Look, I don't want to sound overly dramatic, but, well, here we go. If Gearbox wasn't going for a tongue-in-cheek parody of today's games industry with its new Borderlands 4 animated short, then it was certainly serendipitous, because now that the parallel has struck me I'm having a hard time ignoring it.
The star of the trailer is new Vault Hunter Rafa, a cyber-soldier held together by a "Liveframe" exo-suit like ground meat in a sausage casing. Rafa grew up in a different gravity, so his body can't handle other environments without the suit, which happens to come with laser swords, turrets, and a bunch of other Tediore military-grade gadgets.
We see some of those weapons in action here, kindly escorting loads of people into the afterlife at a shareholder demonstration gone very awry, but narrative is the focus. And once again, despite absurd caricatures and some expected ham-fisted writing, I find myself surprisingly intrigued by the tone of Borderlands 4.
A demonstration of the Liveframe suits comes to a swift and bloody end after members of the Tediore board deem the project too expensive. The presenter bows to "the living, breathing backbone of this company," also known as "savings," in one of the video's loudest roasts of capitalism. "The board has decided to reduce our overhead in R&D," he adds, executing soldiers and animating their corpses using those fancy suits. There's an AI simile in here somewhere, but it's too tortured even for me.
Now, I'm not going to seriously compare games industry-wide layoffs caused by mismanagement in real life to straight-up murder ordered by greedy shareholders in a video game in a series that's about as subtle as a brick to the forehead, but clearly I am going to spend about 270 words mulling over their curious thematic overlap. And that's more mulling than Borderlands has generally gotten out of me in the past, so screw it, maybe I'm just in a cynical mood this summer, but I'm still naively holding out hope that Borderlands 4's story will clear the "dumb as a bag of hammers" bar.
