too, but there is definitely more going on with him.
All of our vault hunters are fantastic experiences for beginners. It really just depends on how complex you want your fights to be.
Is Amon good for co-op mode?
Amon has a range of abilities that can provoke enemies to draw attention to himself and thereby diffuse the focus and anger of enemies towards the other vault hunters.
He has a handful of abilities that can heal allies and create a kind of crowd control by freezing enemies. So in co-op, he particularly shines through his sturdiness and crowd control capabilities.
If you had to compare Amon to the older vault hunters from previous games, who do you think comes closest to him in terms of gameplay?
I find this to be a really tough question because the diversity of builds is so important to me and the ability to play your character in different ways.
So I think it’s almost more accurate to say that his action skills resemble characters. Scourge and Athena are, in my opinion, very similar. If you are an Athena player, you will love Scourge. If you like to play with Krieg and switch to melee mode, I think Onslaught is a great addition for you.
And if you really want some kind of elemental nuke at range, I find that Amara has a lot of similarities with the action skill “Crucible.” I think it’s like a mix of characters.
Is there a connection between Amon and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands? Did this game inspire Amon, or are the similarities coincidental?
It’s funny that you mention that because I see a lot of people saying that Amon is basically a continuation of Wonderlands as a character, which I find quite amusing.
Wonderlands was the first time I was on the team for the player characters. So Wonderlands was kind of the place where I gained a lot of knowledge. And I saw a lot of what worked in Wonderlands and what didn’t.
And I took the things I liked best from Wonderlands and just embedded them into Amon. I think it’s always great when Borderlands mixes different genres. I think many other games take themselves very seriously and think it has to be either science fiction or fantasy. But I feel that Borderlands does something really incredible by mixing the genres and adding a bit of spice.
Amon is very technology-oriented. He is not a magical guy, but he can create all these fantastic weapons that look really impressive.
What are the things you particularly liked about Wonderlands?
I think what Wonderlands did well and what was somewhat lacking in previous titles was that action skills became more relevant. I believe that in many of the earlier games there were many action skills, but they were very secondary compared to the guns.
Ultimately, we are a gun game, so the guns obviously have to come first. But I think we really pushed that forward in Wonderlands. We gave players the ability to scale the damage of action skills in a way that wasn’t possible in earlier titles. They could also scale melee damage to make it relevant.
A lot of our feedback on some vault hunters in the past was: “Yes, you are a melee character, but there aren’t many good ways to scale your melee, are there?” We take such things very seriously. And once again, as a min-maxer, I want every build to be successful in some way. So if I want to create a melee build, whether it’s Amon or someone else, I want to make sure there are opportunities across the entire skill tree so that it scales into the endgame and beyond. A lot of that philosophy was carried from Wonderlands to Borderlands 4. This way, players can ultimately live out whatever fantasy they want.
What thoughts did you have on Borderlands 4 when you started designing the characters? How did you begin to decide how the vault hunters would function this time?
At the beginning of each project, many different stakeholders come together and look at what has never been done before, what fantasies have never been realized. Therefore, there are always a plethora of ideas at the outset.
For me, as I said, it’s most important that all vault hunters feel like different ice cream flavors. Because if you know the game is only filled with chocolate, you will eventually get bored of chocolate ice cream. You want something different, right? So it was really important to me from an aesthetic and gameplay perspective to say: how does each character differ?
The common thread with Amon was all along: we wanted an unstoppable Goliath, an absolutely brutal character. We haven’t really done that since Brick in Borderlands 1. Of course, other characters in the past have been tanky too, but no one else was like this massive, two-meter tall guy who jumps into someone’s face. So we definitely wanted to ensure that one of the characters in this game continues that tradition, and Amon was the right choice for that.
Narratively, Amon is essentially a survival story. He and his parents belonged to a cult that worshiped vault monsters. Of course, that all went wrong, and the vault monster killed everyone close to him. He took that very much to heart and swore vengeance.
But just because he carries that core of rage within him doesn’t mean he has to behave that way, right? A lot of Amon’s personality stems from his time in the cult, where he was very reserved. He is a warrior-poet. He quotes almost biblically, the way he sometimes speaks. He is very cultured. He is basically a gentle giant.
What drives him is ultimately revenge, but he tries not to let that define his personality. He tries to remain a cultured, calm person.
Let’s talk about the backstories of the characters because I find that the ones we know so far are quite dark. So, Vex has killed everyone in this shop. Rafa has a truly dark past with the suit, and now Amon is trying to take revenge for all the people he loved who were killed by the vault monster. What comes to mind first regarding Borderlands is the humor. Why did you choose these rather dark backstories?
There are many people who have a lot of opinions on this topic because I’m not the only one who thinks about such things. I’m one of many. But I believe everyone felt that Borderlands at its core… I don’t think most players remember how dark Borderlands 1 was, especially Borderlands 2. There were many very dark things, but they just weren’t in the spotlight. And I think that ultimately you need a lot of dark elements for the silly elements to really shine. You need a mix.
Borderlands has always drawn from a variety of different references. I think that applies to the story too, where you know you need darkness to have light.
I think it’s really important that while this game has a very serious overarching thread, there is definitely a lot of lightness and humor as well.
I would say a large part of the main story is among the most serious we’ve ever done, but many of the side content is among the silliest we’ve ever created.
This way, everyone gets a bit of everything. But in the end, the players who are really looking for the dark Borderlands experience they know from Borderlands 1 and 2 will find it here in the main story of Borderlands 4.
Is this a decision that stemmed from Borderlands 3, where there was some criticism of the story?
I was not involved in Borderlands 3, so I can’t really comment on that. But I know that all of us, including myself, usually pay a lot of attention to social media. We read a lot and take a lot seriously. Sometimes people feel like they’re screaming into a void. But we really do listen. And I think we are one of those companies that genuinely cares a lot about the community’s sentiment.
And what I can say is that even though I wasn’t the decision-maker in the room, I believe that fan feedback is very much appreciated here and ultimately influences many of the things we do in the future, and that our community means a lot to us.
Thank you for the interview!
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