Latest news with #Borderlands3
Newsweek
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Newsweek
Fans Are Ripping Gearbox for Controversial 'Borderlands 4' Decision
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Entertainment gossip and news from Newsweek's network of contributors Gearbox Software has made a name for itself by releasing the ever-popular "Borderlands" series. The shoot-em-up RPG features zany boss fights, hilarious and over-the-top toilet humor, and a ridiculous amount of guns to choose from. The series began in 2009 when the first "Borderlands" was released. The series, which includes three mainline games, and a series of spinoffs, has sold over 77 million copies, according to Wikipedia. Simply put, the "Borderlands" series is a mainstay, and the fourth installment is set for release on Sept 12, 2025. It has been six years since "Borderlands 3" was released, and fans are eagerly awaiting "Borderlands 4." While the trailers and looks at the upcoming sequel have been filled with excitement, there is one controversial change that has warranted major responses from fans. According to IGN, "Borderlands 4" contains a setting that will allow players to quiet down the lovable and quite annoying Claptrap. Claptrap was introduced in the first game, and he follows around the main character, spewing out random anecdotes, jokes, and so much more. Claptrap has also become the de facto mascot of the series, leaving fans wondering why this setting even exists. Claptrap, the cutest robot buddy Claptrap, the cutest robot buddy Gearbox "Isn't the entire point of Claptrap to annoy the player as much as possible?" one fan wrote. "The Easter egg is the setting works in reverse and he only gets louder because he knows you tried to silence him 😂,": another replied. "I will NOT make Claptrap quieter....i LOVE CLAPTRAP😭," wrote. "Why would you want claptrap to be quiet? He's the main protagonist," another questioned. Though the idea for quieting Claptrap down might be to give the main character some peace and quiet, fans are rallying to question why Gearbox Software would make such a controversial setting. Granted, Claptrap can be quite burdensome throughout the series, but he also serves as the comic relief throughout the series. His presence is one of the most welcome, albeit he has to talk and prattle on every chance he gets. The "Borderlands" series got so popular that a movie adaptation was created. Sadly, the adaptation was not a massive hit and bombed at the box office. Deadline reported that the adaptation lost $80 million. Despite the box office bomb, the characters in the adaptation included the beloved Claptrap, who was voiced by fan-favorite actor Jack Black. Simply put, there has been a lot of effort made for the character Claptrap to remain his zany self, and it appears fans are not keen on "Borderlands 4" having a setting where you can shut off the robot. For more video games, head to Newsweek Video Games.
Forbes
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘Borderlands 4' Is Now My Most-Anticipated Game Of The Year
Borderlands 4 The vibes are good around Borderlands 4. That may sound like a pretty vague statement, but I've been doing this long enough to hold my finger to the wind and know which way things are moving. And in the case of Borderlands 4, all signs point to a successful launch in September, even in the wake of many that may have become disinterested in the series after its last installment. I've always been a huge Borderlands fan, the genesis of the looter shooter genre that Destiny eventually took and ran with (granted, Borderlands originally took a lot from Diablo and the like). Borderlands has avoided being a live service, and that still seems true for 4. But it also has learned significant lessons from its last installment, Borderlands 3, which attracted a lot of criticism despite big sales and made fans concerned for the future of the franchise. Now? Those fears are mostly gone. Almost entirely gone, for me especially. I have more or less not seen anything bad released for the promotion for this game. Not trailers, not interviews and now not an elaborate dump of first-impression previews and active streams of the game from creators. I know marketing is obviously meant to make games look good, but Borderlands 4 looks very good. There are a number of ways the game looks to have improved itself, but I'm most excited about three of them in particular: The Tone, thank god, The Tone – Borderlands 2 started this in some capacity, but Borderlands 3 went way off the deep end when it came to pop culture references (all of which are now significantly dated) and 'edgy' humor like the main villains being livestreamers. Even if the game was fun, the story was…rough in multiple ways. Now? Just watch any of the trailers, especially this latest one, where the game will not forgo humor entirely, of course, but it's a lot more focused on actually menacing villains over Butt Stallions and the like. The writing everyone hated appears, at least, to have taken a hiatus, direct feedback producing clear results, something the game's writers have talked about explicitly. Mobility – For being a game entirely focused on guns, abilities and combat, Borderlands has never exactly been the best-feeling shooter on the market. It appears Borderlands 4 has realized that's a missing component of most combat powers outside of some specific class abilities and has changed with alterations like a grappling hook everyone has access to, and a Warlock-like hover drift moving from locations. This may not be the highest-profile thing discussed about the game, but I think it's going to be key once everyone gets their hands on gunplay. Borderlands 4 Open World – I don't know how many hours I've spent looking at loading screens between the 20+ zones of a given Borderlands game, but that seems to be getting majorly reduced or eliminated with the inclusion of an open world this time around. I know for a time, switching to an open world seemed like an Ubisoft-style gimmick, but I genuinely believe Borderlands 4 will benefit from this. Early previews have also suggested this is a 'dense' world that won't have just endless sprawling spaces, but rather lots of things to find and do across the entire map in large quantities. I'm excited. I can't think of anything else coming out in the latter half of the year that I am personally looking forward to more. While I was always going to be excited for a new Borderlands, the previews for 4 have just been so reassuring they got it right this time. I hope that's the case. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Metro
18-06-2025
- 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.
