Gamescom Hands-on and Randy Pitchford Borderlands 4 Interview

Borderlands is many different things to its fans. For some, it’s all about the humor mixed in with the outrageous storylines. For others, it’s all about chasing that elusive drop with the exact stats for your perfect build. Whatever it is for you, it’s safe to say Borderlands has been successful since the original launched nearly 16 years ago.

Gamer Guides were invited to not only an exclusive hands-on at Gamescom 2025, featuring never-before-played Harlowe, but also two exclusive interviews with Gearbox CEO, Randy Pitchford himself, along with Anthony Nicholson (Senior Producer) and Jason Reiss (Worldbuilding Director).

Grab yourself a drink and put your feet up, as we have a lot to get through!

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We got to play Harlowe for the first time at Gamescom. Image credit: 2K

Freedom! Glorious Freedom!

If there’s one word that encapsulates the design philosophy of Borderlands 4, it’s the theme of freedom. This is evident not only in the seamless open world, but also in your guns (with the new License system), and even in the themes of the story. The Timekeeper, Borderlands 4’s new primary antagonist, is all about complete control, and the people of Kairos begin to seek their Freedom given the new situation they find themselves in.

It’s this design philosophy that I noticed immediately with the first part of my hands-on, where I took Harlowe for a spin in the open world. I was plunged relatively early into the game, at Level 5, but I quickly discovered that there is so much to see and do. The viewline stretches for miles, the new movement abilities mean I can get around quicker, and at any point, I can just go and pursue the story. Even in the cutscenes that followed a brief skirmish with the Timekeeper’s forces, you could already see the benefits of Borderlands 4 moving to Unreal Engine 5.

I finished my time up in the open world exploration by completing one of the game’s Silo activities, which serve as a way to add Fast Travel points once cleared, where you can use vending machines and then use the Silo itself to grapple high in the air, making it easier to get across this huge world. This was just one activity we had the time to check out, but as we’ve been reassured by Pitchford himself, the game gives you that freedom almost from the start: “The game opens up relatively quickly, where you have a lot of freedom to explore, and you can choose what order to do certain things and even mission critical core campaign things”.

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Expect to fight many challenging bosses in Borderlands 4. Image credit: 2K

Fast, Explosive, Combat

Combat has always been a strong point of the Borderlands series, and with all of the new movement mechanics added to BL4, I was excited to put them through their paces during a Vault that took up the second half of my hands-on at Gamescom. This time, opting for Vex, the new Siren, I had a quick look at the tools I had available to me (which was already a lot at only Level 20) and got to shooting.

Vaults are combat arenas that you progress through before taking on a challenging boss at the end of them. The thing I immediately noticed about this here, however, was just how many more enemies I was encountering, something I also noticed in the seamless open world, too. Nicholson said, “You probably also noticed that there are a lot more enemies that are able to respawn, too. So, you get that challenge. It feels more, you know, you feel much more like a badass whenever you make everybody’s head explode.”

And that’s the perfect way to sum up how combat feels in Borderlands 4. Being able to heal myself at any time with a Repair Kit keeps me in the fray for longer periods of time, while as Vex, I was already coming up with strategies using her summons, such as using Reaper (a Tank-focused one) to hold the attention of a large group of enemies on my left, while I then summoned Specter (a DPS-focused one) to help me take out the enemies attacking from the other side. I can then use my double jump to glide out of the way, activate my heavy weapon (now on a cooldown instead of taking up a weapon slot), and start blasting away at the rest of the enemies. The new movement abilities help take that beautiful carnage to a whole other level. And this is all solo, I’m sure this only gets better when taking this on with a group of friends.

I only had a short time with Borderlands 4, but it was enough, along with the fascinating answers I got from Randy Pitchford and the development team, to make waiting these last few weeks even tougher than ever. Borderlands, after a rather disappointing third entry for me, is back, and better than it’s ever been!

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Harlowe’s combat skill can cause mayhem! Image credit: 2K

The Full Randy Pitchford Borderlands 4 Interview

As mentioned at the top, we also got the chance to exclusively speak to Randy Pitchford at Gamescom, where we discussed the themes and philosophy behind Borderlands 4, the decision to have free-form progression in the game, the end-game direction, and even a bit of history about Gearbox itself! You can find the full transcript of that interview below.

Gamer Guides: What led you to the decision to set Borderlands 4 on just Kairos? As opposed to multiple planets in Borderlands 3?

Randy Pitchford: There are a bunch of reasons. One is the technology, both the software technology and the hardware technology that we create and that we work with, has finally evolved in advance to the point where we can live up to our ambitions with the game.

Like, if you go back and you play Borderlands 1, you could feel that they always wanted to be expansive, kind of open games, but we’ve always had to pinch you off into a bottleneck, into a load time to get to the next section. Because of that, the areas, even the biggest ones, feel like they kind of give you the illusion of expansiveness. You can feel constrained; the backgrounds are all fake skyboxes, and we have to get you into a bottleneck so that we can make that transition.

With Borderlands 4, we have the ability now to make everything seamless. It is a massive, seamless world. Frankly, in Borderlands 3, the concept of multiple planets is a hack to get around the load times. So, I can have this little place, and I say, ‘this is one planet, oh, and of course, you have to have a load time because you’ve got to get on a spaceship and go to the other planet.’ But in terms of the actual geographical area that you can explore at once, it’s much smaller.

Borderlands 4 is actually the biggest game we’ve ever made, and by building the planet, it’s as wide as it’s ever been. And you can see a vista in the distance of a huge mountain, a deep valley with a river running through it, and the moon of Elpis up in the sky. Everything you can see, you can get to and explore. It’s not just a skybox. It’s not just an illusion. That moon in Elpis? You can go up there and get up onto the moon. And it’s everything you can see you can get to. This led us to some other fun innovations with traversal and movement, gliding through the environment, double jumping.

You know, I see a mountain up there, and I want to, I’m in combat, I want to jump up the cliff and use a sniper rifle. I can never really do that before. Honestly, in every area of Borderlands, the lowest to the highest point in combat, it’s about 15 feet max. In Borderlands 4, it’s hundreds and hundreds of feet, depending on the combat in space or the environment that you’re in and that flexibility of environment was a big part of our thinking and going into building this game.

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The Timekeeper is the main antagonist in Borderlands 4. Image credit: 2K

Randy Pitchford on the Setup for Borderlands 4’s Story

We also have a story, and it’s a really interesting situation because on one hand we wanted to do a continuation, but on the other hand we learned that with each [numbered] Borderlands sequel, about a third of the people that end up playing are actually new to playing Borderlands. With Borderlands 2, about a third of the people had never played Borderlands 1, Borderlands 3, about a third of the players had never [played], because each game’s getting bigger and reaching more and more customers. I don’t know why that is, but we knew that going into Borderlands 4.

So, this time we said, ‘we need to make a game that really makes it comfortable and familiar and a continuation for people that have played prior Borderlands games, but we also need to make it so that it is a perfect entry point for all those new players, so nobody feels behind and nobody feels lost.’ And fortunately, the story that we left with in Borderlands 3 sets this up perfectly for Borderlands 4.

[So] Lilith saved all of her friends and saved the planet of Pandora by teleporting the moon of Elpis away. The moon of Elpis was crashing into the planet, and it was going to kill everyone and everything she ever knew and cared about. So, she used her siren power to just move it somewhere across the universe, and she didn’t know where. But she moved it into the void, breaking the veil of this new planet of Kairos. And so now when the players enter, they’re having the same amount of information if they’ve never played the game, as someone who’s played the game before.

Everyone’s new to Kairos, and everyone’s new to the world and the characters and the situation there, and it’s kind of cool, but it connects up. So, as we play the game, [as] we bump into some characters that were in past games, if you’re a new player, you’re meeting them for the first time, but if you’ve been with us before, it’s like ‘oh my god, my old friends! There’s Claptrap, there’s Zane, Moxie, Amara!’ All of these favorites from past games can come back and enter the story in a way that works for everyone. And it’s a really elegant and clever design and solution to us really just wanting to embrace all the players that we know are coming.

Gamer Guides: What came first? The desire to go to one big planet, or was it because you wanted to do the free-form progression?

Randy Pitchford: Well, with that success with the technology and having a seamless world, what good is it if we’re going to navigate people through it very linearly? If we’re going to keep people in a corridor around what they can experience in what order? So no, we want people to feel freedom. And so, the game opens up pretty quickly, where you have a lot of freedom to explore, and you can choose what order to do certain things and even mission-critical core campaign things.

[And] we have a really awesome core campaign that’s presented for the first time in our history non-linearly, but we also have more side quests and side missions, and activities than we’ve ever had. And not just like 10% more, but like three times as many as we’ve ever done before. So that freedom of exploration is, I don’t wanna say a consequence of us being able to do a seamless world, but an opportunity that the seamless world provided for us that we embraced and leaned into. To the benefit, I think, of all the gamers that just wanna explore this amazing world.

Gamer Guides: So, there’s no point really in the story where you’re funneled in one specific direction? For the most part, you’re always free to choose?

Randy Pitchford: What’s cool, too is in the middle of the story, not only are you like, you could choose to ignore the campaign. And you can play for an infinite amount of time, developing a character and completing quests that have stories to them, but they’re not main campaign things. At any point, you can choose to re-engage with the campaign, and you don’t even have to continue with the thread you were on. You can jump [in] and progress with another part of the campaign, where the non-linear things all spread out. And of course, they’ll intersect and reconverge into a climax. There is a beginning and middle, and end to the story, but in the middle, it’s non-linear. And you can explore that and experience that at whatever pace and in whatever order you’d like.

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You’ll need to put all of the game’s new tools to use to defeat the bosses of Borderlands 4. Image credit: 2K

It’s a pretty cool achievement. It’s been frankly, look, I’ve been working on Borderlands for over 20 years. And there’s a huge number of people on the team, like Jason Reiss (Worldbuilding Director) next door, who was lead level designer on Borderlands 2, also the level designer on Borderlands 1. He and I have been working together on Borderlands for 20 years. Graeme Timmins, our creative director, we’ve been working together on Borderlands for over 20 years. Steve Jones, he’s the head of all development. He was our lead programmer. He and I have been working on Borderlands for over 20 years, and I can go on and on and on. [And] we’re just now starting to have all of our technology and all of our work catch up to the ambitions we’ve had. And it’s really, really exciting. I feel like after 20 years of working on Borderlands, we’re starting to get pretty good at it, but I feel like we’re just getting started.

[And] now that we’ve finished the main game, like we’re coming in for a landing, it launches on September 12th. We’ve gone gold, we’ve got a little bit of work we’re doing for our launch patch that’ll happen because we just can’t stop. We just want to jam everything we can into the game. But now we’re starting to look ahead at what we’re doing for our post-launch.

We’re looking at our DLC content, all this exciting stuff that customers are already buying that we’re dreaming up. Like we have so many excited fans that are just, ‘yep, all in, Super Deluxe, let’s go’, and they’re getting the ultimate editions that have all this work that we’re dreaming up now and it’s so fun to do it because we now know exactly how to make Borderlands 4 because we finished it. While we’re building it, like, you’re building a plane while you’re flying it, you know what I mean? But now the ship is finished, and it’s beautiful, and we know what it can do, we know its performance, it’s so fun to add the stuff to it and make it stronger and better, and I love the post-launch effort. Our games just keep getting better the more time we spend with them.

Gamer Guides: At Gamer Guides, we have quite a hardcore user base. For those users, how are you approaching the endgame?

Randy Pitchford: Yeah, it is our most robust endgame we’ve ever had, and I think that, central to that, is this feeling that I get when I play, when I’ve been working on a build and I just want this perfect drop. I want this exact piece of loot that I know is possible, and I know where it’s going to drop, and if I get it all, the gameplay that I’ve been working on, my style, my stats, all of it’s just gonna be the best version of it and I could feel like a god. And when I go after that boss and I grind him, and I beat him, and it doesn’t drop, and I beat him again, and then finally, oh my god, it’s the perfect, this is the Goldilocks, you know, it is that, and I’m just like, ‘ah!’ And then when I use it, I’m just a god and I can wreck everything. That feeling I get is so strong and so powerful.

Well, we know that we’re not alone. We feel that when we play our game and we know that a lot of people that spend a lot of time playing, that’s a very, very compelling sense of reward. So, all of our, not all of our, but a lot of our in-game design is revolving around that and amplifying that. And a lot of the game design that you experience along the way feeds into it. Like the licensed parts system. I don’t know if you know about this, but in the Borderlands lore, we’ve built a lot of ideology and culture around the manufacturers. Like it’s in the universe, but it also affects the gameplay, like these hardcore capitalist corporations become the governments of entire planets, and they’re strip mining the resources to make guns.

Obviously, we’re playing with some commentary of the world we live in, but we also kind of lean into the gameplay implications where each manufacturer has technologies that they’ve become the master of, and they have proprietary stuff, right? Like the Hyperion Corporation has figured out how to embed shield technologies into the guns themselves. So, the very tool that I’m using to shoot with has a shield come up that can protect me against incoming fire, and that’s really cool, but it’s only on Hyperion guns. And let’s say I’ve got a character with a powerful boost to shield so that every damage I’m absorbing can then get redoubled to the damage I’m throwing out. Okay, that’s cool.

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The customization in Borderlands 4 is greater than ever, making that endgame grind more enticing. Image credit: 2K

That works great with a Hyperion weapon, but I get a multiplier if I have, let’s say, an electrical element involved, which is only on Maliwan. So, do I get a Maliwan gun to get the electrical amplification multiplier? Or do I get a Hyperion to get my incoming damage reflected back out again through the shield absorption? Oh, that’s a sucky trade-off. But what if Maliwan licensed the shield technology from Hyperion so I can find that perfect drop that’s a Maliwan sniper rifle with electrical fire and a Hyperion shield part attached to it. Now I want that drop. And the hunt for that, and that just expands all the possibilities, and that’s new to Borderlands 4. The idea that manufacturers are licensing their technology to other manufacturers, and it’s cool for like a lore and storytelling perspective, but it also feeds right into the gameplay loop and what I love in the gameplay.

Gamer Guides: What was the main design philosophy for the Siren this time around?

Randy Pitchford: We love playing with Siren lore. Sirens are very important not just as a gameplay concept, but as just in the actual fiction of the whole universe. The sirens are entwined with kind of how the whole Borderlands universe works. So, it’s a very delicate thing for us whenever we introduce a new Siren. We’ve kind of gotten into a habit of not merely bringing Sirens in as non-player characters, but introducing some Sirens as player characters. And so far, in all of the numbered sequels, we’ve had at least one Siren as a playable character. We haven’t done that in every Borderlands game, but we’ve done it in all the numbered sequels. And it’s definitely, there’s a lot of debate and a lot of discussion internally.

We got really attached to this notion of a kind of emo character. And there’s a new element on Kairos. Kairos is on the other side of the galaxy from Pandora. There’s a new element we call Ordenite. If Iridium is purple energy, this is like yellow energy. We wanted to mess around with that balance. Okay, you put a purple energy character in a yellow energy environment, what could that mean? And so, we really leaned into these spectral abilities, and Vex (Borderlands 4’s Siren) is her name, her ability to manifest entities that have intelligence of their own. Like her pet, it’s a spectral beast named Trouble, and it’s got a mind of its own. Or literal Specters and Reapers that can be in attack or defensive roles as you’re doing combat as action skills. And we wanted to play with these manifestations that are really coming from inside of her. And you can feel that personalization in the short that we made, and a really fun process to conceive of that story.

I remember with the team and I was, like, really, what is Vex? What’s her origin like, and what horrible thing happened that made her go from a normal person to realize that, oh, she’s a Siren and she has this unbelievable power? And we told that story in a short that we made and [it was] so fun to crack that creative nut with the storytelling team. Like, it was so fun being in the room there. But I think that kind of explains both the characterization, like the personality behind the Siren, but also how that manifests in abilities.

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The design philosophy for Vex is based around the idea of an emo character. Image credit: 2K

You know, we have to be very careful with them because we’ve sort of created, we have a framework for how the Borderlands works and how the universe works. And this framework allows for things that feel like magic, like the power of the Sirens. It’s not magic, but it feels like magic. But also, extreme science, everything from like digistructing in, like storing an object in a digital backpack and then digistructing into existence, not just a gun but a vehicle. You know, and all the way to reconstructing ourselves when we might fall in combat into a new you using these technologies and this blend between science and magic. And there’s a balance to it that every time we introduce a Siren, we’re flirting with that balance. And we’ve built rules to our universe.

We haven’t told everybody all the rules, but we commit to them. And people have figured out some, and they’ve started to, there’s even if they can’t, even if our most hardcore fans can’t specifically articulate the rules, they kind of know what they are. Because the world conforms to those rules. And so, every new Siren becomes kind of a test of what those rules are, but also shows some limits that can be played with. And that’s part of the fun for us, is say, oh, you know, you think this is a rule, but because we know the rule is this, we’re gonna show you how that is a little malleable over here. And sometimes we use our Sirens as not merely vehicles for fun gameplay but also to expose more about the universe we’ve invented.

Gamer Guides: I wanted to get your opinion on what is your favorite of the new movement abilities?

Randy Pitchford: Well, they all stack together. To me, the sum of the traversal and the move set is kind of a consequence of the commitment to the world that we built. When you get a big seamless world, now there’s certain things that you want to do to maneuver through it that weren’t really possible before. Like, for example, in Borderlands 2, if I like sniper gameplay, you kind of have to find a way, like not all the combat really supports that. But in Borderlands 4 with the deep verticality and the fact that I could double jump and glide and grapple. Now I can very quickly get to high ground. And go from intense close combat or find myself in a situation and pull myself out and go into more sniper mode or vice versa.

I can jump into combat through these traversal tools and surprise an enemy. I can glide over them, they don’t even know that I’m in there and then ground pound stomp, disrupting them all, triggering novas, knocking everybody on their ass and just popping all my cooldowns to wreak havoc right in the middle of a scene.

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Expect to see plenty of old faces in Borderlands 4. Image credit: 2K

The other thing too that we discovered like you know it’s so easy for us as game designers to kind of fall into this mistake which I see a lot of games make and we’ve made it to in the past which is to assume that players will tend to commit to a playstyle. ‘Oh, I’m a sniper, and that’s what I do. Oh, I’m a finesse player and that’s what I do. You know, all pistols and swords. Or, oh, I’m a brute force throughput or I’m a defensive player.’ The truth is, many of us, we might commit to a playstyle for specific combat or for a period of time, or we might be hyper-flexible and want to weave between the different playstyles based on the context of the situation or just our mood in the moment. And we’ve sort of come to realize and accept that we shouldn’t be creating boundaries and these sort of containers and try to expect that all of our players will perfectly fit into that.

Instead, we should be creating a language that allows us to explore and feel and experiment with combat in a variety of different ways. Especially when a game like Borderlands, yes, it has RPG elements, yes, leveling up and getting the better gear can make me more powerful in combat, but it’s still a skill game, it’s still a first-person shooter at its root, and the skill of maneuvering and dodging and getting into a fight and getting out of a fight and the moment-to-moment action is exceptionally compelling and I think one of the reasons why Borderlands is so special. So, we’re gonna commit to that freedom of player choice and enhance how easy it is to flexibly switch playstyles.

And you’ll find it too in the boss mechanic designs because some of the boss fights that you’ll find in Borderlands 4 are the most challenging we’ve ever made. But in fact, as you as a player, if you’re already familiar manipulating your play styles and adapting in real time, you probably like,’ I don’t see what the big deal is. These aren’t that hard’. Because you’re comfortable going from offense to defense or from finesse to brute force and you’ll maneuver yourself naturally. And for those players that aren’t really comfortable, they’re gonna find themselves challenged and discovering different aspects of the game that they might not have played with before because they’ve gotten really comfortable and familiar with a specific style of play. And for some of them, they’re like, oh my god, that was really fun actually. I want to start messing more with that style of play because the game kind of tests that in ways it’s never done before.

So, you’ll find that when you play the boss mechanics. It’s not just a brute force DPS test, which almost every previous Borderlands game was just a damage per second test and a throughput test and now it’s no, there’s playstyles at work that are part of the mechanics of the boss fights and even some of the non-boss fights like Badass in just normal combat you’ll see you’ll see it and feel it.

Gamer Guides: So, with the movement abilities, how did you keep the balance of the vehicles?

Randy Pitchford: Well, vehicles are the fastest way to get around. So, if you’re traveling from A to B and you know that you wanna traverse a long distance, or you just see something interesting in the distance and you wanna get there, almost always your first best step is gonna be to just summon that personal vehicle, hop on and start hauling ass. And then along the way, you might discover there are some things you can use as you become an expert.

If you want, totally optional, but if optional expert gameplay is interesting to you, you’ll start experimenting with, oh I’m already hauling ass in this vehicle, and I see a grapple point up there. What’ll happen? And you’ll find you can slingshot yourself and combine and stack these things to make traversal or distances or heights or depth accessible that weren’t accessible before.

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The new movement abilities flow perfectly with vehicles. Image credit: 2K

And it goes both ways. Launching from a vehicle and having the momentum of ejecting from a vehicle and then grappling and using that to slingshot you even farther, and then adding a dash to it in the middle, that’s one direction. It also goes in the other. I might be gliding and flying through the air, and then as I’m going to come and hit the ground, I’ll summon the vehicle and hit onto it. And then take off with a burst. And in all directions. And there’s a lot of flexibility that we’ve never had before. And I’ve played with it a lot. We’ve been working on this game for a long time. But even I am still discovering fun ways to combine and stack these mobility options that I have in the gameplay that are really rewarding.

I know it won’t be long before some of the crazy speedrunner kind of gamers throw stuff up on YouTube, and we’re all like, ‘What? That’s unbelievable!’ I can’t believe we never found that! And it’s just gonna, I can’t wait. That’s part of the fun of, for me, when we get to launch a Borderlands game, because there are so many clever people out there that do so many interesting things, and the joy of feeling others experience it, like, it’s why we fight. I can’t wait for launch day. My launch day is usually just getting online and jump, incognito, into random people’s games and just seeing what happens, and I’ll just do that for 15 hours straight on launch day. I love that.

Randy Pitchford on the Theme of Freedom

Randy Pitchford: It is a theme you know, and not just in the gameplay, but even in the storytelling. You know, Gearbox has, all of us have gone through some things. We feel like we’ve got a really powerful creative engine. And our limiting factor has become access to time and resources to fully fulfill what we’re capable of.

And so, to overcome that, I made the decision to find alliances with publicly traded companies to merge Gearbox into a publicly traded company that had access to capital so that we could make the biggest, best games that we’re capable of instead of just always struggling and doing our best to fight against it but always being constrained. And so, we did a deal to become part of the Embracer group, and now we’re part of Take-Two [Interactive]. Now I’ve spent most of my career with Gearbox where I founded this company wholly independent. Never with any investors, never with any debt. Everything we built was just on the backs of our own success. And made the commitment to join Take-Two, where we’re now a part of this larger company. And there’s a trade-off there. We’re trading a bit of our freedom and autonomy for organizational power and the order that comes with that.

When I think about it with the most amount of charity, it’s this balance between autonomy and organization. That conflict exists in many different capacities and we’re all kind of dealing [with] the balance between, like, anarchy on one end of the spectrum and, like fascism on the other. Or freedom versus order and these themes were feeling as individuals and as a whole at Gearbox, and we bake that into the storyline.

The Timekeeper (Borderlands 4’s villain) is order incarnate, like the totalitarian, like you’ve never even imagined to the point where the guy has absolute control through the bolt of what your body does and what you see. He sees what you see if you’re in this world of Kairos. And then on the other side of that, the people fighting for freedom, and you know, is that, are they going to lead to anarchy and chaos? Or is it an autonomy? And the balance between these things, they’re themes in the game, in the story, they’re kind of themes we’re dealing with in the real world, and they’re themes that all of us are dealing with as individuals.

And you can feel, you know, everything in a Gearbox game is handcrafted. It’s made by people, and you can feel the touch and the hearts of me and this team in the game. You can feel us in the game. You can feel our personalities in the characters. And it’s because we made it. Humans made all this stuff. And I think all of that weaves together in this kind of thematic test between freedom and order. And the truth is that there’s a borderland between freedom and order. There’s a space in between those two things. And that’s kind of what Borderlands 4 is all about. And we’re doing it not just in the storyline, but even in the gameplay. And that balance between freedom and control.

Borderlands 4 launches on September 12, 2025 for PS5, Xbox Series X and Series S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.