Latest news with #Borderlands3
Metro
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
Borderlands 4 hands-on and interview - ‘some people have a negative reaction'
The first Borderlands sequel with a proper open world is almost here but how does it play in solo and co-op and is it still funny? It seems like an eternity since the last Borderlands game, but it's only been six years. That was before Covid, which explains why it seems so long ago, but it means that the series is earning a reputation for unusually long gaps between its numbered sequels. We've had spin-offs Tiny Tina's Wonderlands and New Tales From The Borderlands in the meantime, but it's only now, 17 years after the release of the original game, that we've finally got the sequel everyone's been waiting for. As successful as it's been, Borderlands has a right to feel underrated, as it popularised the concept of the looter shooter long before Destiny, and yet it's often not even mentioned when the sub-genre is discussed. It did have two main problems though, in that for a first person shooter the gunplay wasn't very good and while it acted like it was an open world game, on a technical level it wasn't. Borderlands 3 addressed the gunplay issues, but it is only now, with Borderlands 4, that we get a proper, modern open world to explore. And from what we've played of the game, it was worth the wait. Although it's made with Unreal Engine 5, the distinctive cel-shaded visuals of Borderlands means the graphical improvements between each new entry are much less obvious than with other franchises. Nevertheless, the open world of the planet Kairos looks suitably vast, with a silky smooth frame rate no matter what's going on. The plot of the game involves a dictator named The Timekeeper, with the developers keen to emphasis a dystopian setting and what they describe as grounded, dry humour. As we explored in our interview later, that's not the sort of thing we'd normally expect from Borderlands and we can't say it was particularly evident in anything we played – with lots of shouty voiceovers and comically inept boss characters. We had a few sensible chuckles at some of the one liners, but our ribs never felt in much danger of cracking, although that's a considerable improvement from the mercilessly unfunny Borderlands 3, which was so convinced of its own hilarity it never shut up. Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. Without that frustration, we were able to enjoy Borderlands 4 a lot more, and while the gunplay is still nowhere near as good as Destiny it's a step up from Borderlands 3 and feels very tangible when you get a weapon that suits you. We would've liked to see something a bit wackier than just machine guns with a freeze effect but maybe we just got unlucky with the random drops. Although we did like the gun that turned into a turret (in that it floated in mid-air and fired itself) and another one that spat out spare ammo. The switch to a proper open world brings with it some practical considerations and the first story mission ends up with you being given a hover bike that you can summon at any moment. But there's also a lot more traversal abilities than normal, to help you get around, including a double jump and mantle ability, the chance to glide through the air, a grapple hook, and swimming. All of that felt fun to try out and while we didn't see any particularly complex architecture or landscapes, that demanded their use, there was a bit more platforming than normal for the series. You've also got a little robot drone with you, called Echo-4, which can do a lot of donkey work for you, including highlighting objectives with a detective vision style overlay, collecting side quest rewards for you, and hacking doors and turrets. We played around with two characters, both of which are new: exo-soldier Rafa and Vex. Rafa is more of a melee expert, with close-up special attacks revolving around big metal scythes that come out of their back. We never get on with that sort of character in a first person shooter, so preferred Vex. Despite being a siren like Lilith she has quite distinct powers, with the ability to summon a big magic sabretooth tiger, as well use a variety of elemental attacks and the chance to drain health from enemies. It's all good fun but basically you are still just shooting bad guys with relatively ordinary guns, with the sequel relying on the open world element for much of its novelty. We did get into some good scraps though, especially when taking control of the characters at level 20, instead of 5, with a save from a bit later in the game. This featured a nicely escalating battle on a floating island, where there's nowhere to hide for long, culminating in a fun boss battle against a jungle monster that floods the area with toxic waste, forcing you to swing around on vines, looking for a weak spot. If you've never liked Borderlands we don't think any of this is going to change your mind – even if a co-op open world shooter is always inherently appealing – but if you did enjoy Borderlands 2 and were put off by the last one, then Borderlands 4 is looking like a welcome return to form. Formats: PC (previewed), Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, and PCPrice: £69.99Publisher: 2KDeveloper: Gearbox SoftwareRelease Date: 12th September 2025 Age Rating: 18 After the hands-on we got to speak to executive producer Chris Brock, who's worked on every entry in the series, and lead writer Taylor Clark, whose only previous involvement is New Tales From The Borderlands. GC: I was going to start off facetiously, by saying I don't understand why in the artwork he's not holding up four fingers. [The main artwork for Borderlands 2 and 3 featured a Psycho holding up an appropriate number of fingers.] CB: We actually talked about that. TC: We asked the same question. GC: Is that a secret reference to the fact that you're trying to get back to Borderlands 2? [He does have two fingers extended.] Both: [laughs] CB: Man, you've thought about it more than I have. TC: If you count the veins on his arm there, there's four. [laughs] GC: [laugh] But my first real question, and I don't mean this in a negative way, but who is your audience for Borderlands? Because I feel Borderlands 2 was a long time ago now… CB: Yeah, 2012. GC: [resigned sigh at the passing of time] CB: Yeah, I know. I feel the same way. GC: I enjoyed Borderlands 2, but Borderlands 3 was a long time coming and by then I assumed it just wasn't for me anymore. The sense of humour felt a lot more obnoxious… CB: [laughs] Yeah. GC: Like it was meant for teenage boys, which is fine, but it wasn't for me. But I got the sense from when you were talking earlier, that you did see that as an issue, that had perhaps narrowed the audience a little. TC: Personally speaking, as a writer, sometimes people get a little confused by the tone, because Borderlands is tonally… the voices of the characters are over the top a lot, in performances, that you kind of miss the subversiveness of a lot of the jokes. And I recognise that that's not for all people. Some people have a negative reaction to the tone. Part of the fun of writing for Borderlands in general is that, especially in 4, I think we're trying to subvert the cliché as much as we can with humour. So, I guess that is a recall of BL2, which was often like that, in terms of subverting the cliché. GC: Did you work on Borderlands 3? TC: I didn't work on Borderlands 3. GC: Okay, so I can say what I like. Both: [laughs] GC: Borderland 2 was genuinely funny, but in 3 I could see the jokes, but I never laughed at them. CB: Yeah. BL3 also had kind of a comedy machinegun approach to it as well. And I think that's something we can do in BL4… humour is a pillar of the franchise. We don't want to ever get away from that but just pacing it differently… and we've talked about some… the stakes of the story are different, which requires kind of a different approach tp the humour. TC: So Pandora, as you will recall, was a Wild West kind of place. GC: Yes, I recall that. Just don't ask me some complex question about the lore. TC: [laughs] I won't! But thematically, tonally, it was a place where kind of anything went. And so, the gunslinger comedy approach made more sense there. In the context of a totalitarian dystopia ruled with an iron fist by this ominous villain… GC: Which is not the obvious thing I would've expected from a Borderland sequel. TC: No, no… GC: When you were saying the humour's dry and grounded, again, that's not how I would think of Borderlands. But then after playing it, I kind of see what you mean. It is quite dry, it is sarcastic. TC: Yeah. I think wit rather than wackiness might be the distinction, where the knob gets tweaked a little bit. CB: Also, over time, it just practically takes longer to make a game. So for BL2, for example, we could make references to internet jokes and memes and stuff. And between the speed of the dev cycle and the speed of the internet moved, that could be timely. Right? GC: I don't want to seem like I'm discouraging Borderlands from being funny. So few games have a decent sense of humour, I guess because comedy is hard. TC: Comedy is hard. GC: But also, as you're saying there, it takes so long to make a game now. So, one obvious question is are there any references to the movie in the game? Have you even had time to add that? CB: Not really. There might be an Easter egg of a gun or something, but I don't think… TC: Yeah, barely. CB: Maybe if we'd had more time, maybe you could make it. TC: Yeah. I mean the game is so big and has to be localised to so many different languages that the lead times for dialogue and stuff are longer than you would think. So yeah, we just can't be reactive to… and we wouldn't be, I mean the movie was its own, we really didn't have… CB: Yeah, there was not a ton of crossover between the two efforts. TC: I mean, some of us were consulted, just sounded out on various… to make the movie world feel accurate to the game. But other than that, they were completely separate productions. GC: And you say you've worked on all of them? CB: Different capacities in all of them, but yeah. GC: Because I think the other thing with Borderlands 3 is that people were surprised it wasn't open world. It feels like only now have you done what everyone assumed you would've with a sequel. CB: It's interesting, actually. So for BL3, I don't think there was ever really any… we actually don't think about BL4 as really an open world… with BL3, it had been so long since BL2 it kind of felt like we needed to make the Borderlands people are familiar with. Let's return with a vengeance, or whatever, and that means that it's structured in these ways. And then jumping off from 3 to 4, we were like, 'The big improvement we want to make here is in exploration.' We want to have all these movement abilities, all this traversal stuff. We want to give the player more reasons to explore. And so that kind of led to the structure of the world. When we say seamless world instead of open world… open world means different things to different people. And to us it does not mean crafting, it doesn't mean X, Y, Z, right? GC: Oh no, no. To me it just means a contiguous world. CB: We just wanted players to not be impeded. We don't have to load all the time, so we don't. TC: I would say Borderlands 3 opened up the galaxy. You did go to different places. CB: Yeah. That was our way of blowing it up in that one. TC: This is finally expanding the map to feel like, for the first time, I think, like a real planet. You don't see it in the build that you played necessarily, but you can take a straight line where you go through a forest and then a grassy part, and then the snow starts to appear, and then suddenly you're in the mountains. That's an experience that was not available before. GC: You get a vehicle very early on but is that something that just comes naturally with a seamless world? Because it sounds like you're doing it the other way around, you're not thinking, 'Oh, I want to have an open world. What can we do in it?' Is it like… CB: We want to do these things, what's the world going to be like? Exactly! GC: So the open world is just a means to an end, essentially. CB: A means to end might be a good way to put it, actually. We have all this extra space now to do all this extra exploration. Do we want to have to go to a Catch-A-Ride [terminals where you collected and customised vehicles in the previous games] all the time? No. It's like, well, what would be more convenient to a player? Just give me a vehicle. TC: It made so much more sense before, you would load into a new map and the Catch-A-Ride station would be there. So you would naturally get on there. Here you can be anywhere at any time. It just makes sense; more sense than before. GC: Okay. And this is slightly awkward if you've worked on them all… CB: [laughs] GC: But I would not say that Borderlands is particularly noted for its gunplay. It's kind of the inverse of Destiny, where that's the only thing that's interesting in the game. Whereas in Borderlands it's fine but a lot of other stuff is more notable. Do you see that as a major problem for the series? CB: That was actually a big effort of 3. So going from Pre-Sequel to 3 was like, 'Hey, we have all these great guns…' It's actually much like what you just said, we have all these great guns, we need to start having best in class gunplay as well. It needs to feel great to fire that gun. I think we've continued that. I think that 4 is an improvement over 3, but I feel like 2 to 3 was kind the big level up there. GC: I agree but I would've liked to see guns that did more crazy video game type things. A lot of what I was playing with was still basically a machinegun or whatever. TC: You may be the only one to say that borderlines guns aren't crazy enough. GC: They do some weird things, like that turret one, but do you even want to get crazier than that or is it still important to keep things relatively grounded? CB: That's a good question. I think you largely want it to feel familiar. Like, 'Hey, the icon says that's an SMG, I roughly know what an SMG does.' I think you do want a percentage of your guns to be very weird. And where we tend to do that more is with Legendary weapons. If you see an orange gun drop, sometimes they'll be very strange. There'll be unnamed guns, wild stuff. And we tend to try to save those for later in the game, like Legendary weapons, mission rewards. Sometimes we'll give those. TC: That's when it gets really experimental. GC: I was playing some co-op just now but we didn't have mics so it was really more like playing with a human bot. Do you do anything to try and encourage more communication and teamwork or do you have to assume people won't be talking? CB: We try for both to work, right? We have data. Most people who are playing online, they're not chatting as much, especially in pick-up games. If you're just matchmaking, chances are good you're not going to be talking with everybody in your party. So it has to work in that way, where we're not communicating super in-depth. It needs to still be fun and it still be worth it. Also, between the character classes covering off 10 different areas, once people are communicating and working together, we want that to also feel rewarding in a way. And I find the game far, far easier if you're doing those things and can chew through more of it; you can grind, more bosses get better loot. So yeah, you basically just have to do both. GC: But you weren't stopping them from being the same class, were you? CB: No, we're not. They could all be the same class. You could all be Vex if you want to. And hopefully the character skill tree depth is enough to where that actually is meaningful too. PR guy: I'm sorry, we're out of time. More Trending GC: That's all right, that's fine. CB: It's good to talk to you, those were good questions. TC: Love the questions. GC: Thank you. Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: The Witcher 3: Complete Edition is less than £7 in new PlayStation sale MORE: Stellar Blade dev gifts Switch 2 to staff as Nintendo port rumoured MORE: Mario Kart World's soundtrack is fantastic – here are the best songs
Forbes
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Gearbox's Randy Pitchford Responds To ‘Borderlands 4' Price Debacle
Borderlands 4 Gearbox Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford went extremely viral yesterday after a week-old tweet was passed around responding to a fan comment about a potential $80 price for Borderlands 4: 'A) Not my call. B) If you're a real fan, you'll find a way to make it happen. My local game store had Starflight for Sega Genesis for $80 in 1991 when I was just out of high school working minimum wage at an ice cream parlor in Pismo Beach and I found a way to make it happen.' The tweet inspired hundreds if not thousands of takes about its tone-deafness, plus gaming outlet coverage far and wide. It comes at a time when consumer spending power is dropping and prices are going up, and telling people if they're a 'real fan' they can make an $80 price work did not go over well, to say the least. Many fans said the tweet had derailed promotion for the game out in four months, others said they wouldn't play at all now. I find this at least…somewhat dramatic, and I have my doubts a tweet is going to significantly affect Bordlerands 4 sales this fall. But that price might. Today, Pitchford addressed the tweet by posting an older clip where he was asked about a potential price. It's a much more nuanced take on the issue, though it certainly seems to indicate that $80 is in the cards. Though this time, he says things like how he wants to create a value that fans will be happy with at any price, and addresses the plain fact that the production cost of Borderlands 4 is double that of Borderlands 3. I am no stranger to off-putting tweets from Pitchford as I've had some dust-ups myself. But a poorly-put tweet does in fact represent a larger reality (as explained in this video) about ballooning video game costs, which is true. I remember when it was revealed that Insomniac's Spider-Man 2 had triple the budget of the first game despite using a barely larger version of the same city and a second hero that had already been created for a spin-off. This is certainly not to say that $80 is the right call. Consumer only just got used to the $70 increase from $60 a few years ago, and now this leap to $80, spearheaded by Nintendo and its Mario Kart World pricing, is irritating and exhausting when 4-5 games will now be the cost of an entire console by themselves. This is what's going to happen, however. The dam has broken. In a year and a half at most, you are going to see practically all AAA games priced at $80. There is fan theorizing about Borderlands 4 publisher Take Two trying to push that even further for the release of GTA 6, the biggest game of all time, seeing if they could get to $100 or more. However, this leaves room for smaller games and smaller studios to shine. The highest rated games of the year are $50 or under, including GOTY frontrunner Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 along with Blue Prince and Split/Fiction. So that's an opportunity there. It's a bad tweet. It also reflects an unfortunate reality that's coming no matter what. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Borderlands 3 player beats every last bit of the FPS at the highest difficulty, without getting downed a single time: "The most tense run I've done"
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A Borderlands 3 player has completed the entire game at the hardest difficulty, without getting downed a single time. In the Borderlands games, running out of health drops you to the ground, but it doesn't immediately kill you. Instead, it challenges you to 'fight for your life' - if you can get a kill while downed, you'll immediately be resurrected to fight another day (allies can also resurrect you during FFYL). For streamer LazyData, however, that was never on the table. Running an entire playthrough of Borderlands 3 - including all DLC and the complete endgame - they made their way through the game without ever entering FFYL, aside from in one scripted moment that's hard-coded into the game and can't be avoided. Making their achievement even more impressive was the fact that they completed their challenge in Mayhem Mode, massively increasing enemy health pools and adding various extra modifiers. Mayhem Mode runs from level 1 to level 10, so naturally LazyData was making the challenge as hard as possible. Much of their run was played out using their patented 'Hellzerker' build for Amara, which focuses on rapidly clearing out enemies and staying as mobile as possible. Even more impressive is the fact that there's not much healing in the kit, and what's available requires you to be playing as aggressively as possible. That's all well and good for a Borderlands game generally, but it's probably a little more nerve-wracking when a single big hit can end an entire run. Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford says "F balance" for Borderlands 4, before affirming that weapons and skills will get nerfs if they need them.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Steam users are review bombing the Borderlands games following Take-Two's new user agreement: "I don't feel comfortable with the terms of service"
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Ahead of Borderlands 4, fans of the action RPG series from Gearbox Software are rallying online to share their thoughts on Take-Two Interactive's new terms of service. As pointed out by a player in a recent Reddit thread, the Borderlands games are currently facing a review bomb of sorts on Steam. The debacle boils down to Take-Two's recently updated user agreement, which is outlined on the holding company's website. "People are review bombing the entire Borderlands series because of EULA changes that can apparently gain root-level access to your machine under the guise of 'anti-cheat' software." The poster continues, explaining how fans are upset at the prospect of Take-Two collecting "personal info like accounts, passwords, telephone numbers, etc." One look at the Steam pages for each of the three main Borderlands entries serves as proof that players are indeed upset about the new terms of service. Under the first game's recent reviews, which have dropped to "Mixed," people share their concerns about the user agreement. People are review-bombing the Borderlands games because Gearbox/2K made EULA changes? from r/borderlands3 "I don't feel comfortable with the terms of service," writes one such fan. Another simply calls the game "spyware" following the integration of Take-Two's new terms of service. The page for Borderlands 2 also shows "Mixed" reviews, with players highlighting their worries over the user agreement and how they're afraid it affects their privacy online: "This collects usernames and passwords, IP locations and browser history data." Recent Borderlands 3 reviews don't look much better, either. One fan exclaims that "recent EULA changes seem insane," while others describe how now "mods are a bannable offense" and any "display of cheats/exploits is bannable" despite the game being largely single-player/co-op rather than an online experience where anti-cheat measures make sense. Elsewhere, people cite the legal implications of Take-Two's new user agreement. Not everyone is convinced the changes spell the end of Borderlands as fans know and love it, however. As seen on the Reddit post covering the review bombing, some think players are "overreacting" currently: "People are overreacting for sure. The EULA is hardly any different than the one before it all the way back in 2018." Just as the games' reviews are now "Mixed" on Steam, then, so are the community's opinions on the terms of service. Borderlands 3 player beats every last bit of the FPS at the highest difficulty, without getting downed a single time: "The most tense run I've done"
Forbes
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
How Video Game Exploits Predicted ChatGPT College Cheating
Borderlands 3 There is currently a somewhat horrifying article going around from NY Magazine about how widespread cheating is in college, no longer through sneaking in answers to tests or having someone else write your essay. Well, there is someone else writing your essay, or rather, some thing. That would be ChatGPT, the ubiquitous AI system that can take any prompt and spit out a convincing-sounding paper. This has spread everywhere from high school to the Ivy League, and teachers are drowning in AI-generated papers where it's often impossible to prove their authenticity, so many are just giving up. Here's a sampling from the piece of the thought process of the students doing: The thing is, video games have predicted this exact same concept for years. One that's more demonstrable in the industry than other comparable examples of societal laziness. Rather, ChatGPT is more akin to an exploit, to an overpowered build in a game. In the dozens and dozens of games I've played over the years, there is one universal truth. If there is a shortcut to beating a game or doing an insane amount of damage or anything that's able to be utilized for an easy path through a game's challenges, it will be used. By bad players, by good players, if it exists, it's a tool that will be exploited until developers take note and nerf its power or remove it from the game entirely, patching the game, fixing a bug. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Damage Players will chose this path almost every time. Those who don't use it may be in it for 'the love of the game,' but this requires purposeful handicapping to create some semblance of a challenge. But the overpowered build or skill or skip is so tempting that it is often impossible to resist for the vast majority of players. This is ChatGPT, a bug, an exploit in the education system that students will now have to purposefully avoid using in order to have some semblance of challenge and friction in their education. Many students, having been pressured their entire life to get good grades and study and research for difficult tests and lengthy papers now suddenly have a button to skip all that. Quite literally, a button. And when you're 14-22, you're not exactly thinking about the long-term benefits of actually getting an education instead of coasting your way to whatever degree you're seeking. If you think that this cannot be true for more hyper-specialized fields like law or medicine, I have bad news about what many lawyers are now using to write legal opinions and doctors are relying on to come up with diagnoses. The problem here is…there is no patch. No fixing this bug. Students don't want it fixed, OpenAI and other tech giants throwing billions into AI tech don't want it fixed, and at this point there is no actual means of stopping this. Any possible legislation is seemingly ages away, as if Congress ever does a coherent job of policing big tech in the first place. The tools to find AI-generated content are not remotely on par with the ability to generate the AI content, which is getting more complex and harder to spot by the day. The teachers and professors here are being thrust into an impossible situation. They're sometimes even going back to the stone age of oral reports and pencil-written essays, with little other choice. A laptop keyboard and ChatGPT on AppStore displayed on a phone screen are seen in this illustration ... More photo taken in Krakow, Poland on June 8, 2023. (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images) The video game industry has this handled. There will always be bugs, exploits, cheats or simply overpowered options to reduce the challenge in any game. But it's whack-a-mole. A problem exists for a while, it's found and fixed, another one crops up later. ChatGPT is not a mole. ChatGPT is a Balrog emerging from a pit with no Gandalf to stand in its way. Appealing to the moral nature of good sportsmanship and ethics will not work here on the vast majority of students. They want to have fun in college, they want to graduate with the degree they're paying potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars for, and they do not want any of that at risk because of pesky classwork or difficult tests. And there is no end in sight for this. No patch is coming. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
