With Borderlands 3 and its divisive story in the rearview mirror, developer Gearbox Software is driving full speed ahead to Borderlands 4 and the totalitarian planet of Kairos.
The long road to the launch of a fourth mainline Borderlands game had a bumpy start. While plenty fell in love with Borderlands 3 and its improvements to the looter-shooter series' gunplay, others still struggle with its joke-fueled story and reliance on toilet humor. It will have been almost exactly six years since its launch when Borderlands 4's September 12, 2025 release date arrives. Now, fans are on the edge of their seats, waiting to see how Gearbox spent its time.
We caught up with Gearbox narrative director Sam Winkler, lead writer Taylor Clark, and managing director of narrative properties Lin Joyce to learn more about why the team decided to create a more grounded story for Borderlands 4. Along the way, we found out how the elusive Timekeeper can stand toe-to-toe with Handsome Jack, how controversial characters like Ava could still have a future in the series, and we even learned how the upcoming DLC will fit in with Borderlands 4's main campaign.
IGN: Gearbox has been very clear that Borderlands 4 will feature a more grounded story and tone. How did the conversations to shift the tone begin, and is this the direction the team has followed from the beginning of development?
Sam Winkler: Those conversations started as early as the conversations of, 'Hey, what the hell does Borderlands 4 look like?' Even before Borderlands 3 was shipped and out the door. Something I like to remind people is that the devs are often the first fans of a game and also the first critics. I think that we had some own internal critiques about the tone and the level of humor present in Borderlands 3.
[It's] something that we already were starting to address in the DLCs for Borderlands 3, but we wanted to really make that a central point of Borderlands 4. So, as we had these very large conversations of, in world context, 'Where is this? What does it mean? Why are we doing this next big, monolithic game with a 4 in its title?' [we said], 'How are we also going to evolve the storytelling, the humor, and the characters, and what we want to do with them?’
Taylor Clark: I came aboard a lot later than Sam. I've been on the game for a couple of years, and it was definitely something from the moment that I came on board, when I was talking to Sam, the grounded tone was a priority. Grounding the humor in the world, he made it very clear that if I tried to put a meme in the game, he would come to my house with a baseball bat [laughs]. So, it was definitely in the brief from the beginning to make the tone fit the world.
Winkler: I don't want to swing the needle too hard on that front. I am not anti-meme. In fact, hey, exclusive: There's a specific meme in this game, and I feel justified putting it in because I accidentally created it. Yes, I didn't mean for it to become a meme, but it became a meme, and it's in the video game. That is all I'm going to say.
IGN: We can't know what meme it is?
Winkler: Look, I have a couple of Know Your Meme pages that credit me, and I will let you do any journalistic dirty work that you need to.
Clark: It does not involve a Skibidi Toilet.
Winkler: It does not. Yeah, there are toilets in our game. I'll say that.
Clark: Where else would you get ammunition?
Winkler: Exactly. In Borderlands, only toilets and washing machines.
IGN: No Skibidi Toilets, though.
Clark: No. No.
Winkler: None.
IGN: I think some people are going to be really happy to hear that. I'm wondering if you can compare the tone in Borderlands 4 to some of the previous games. It seems like the team definitely wanted to have a more grounded tone than 3, for sure. So, how would you compare the tone or joke frequency to something like 1, 2, or even spinoffs like Tiny Tina's Wonderlands?
Clark: The way that I've always talked about it, personally, was that, in Borderlands 1, 2, and 3, we were on Pandora, right? Pandora was a wild west. It was a place where corporations were stabbing each other in the back for supremacy. So, there was a lot of antic energy in that place, and with those villains that we were dealing with, it made a lot of sense to have more zany, like, gun-slinging jokes, you know? Hip-firing jokes tone.
Kairos is a different place. Kairos is a totalitarian planet ruled over by this dictatorial figure known as the Timekeeper, who sits far above it all. In this context of global oppression, the Whac-A-Mole joke style didn't make as much sense. So, a lot of it had to do with making sure that the tone fit the stakes of the world, and that the humor was rising organically out of situations, out of character moments, rather than the wild west feel of the first games.
Lin Joyce: I will let Sam talk to the contrast, too, in the mandate between 3 and 4, but I will double tap too, that what we were looking for is that the humor in Borderlands 4 works at the level of Kairos and the characters. We weren't making jokes that would only land for the player.
It was a gut check, 'Is this as funny to the characters and their lived experience as it is to the player? Can we do both?' That situational comedy and context helped us also keep the tone grounded, and the comedy then has purpose. But Sam can talk about the frequency between Borderlands 3 and 4.
Winkler: I mean... I went back and played every single Borderlands game. 1, 2, Pre-Sequel, [Tales from the Borderlands], everything like that. Just to observe, not just the tone of humor, but also the vectors of humor, right? I think people talk a lot about our humor from the perspective of people chatting in your ear. But I was really struck by, for example, in Borderlands 1, most of the NPCs didn't have a ton of actual audio to say.
It was pretty sparse on that front, and a lot of the humor came out of situations. Comedic, usually darkly comedic, circumstances, but also the way things were named, the text in the mission accept, that sort of thing. I think that contributed a lot to players' perception of Borderlands 1 as having a more dark, grounded tone, is it is a quieter game, and a lot of the humor stems situationally and organically.
So, that was something that we tried to work with the design team, the mission design team, and everything like that, to say, 'Hey, we can have heavy moments. We can have grounded moments, but we can also have wacky circumstances that arise out of the players' actions and the NPCs that come at them.' We wanted to make sure that humor wasn't just some sticker that we're slapping on something, you know what I mean? The other thing is that, with design shifts, our mentality to humor had to shift as well. With Borderlands 4 going into this seamless, explore-to-your-own-tastes gameplay experience, we could not control where the player was going to go next.
We couldn't always script people's open-world exploration, [and] that allowed that space to just be naturally filled. Whether it's through combat dialog or player characters, or just silence and soundtrack and ambience and mood. It just inherently changed our approach to it.
IGN: One of my other questions is, 'Why should players who have been with the series for 16 years not be worried about this shift?' But I think that kind of answers it. It still feels and sounds like it's very Borderlands.
Clark: For sure. It is unmistakably Borderlands, but we're constantly tweaking the dials of certain factors to make the tone match the game that we want to create, and to respond to our internal and external feedback.
Joyce: At no point did we say, 'Let's stop being funny in Borderlands. Let's not do that anymore.' It is still a Borderlands game made by a Borderlands team, many who have been here since 1.
Clark: We're not making an arthouse Borderlands game [laughs].
Winkler: But, also, it's a big game, right? It is not a monolith. There are areas of our game that are more serious. There are areas of our game that are more humor-filled. There are characters that don't take things as seriously, in a diegetic way. For the players who have been long-time franchise fans, I think they're going to find flavors that they're looking for all across Kairos. If they play one side mission or interact with one character that doesn't quite vibe with them, there's probably another one not too far off that they will vibe with.
IGN: For the sake of comparison, are there any other stories from across movies, books, TV, or games that the team feels are similar to the tone that you guys are going for? Are there any particular inspirations that you can point to?
Joyce: There have to be so many. We're constantly throwing around, 'Have you seen...? It's a little like that.' But now that you're asking it directly, I'm like, 'Which one...'
Winkler: I don't want to use it as a straight comp, but a show that I've been really inspired by has been Star Trek: Lower Decks, which is very, very much a comedic show. It has wacky energy to it, but it works, and it works really well — it just won a Hugo Award — because it takes its characters seriously. It takes its circumstances seriously, and if something is wacky, there's usually someone there to point out, like, 'This is wacky and super unsafe, and it shouldn't work that way.'
It is a project that is clearly made out of love for Star Trek and the characters in the story, rather than some sort of parody of it. I think that on Borderlands 3, in our worst hours, it sometimes felt like parody, and that is where we edged into a red line, I think, for a lot of fans and for myself, personally. So, we wanted to look towards other media that could balance that. [That] could balance both humor, levity, and authentic character storytelling that takes itself seriously.
IGN: One character I did want to ask about from Borderlands 3 that I didn't particularly mind at all but others had a problem with is Ava. She's a character that a lot of fans associate their dissatisfaction with Borderlands 3's story with. With so many other memorable faces back for Borderlands 4, can fans expect to see her show up, too? If not, is there any room for her to return in the future?
Winkler: I don’t think we’re going to answer any questions about characters that we haven’t shown off yet. I think the only thing that I will say is, I am not a huge fan of removing or killing off characters off-screen unless it absolutely has to happen. We don’t forget about characters, and we want to make sure that storylines are completed. That’s it.
I hear all the complaints about Ava. I had some issues with how we were able to portray her. We were unable to show some of, I think, her more heartfelt moments in the base game of BL3. We used the Director’s Cut to show off what Maya’s funeral could have been and what the relationship between Ava and Lilith could have been. We didn’t have that opportunity in Borderlands 3, but it’s the kind of thing that I still believe in and that I would love to address again some other time.
IGN: In typical Borderlands fashion, Gearbox has free and paid post-launch DLC in the works. A lot of it, by the sounds of it. We don’t have to get too into specifics; I know a lot of that stuff is still very much in development. But will that same grounded tone carry over to the DLC? Will the team take the opportunity to show us some of the less grounded corners of Kairos?
Clark: Just like the last question, I think we are limited in what we can say about the post-launch content that we’re working on. I think it’s safe to say that the plan is for the tone to be consistent between the products.
Winkler: I’ll say this: the best thing about Borderlands extra content, like full campaign DLCs, or some of the live events that we’ve done — we did the holidays and stuff like that in previous games — is it allows us to explore different tones and different corners of the Borderlands world and do different genres and everything like that. So, I would expect that same level of creativity and exploration from where we go in the future.
Joyce: I would extend it to be... I would look at the DLC content and call it complementary, right? It complements the base game. It is going to be different, but complementary. Or, if you prefer a different metaphor, the pieces of attire will be coordinated to make a nice outfit, really. You pick which metaphor you like better there.
Clark: It’s tough to talk about in vague terms. We’d love to talk about it more.
Winkler: Especially because some of it we don’t know yet. It is in active development. Borderlands 4 is getting stamped onto DVDs somewhere and... actually [laughs] I think it’s Blu-rays. But in the meantime, we are cooking on that next group of content, and we know a whole bunch of it. We’re actively working on it, but some of it is still in development.
IGN: How long do you think it will take to complete Borderlands 4’s main campaign, and then how long will it take to complete the main campaign plus all of the side content?
Clark: This came up some in prior interviews. The answer that I and Chris Brock, our lead producer, gave on this was to point out that, while we can't say a specific number, we can say that, when we got together to do a playthrough together — Sam, me, Lin, a bunch of others, our creative director, Graeme [Timmins], Randy Pitchford — when we were doing work, doing play throughs of this stuff, and to evaluate how it was going, playing through the entire main campaign took us days and days. It took a long time. It is a meaty piece of content.
Winkler: And that was a straight line. That was doing basically no side content.
Clark: That was scaling damage to 10,000% and just mowing through stuff.
Joyce: The other anecdote I could probably give there, safely, is, I meet every week with Andrew Reiner, our global creative executive officer. Last week he said, 'I've started, I'm going to say, the million-teenth run of the game.' He's like, 'This time, the goal is 100% it.' I was like, 'How long have you been playing?' All week. 'How far have you gotten?’ Still in the first zone [laughs].
Winkler: That's a very good factor, and going back to what I said, the seamless world allows players to have a little bit more choice about the order in which they take on the story. We have seen play testers want to go through the mainline, so they're bouncing around between the different zones and seeing all sorts of the game.
We've also seen testers who are just like, 'I'm going to go into this zone. I'm going to see everything I can possibly see. I'm going to scrape the barrel, and then I'm going over to the next zone.' One player's first 15, 20 hours could look very, very different from another player's.
IGN: It's a big Borderlands game.
Winkler: It do be big.
IGN: For so many people, Borderlands villains are the reason a lot of folks show up for this series. Obviously, Handsome Jack is one of the all-time great video game villains. I'm wondering, because there are so many theories about the Timekeeper, specifically, and I don't want to know what it is, but does this character have any identity past that Timekeeper name? Is there some mystery, some intrigue you want to build up with him?
Joyce: You ask great questions [laughs]. To what degree can we answer them is a tough one.
Winkler: The Timekeeper is like an onion. He has layers... No one's used that before, right?
Clark: I think the answer is yes. Is there a mystery to him? Yes [laughs].
Joyce: We could talk about, certainly, how we approached crafting him and writing him. That's another angle into answering your question. The timekeeper, one of the things that makes him different and keeps an air of intentional mystery around him, is that he is not in your face at all times. He sits in his high tower with a view of the entire planet, and his prerogative is to keep the entire planet under order.
So, when we first show up, the Vault Hunter is mildly of interest, but he's got many other things to do. So, we also have to, as players, over time, gain his attention more and more. That was a very different way to approach writing a villain into a Borderlands game than we had done before. And I'll let Sam and Taylor run from there.
Clark: I think we, as creative people, are always challenging ourselves to not repeat ourselves, to have characters who are appreciably different, who have different kinds of stories and have different kinds of things to say in each entry. The Timekeeper is appreciably different from the prior villains in the Borderlands series. He is a new frontier, I think, as a character.
Something I really, really liked about Borderlands 2 was, as you're going across Pandora, pretty much everyone you meet has been screwed over by Handsome Jack in some way. Their life is measurably worse, or they're under threat, or they know someone who died because of Handsome Jack. That was really inspiring for the Timekeeper, for us to be able to show a villain, not just through phone calls where he says, 'Hey, you're a dick,' while you're while you're going through trying to collect guns, but also how everyone you meet has, in some way, been affected by him and is living under his totalitarian rule.
Their circumstances are different and vibrant and their reactions to the Timekeeper... like they might be so scared of him that they don't want to rise up in resistance against him, or they might be so pissed off at him that they do, or they have a complicated relationship with the Timekeeper when they once kind of looked up to him, but now they are in danger because of him. With the goal of making this character feel a little bit more omnipresent, a little bit always watching, we wanted that to shine through in all of our NPCs. So, as we meet new friends — and each of these zones has this big over boss that we have to, ultimately, deal with, each of those villains has a different relationship with the Timekeeper. As we're learning about them, we're also learning about him.
