The Borderlands franchise has always given players wide-open areas to traverse and explore, but with Borderlands 4, Gearbox is taking it to the next level. The latest game from the looter-shooter pioneers at Gearbox introduces a seamless, open world full of missions, NPCs, encounters, and side activities to take part in. Though Gearbox explained the difference between its past approach to crafting its worlds and what it accomplished in Borderlands 4, I didn’t truly understand the scope of just how different it is from the franchise’s past explorable worlds until I spent hours exploring the world this team built.
The world of Kairos, the new planet debuting in Borderlands 4, is much more open and explorable than Pandora. My journey started in the Fadefields, which offered a ton of side activities and main missions scattered throughout, and when the time came to move to my next zone, Carcadia Burn, I did so with no loading times. Not only that, but the transition from the Fadefields’ lush greenery to the wasteland setting of Carcadia Burn felt natural. Slowly, the blades of grass gave way to grains of sand as I rode my Digirunner into the sand-blasted wasteland that took the brunt of the damage when Lilith teleported Pandora’s moon, Elpis, into Kairos at the end of Borderlands 3. Though in the moment, it all felt natural as I played, upon reflection, I was shocked at how few loading screens I encountered during my several hours playing Borderlands – even as I was entering completely new areas.
According to senior project producer Anthony Nicholson, the team never set out to make an open-world game, but once it established the seamless nature and began filling it with various side activities, the form of Borderlands 4’s world took shape. Still, despite how many core tenets of open-world games the world shares, the team seems to prefer the term “Seamless World.” The term comes from the core philosophy of giving players as few reasons to stop playing as possible. “It’s really in service of helping the players be able to be in the game as long as possible and feel that immersion,” Nicholson says.
In talking with the Gearbox teams, Borderlands 4’s world feels like the realization of the direction the team has wanted to go for a while. But to do it right, it needed to harness new technology.
“Coming right off the launch of Borderlands 3 and going into the DLC, it was pretty clear where we wanted to continue some of the work that we wanted to hit that we couldn’t hit on the prior generation,” Nicholson says. “Now, we run in Unreal [Engine] 5, so that gave us other advantages to be able to do things and kind of went into being able to make a seamless world and things of that nature.”
The openness of Borderlands 4 is enticing for players, but proved challenging as Gearbox began adapting to this new approach when combined with the massive additions to on-foot traversal like grappling and gliding. “We’ve always made big levels at Gearbox, but we usually do these hub-and-spoke kinds of things and always transition from a large level to a linear level,” world building director Jason Reiss says. “I feel like we’ve flipped that formula where we have large levels that sometimes go into a linear level, but I think we’re building a lot more 360 combat areas where players can enter into spaces from any direction, including from the air – and we have to account for that now with all these crazy movement abilities. It’s been all about, ‘Let’s create a large, dynamic, awesome place where players can feel like badasses.'”
The more open areas also caused hurdles for the combat and encounters team since they could no longer hide enemies without removing the immersion. “It definitely created a lot of challenges for enemy building since our line of sight is significantly larger than it’s ever been before, and we have to deal with higher enemy counts than we’ve ever done before,” lead game designer Josh Jeffcoat says. “But enemies have to be alive and doing things from so far away, where they need to look like they’re naturally a part of their environment whenever you’re looking at them through your scope from a mile away.”
The game drops you into the Fadefields, a lush, beautiful, green area full of grass and vegetation, completely different from the starting areas we’ve come to expect at the start of a Borderlands game. “A lot of time has been spent making the environments as diverse as possible,” art director Adam May says. “You start off in the Fadefields, which is extremely saturated and bright and vibrant, but that’s specifically so that as you travel out into the world, you get to dive deeper into the darker and more desolate and post-apocalyptic vibes that you’d expect out of the Borderlands universe. We want to start at a real high, beautiful note so that you can really feel the difference as you travel through the rest of the world.”
Though there are always main missions to pursue as the Vault Hunters fight for their lives and work to help the various denizens of Kairos existing under the thumb of the oppressive Timekeeper, the side activities truly feel worthwhile as you make your way through the multiple zones of the planet. Whether you’re in Fadefields or Carcadia Burn, or even exploring the Timekeeper’s stronghold city of Dominion, you will have a ton of different side missions and world diversions to tackle.
“For us, it’s about really being immersive in what it is that you’re playing and what you’re going about doing through the narrative or the missions themselves,” Nicholson says. “But then we also have Crawlers and Silos and different activities. Whenever you drive up to them, there’s a seamless mission objective that happens, so you could be exploring, and then it just happens, and you don’t have to go into your menu, find the mission, or find the mission giver like you would on the main mission.”
Those side missions are impactful and enticing as you work your way through the world; I constantly found myself veering off to complete side quests and complete in-world activities that present themselves as you move toward your destination. The side missions range from story-based, like one I completed involving helping Claptrap recover mementos of his good times with other characters, to recurring world activities that appear from zone to zone.
“I think I enjoy the side stuff the most because it’s so varied,” lead level designer David Ruiz says. “I know I can follow the mainline and I can get a good story that’s meaningful, but I know I can dip into the side and have a little bit of zaniness, a little bit of fun, and in some cases, there’s actually one in one of the regions where, as a player, I deal with gaining something and then I lose something, and I feel like I’m losing it forever. At some point towards the end of that mission, I get it back. I was way more excited after that moment, just having that peak and valley and going back up. Having those opportunities, I think, is great for the player to just go through those emotional rollercoasters, whether it’s serious or fun.”
These side activities almost always offer loot of some kind – this is Borderlands, after all – but you’ll find a diversity of rewards and experiences as you complete different recurring missions. Crawlers are pseudo-puzzles where you need to figure out a way to get a battery up to a slot to unlock various rewards – in the one I completed, I unlocked a cosmetic skin for my Digirunner. Silos task you with figuring out how to reach the terminal, which releases a balloon that launches you into the air for you to glide far distances, and helps you find Vaults. You can clear Safehouses to unlock fast travel and bounty boards, while Rift Champions are difficult enemy variants that spawn in the quarantined spheres in the world and drop massive amounts of loot. That’s not even including Drill Sites, Auger Mines, Survivalist Caches, Propaganda Towers, and various collectibles scattered throughout Kairos.
Though it takes a longer time than I had with Borderlands 4 to truly get an idea of the quality of a massive world like this, I can tell it’s designed in such a way that will sink its hooks in. The game constantly encouraged me to investigate each and every corner, and with fewer loading screens and breaks in the action than ever, Gearbox’s goal of giving the player fewer reasons to stop playing feels well on its way to being accomplished. After leaving Gearbox’s headquarters, I’m already budgeting extra time to spend in Kairos when Borderlands 4 arrives on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on September 12. It will come to Switch 2 at a later date.
