We’ve got an absolute boat-load of new Borderlands 4 info courtesy of a Sony State of Play livestream that people flocked to watch last night. In it, we got plenty of gameplay to gaze over, including a peek at all manner of new and returning features. In short, Borderlands 4 looks great!
Starting with the basics: Borderlands 4 will have a suite of super nice features that makes the game a pleasing co-operative experience. This includes crossplay, couch co-op, and individual loot, even in multiplayer sessions as to avoid ninja looting! It even has an option to adjust your own combat difficulty, so you and a friend who is way better than you can do the same content, but have an appropriate level of challenge for both players.
But perhaps the first real knockout announcement from this State of Play is the more “grounded” tone. Watching the State of Play live, there wasn’t exactly a huge number of jokes like you’d see in Borderlands 2 or 3. Instead, quick quips between characters appeared to be the norm, as was a Borderlands 1 style of absurdist humour with certain enemies. Take the big flower monster we saw early on in the State of Play: Tim. Having this horrific creature climb out of a whole and have his name be Tim is a joke, it is meant for laughs, but it’s a far cry from Claptrap snake beatboxing or whatever.
On top of that it just looks like Gearbox has made a bunch of changes that will solve long-lasting problems with the series. Players used to have saves before certain bosses so they can replay them (for loot or just for fun), but now you can go back and rerun missions and boss fights at will, killing the practice of “save quitting”. They’ve made legendary weapon drops rare again, rather than the Borderlands 3 approach of having them drop fairly often.
It all just looks… Brilliant. As far as a first impression goes, Gearbox appears to have knocked it out of the park. The only thing left is to sit tight and wait until we can actually play the damn thing! Thankfully, with Gearbox moving the release date forward, we’ll only have to wait until September 12.
