Borderlands 4 chief Randy Pitchford has said that if other developers better understood why gamers love making decisions about loot, Gearbox would have “good competitors.”
Pitchford was speaking in an interview with BBC Radio 5 Live to discuss the release of Borderlands 4 and Gearbox’s journey alongside the series’ success. The outspoken developer said that even though the Borderlands franchise will break through 100 million units sold with Borderlands 4 (publisher 2K Games has yet to announce a sales figure), he insisted “we suck!” because that 100 million is but a drop in the ocean that is the total number of potential gamers globally.
“Our mission is to entertain the world,” Pitchford said. “Which means we suck! Because there are billions of people in the world. We got a lot of work to do. Borderlands, with 4, we’re gonna cross probably 100 million units sold, with Borderlands 4, of the franchise. That’s awesome compared to a lot of things. But it kinda sucks if your goal is to entertain the world. So I feel like we’re just getting started.
“I’ve been working on Borderlands for over 20 years now. And it feels like we’re starting to get pretty good at it. It feels like we’re starting to figure it out. I feel like we’ve probed a lot of the end points. But I don’t think we’re anywhere near the end of a journey.”
Pitchford then entered into a rather philosophical debate about why people love looter shooters like Borderlands so much. This is a game that revolves around the hunt for better loot — in the case of Borderlands 4 billions of potential weapons are available — and players fuss over whether to equip something new that’s just dropped or stick with what they already have, even if it’s inferior.
This is a constant loop in the Borderlands games, which are packed with enemies, crates, chests, and even toilets that spit out loot. Perhaps to a greater extent than any other looter shooter, loot is everywhere in Borderlands, and the player is constantly having to pause to wonder, is that item that just dropped worth my time?
Most of the time, the answer is no. But sometimes the answer is yes. Either way, as you play Borderlands and fuss over the minutiae of your build, you’re always asking yourself whether this item or that item will help make the numbers go up within your playstyle. Farming for these items is all part of the loot hunt and, for so many millions of fans, the whole reason to play Borderlands.
(Coincidentally, IGN recently interviewed a Borderlands 4 player who spent 150 hours on over 3,000 boss kills to find out the game’s true drop rate.)
Borderlands games are tuned to present these sorts of loot conundrums “by design,” Pitchford explained, before saying he expected the franchise to have more imitators by now because of how addictive this loop is.
“You’re poking at some fundamentals, which is part of why I think Borderlands as a game has worked, and does work, and why it’s a very delicate design that I think is one of the reasons why there haven’t really been many successful imitators since we first showed how a shooter looter could work with the original game,” Pitchford said.
Borderlands doesn’t have the looter shooter genre to itself, of course. Perhaps its most high-profile rival is Bungie’s Destiny, although that Sony-owned franchise has seen better days. Other examples include People Can Fly’s Outriders (no sequel in sight), and Ubisoft’s The Division (The Division 3 is in the works). If we’re stretching the definition of looter shooter, we might include games like Warframe, Remnant 2, or The First Descendant. Rocksteady’s disastrous Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is perhaps the most high-profile of looter shooter failures. Certainly, Borderlands and its various entries dominate the space.
And it all comes down to nailing the “gratifying” decision around loot in Borderlands. It is something, Pitchford said, humans love to do because it scratches an itch in our brains.
“That decision, that choice about, do I keep what I have or do I try the new thing? That is a very compelling, fundamental, both need and skill that our brains have, to make choices like that,” he said.
“We’ve reduced it down to this simple moment with this interface in this system. It’s a gratifying loop. It’s a gratifying decision. Our brains need to do it, and our brains like doing it. And we’re better off when we do it. The more we exercise that muscle, not just in the video game but literally in life — this is what separates our species from a lot of others, and how we developed language and how we developed all kinds of high levels of consciousness and cognition that allow us to analyse the world. Most of what our prefrontal cortex is for — why that adaptation exists and what it’s used for — is that skill, or versions of it. We’ve reduced it down into this design. And yes — the is the thing I’m looking at better than the thing I’ve got, and managing the cognition between the objective, almost scientific analysis of that choice, versus the emotional impact on that choice, and having those at odds with each other frequently, is very interesting, and dare I say it addictive.”
Borderlands 4: All Vault Hunter Skill Trees Ranked
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Pitchford continued: “We don’t do it because it’s addictive. We do it because it’s stimulating and because we kind of need that. Part of why games exist are to… yeah. we can live a fantasy that we might not be able to have in the real world, and we can explore themes and ideas in a safe place that we can’t explore in the real world, but we also can, because it’s an interactive simulation, we can test our thinking and our decision making and put our brain to work in really interesting ways that we kind of need and want.”
And then, the puzzlement that other developers haven’t taken Borderlands on at its own game, and the associated suggestion that Gearbox’s rivals aren’t thinking about the looter shooter on the same level as the studio.
“If other game designers that were trying to get in on the action, so to speak, understood that, we’d have more competitors, or we’d have good competitors,” he said. “But we haven’t so far. It’s weird. The kinds of people that just want to go after it, they’re not thinking about it on that level. They’re just putting into motion something because of market analysis. It’s not a designer’s or creator’s drive that’s doing it. It’s either a business drive or a wishing to be something that you’re not kind of drive.
“It’s so weird. I fully expected after the first game came out that everyone would be hip to exactly what you mentioned, and we’d immediately see lots of other games imitating and aping, and we’d be dead, because we can’t compete with a lot of other folks, especially back then. We were the scrappy underdogs.”
Certainly, the critical reception to Borderlands 4 suggests Gearbox has once again successfully presented a looter shooter that ticks all the right boxes. IGN’s Borderlands 4 review returned an 8/10. We said: “Borderlands 4 gives the series the massive kick in the pants it has needed, with a fantastic open world and greatly improved combat, even if bugs and invisible walls can sometimes throw off that groove.”
We’ve got plenty more on Borderlands 4. Last month, a Borderlands 4 dataminer unearthed evidence to suggest that one of the most hated characters from Borderlands 3 was cut and replaced relatively late in development. 2K Games and Gearbox declined to comment when contacted by IGN.
And if you are delving into Borderlands 4, don’t go without updated hourly SHiFT codes list. We’ve also got a huge interactive map ready to go and a badass Borderlands 4 planner tool courtesy of our buds at Maxroll. Plus check out our expert players’ choices for which character to choose (no one agreed).
Photo by Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images for Lionsgate.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
