So far, Borderlands 4 feels like an improvement on its predecessor. The game doesn’t chase after trends and instead sticks to the looter-shooter format that the franchise has iterated on for years. It makes for a game that will likely prove popular for long-time fans but, I suspect, won’t necessarily convince newcomers to finally give the series a try. Sirens are still incredibly fun, bosses still take a tremendous amount of bullets to take out, and there are still so, so many different firearms to find.

After playing Borderlands 4 for about three hours at a preview event, I sat down with senior project producer Anthony Nicholson to talk about the improvements implemented in this latest entry, such as mission replay (so you don’t have to start a brand-new save or jump into True Vault Hunter mode just to redo a mission or boss to get better loot), a seamless world, and manual healing kits. Our conversation is detailed below, edited for both brevity and readability.

What was the team hoping to get out of revisiting this series again?

Anthony Nicholson: Well, I think a lot of it is improving on the systems, the design, and the features that we’ve had in Borderlands 3 and then the prior games. So what we wanted to do was we knew the kind of things that people were really into whenever it came to Borderlands 3. And then of course in the DLCs, [creative director] Graeme [Timmins] and I were talking about it–I was the head of DLC for Borderlands 3 [and] he was the creative director on the live stuff so we got to listen to a lot of things. We got to see a lot of the improvements and the things that [the team] tried there.

And there’s a lot of things that we’ve always wanted to do, and technologically we couldn’t. But now on Borderlands 4 we’re running on Unreal Engine 5. So that allows us to be able to do more of the things like the seamless world to have bigger sprawling zones, to be able to do dynamic events and some of those more random types of events and activities and things that can happen. And so I think [Borderlands 4] really came from a drive of wanting to do things that we have always wanted to do before, like mission replay. That’s [a feature] that we’ve wanted to do since Borderlands 2.

That’s something I’ve wanted since Borderlands 2.

Nicholson: So it’s for people like you. There’s those types of things. And then there’s also the successes that we saw like the movement suite and movement abilities. We think that we can push this a little bit further because people responded so very well to that [in Borderlands 3]. And now in this game, we’ve added even more to the traversal and to those mechanics.

When you’re talking about the “seamless world,” what exactly does that entail?

Nicholson: So for us, it means multiple things. It’s not just the world, it’s not just the map itself. There’s no loading when you’re transitioning from zone to zone or the big landscape pieces. And so that along with being able to instantaneously spawn a vehicle and just hop on and go wherever you want to, that’s seamless.

You can walk back after you beat a boss [and] pretty much hit a button and the boss respawns. You jump back into the arena and now you’re back into it. No quitting to the main menu and dragging your friends, breaking up the party and all those types of things. Matchmaking [has changed] and we [now] let people jump into the game–drop in, drop out co-op–and all of that is seamless.

And then we’re exploring because the landscape is so vast. If you’re way on the east side of the Fate Fields and I’m on the west side and I’m like, “Oh, you’re doing something cool over there,” [I can] open up my map, find where your icon is, hit it, [and] I instantaneously travel to you. That’s also seamless.

So it really means a lot of different things.

Speaking of the co-op, how far apart can teammates get from one another?

Nicholson: As long as you’re in the same zone. So if you’re in the Fate Fields and I’m in the Fate Fields, we’re on the Fate Fields together on whichever side.

What was the design philosophy behind changing the auto-heal feature to a button you have to press, creating an incentive to hoard healing items?

Nicholson: It’s another one of those things that we have done in this game to give the ownership of player urgency. Players are a part of cutscenes now. You’re a part of it. You’re pushing the story forward. You’re a part of the growth there. But also whenever you’re using a rep kit now you are the one who’s determining [when you heal].

So you can at any point, like you said, know, “I can heal myself when I need to.” It’s almost a slight cool down. Different manufacturers of the different rep kits have different boosts and stuff like that, but also there’s buffs to those because it’s like its own piece of gear, just like a shield or ordinance. So you could have a rep kit that increases damage. You could have one that increases fire rate or movement speed, and it’s healing you all at the same time. So it really is another way for you to have a tool in your box to build around whatever it is that you want your spec to be.

Humor is a key part of every Borderlands game. What goes into trying to make a game humorous? Because what’s funny today might not be funny a year from now and games are designed so many years prior to actually coming out.

Nicholson: That’s a really good question. All of the points that you say are things that we understand and that we take into the process whenever we’re building and planning and developing the story and all the things that we’re doing there. So we are really proud of what we’ve done on the past games, but to your point, those came out at a different time. And we believe that our audience, our community, grows alongside our games, too. So we need to adapt. Things that are happening back then or in the world back then are very different from things that happened now, right?

Right.

Nicholson: [For] Borderlands 1, the development team and the goings on in the world [were] very different from 2025. And so just to your point, we want to make sure that we [reflect] that. But to be clear, [Borderlands 4] is still very humorous. It’s just the way that we approach [it] that [has changed]. We now make sure that the Vault Hunters themselves are the ones who are driving [the jokes] and they’re the ones who are being [funny]. So when we say [Borderlands 4] has grounded humor, we mean it’s more situational comedy between [the Vault Hunters] as opposed to pulling things out from the real world and things like that [like the series used to].

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