Gearbox is aiming to make Borderlands 4 the most robust and accessible entry in the franchise yet. This will be the first game with full cross-platform support at launch between Xbox Series X/S, PS5, PC, and even the Switch 2 when it launches on that platform a bit later. One of the most exciting bits of news we learned was that this game would feature a “seamless world” rather than the disconnected regions of past games. Alongside this change, we have also seen a small glimpse at Borderlands’ take on world events — dynamic activities that can appear as you’re exploring the world to participate in for loot.
I got the chance to speak with Associate Creative Director Grant Kao about how world events work, what types we can look forward to, how they evolve based on player actions, and more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
We’ve seen world events in a bunch of other games like MMOs and shared world action games, so when you decided to include them in Borderlands, how did you design them to feel unique to the Borderlands world?
Kao: When we went seamless world, we realized we had a lot of emergent activities that we wanted players to kind of engage in. We had developed a toolkit for the player to navigate with the personal vehicle, double jump, and new grapple, and using the guns to kill things, and before we looked at what a world event would be, we created a sandbox of fun things that players can do. And once we had this toolkit, we asked, “What’s a great way to merge this together with a seamless world?”
And that’s the first thing. We wanted to empower the player by having them not just do the curated mission content, but by injecting some kind of activity in the spaces between that doesn’t always have to be action-based. It could be storytelling because we always want to highlight the fact that the citizens of Kairos are always battling the Timekeeper.
By having this emergent system there, we were able to change the routing of a player if they’ve played that space multiple times. We call it The Requester — it’s almost like a brain where it’s like, “Hey, there’s a player nearby to this thing? Have they done this recently? Do we want to fire off this event or this event?” And it picks between these different categories of things so when you come into a space you feel like it’s a different experience, even if it’s bite-sized. If we can make you look and play differently, even for a microsecond, we feel like that’s a win for the system.
You’ve shown off the Airship world event in Fadefields and said that there will be more in the different biomes. Are world events specific to biomes or can they show up in any region?
Kao: So, the event system has multiple tiers. What people have seen are the giant world events that happen and those are exclusive per biome. So in the Fadefields players saw the giant Airship event where the survivalist factions are trying to fight against the Order trying to abduct supplies, people, and oppress the area. The narrative concept was entering the airship to take back stuff from them. Other biomes have a different narrative there and different feelings that we want to drive the players.
Beneath that spectacle-like ones there are other events that are more isolated to regional pockets, like road events. You might run into an Order patrol that could be escorting captives, just some guards, or a supply transport that could have a red chest to obtain. Then there are other ones where you could find a patrol with a broken-down vehicle, as if the Order had a flat tire. We have this system where we just empowered designers to come up with fun ideas that they think would be interesting for the player and each one has multiple iterations that could appear. And these are there to change things up.
The final layer is very very minor stuff that we don’t want the player to even know it’s an event. Like, you might see some NPCs wandering around and if you stand there and stare at them, they might be doing something that makes you say, “Hey, what’s that?” And when you go over and they lead you to a chest. We call it an ambient event where, if you wander upon it and look for a second, you might find something cool but it’s not a standard thing and there’s no UI element or mission call-out. You might follow the NPC and it leads to nothing, and we are okay with that knowing these ambient events add to the world itself instead of knowing anytime you walk up to an NPC you have to do something and get a reward.
How did you account for players who want to fast travel from one objective to another to still experience these events?
Kao: So we still have fast travel to specific points, and you unlock a lot of fast travel points throughout the world. The level designers have done a great job of curating the space to make sure that you can’t skip over everything no matter what you do. If you unlocked everything in the world and you just want to go, go, go, you can do that, but there’s still a little bit of travel between point A and B. We’re trying to curate those scenarios where players can get to the spot that they want to get to in what feels like the right time frame, but also so that it triggers things in the activity brain to say, “Hey, you’ve been through here a couple of times. What if we attract your attention with something else?”
We’re going to sprinkle things that hopefully make you think. “Hmm, that’s kind of cool. Maybe I’ll stop and do that real quick.”
You’ve mentioned that a lot of these events are tied to the narrative of the game’s factions and biomes. Will finishing the game or making progress in the story create any dissonance with what’s going on there?
Kao: I don’t think it’s spoilery if I say this but I want to leave some of that to the player’s imagination to figure out what’s happening. There is narrative tie-in there and I wouldn’t want to spoil that. There’s nothing related to the ending but there is something there that I don’t want to jump into.
I will say that when players played the Fadefield event they had that dialog there that was happening with the NPCs. That carried on to other events and there are some dialog changes that happened based on the order of events, so we do have that system working in the background.
So you might see world events kind of evolve as you’re going through the story a little?
Kao: Yeah, yeah, very minor. We’re not talking huge dialog branches but there are very minor changes in narrative beats. This is based off of player’s choices, because one of the things we wanted to promote in this game was that this is a seamless world. You could go to Cascadia or Fadfields pretty quickly right off the bat. But if you play those missions in that biome and then you come to this biome, there should be some relevance to the order of things you did.
Is there any specific world event you’re especially proud of or excited to see how the community reacts to?
Kao: One of the first world events that we concocted is in a later biome where you come to a coliseum. I won’t spoil what happens in that coliseum, but it feels very Roman-esque or Circle of Slaughter-esque from previous Borderlands content. There’s a survival element there with a mix of bragging rights gameplay where you want to kill as many enemies as you can.
I love any kind of game where you want to kill as many as you can and ask friends, “How many did you kill? I killed this many?” Every time I come across it I’m like, “Let’s go do the Colosseum!”
Borderlands 4 will release on September 12 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC with the Switch 2 version coming on October 3.
