Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford spoke to GamesRadar+ during Gamescom 2025 about soon-to-be-released Borderlands 4 and how he's glad new hardware can finally match the looter shooter's perfection.
"With Borderlands 4 – when you talk about evolution – I think we're finally able to have a point where the technology and the hardware has caught up to the ambition of what our game is," Pitchford says while discussing how the looter shooter genre has changed since the first Borderlands game introduced it in 2009.
"We've always built Borderlands with the kind of vibe that it should be a wide, open experience," he continues. "But, in fact, we've had to, kind of, make these narrow seams and connect them with load times, in order to have a world big enough to live up to the ambition.
"In Borderlands 4, it's seamless. The load times are gone, and the world, now, is much wider, and more open than it's ever been before."
Thanks to extremely modern 2025 technology, Borderlands 4 was also able to introduce the double-jump. Please don't worry about the fact that the double-jump has been around since 1984. It's not a problem.
"We then want to push mobility, and push how we get around," Pitchford adds. "So, we explore things like — instead of just getting a car to a vehicle station, summoning in […] a personal vehicle that can haul ass across the environment and go for miles without load time.
"Or, doing ludicrous things like – you know, I say Borderlands lives between two things that don't belong, like, surrealism and realism… we're now living in a world between reality and fantasy, even in a moveset.
"We can double jump. How does that make sense? Where in the rules of physics can I leap into the air and, out of mid-air, jump again. That makes no sense whatsoever.
"But it's really fun in the video game!"
