Here are Grant Kao and Jamie Marchi at Gearbox answering your Borderlands 4 questions at PAX West.
I ran the video through a transcription program due to the background noise at the venue. It may not get it all correctly but it helps.
Yeah, go! Why is Harlow the only character without Ordnance skills? Good question. Harlow has so much prowl control and enemy manipulation that a lot of it will sync up and synergize with Ordnance skills, with Ordnance abilities and with Ordnance gear.
Even though she might not have an explicit Hornets related skill, as you can see in the specialization, her and a lot of passive skills that characters do have, including Harlow, to affect Hornets stuff. So it’s more of a design decision with the designer to promote fantasies that exist within each character. Harlow just happens to be the way that she was created, with character manipulation and with swarming gadgets in the world. So because she’s a gadget character, like that
What were some learnings from how players interacted with Takedown and other endgame content in Borderlands?
that you’ve taken to heart when designing encounters, spaces, and activities in Warhammer? Another great question. A lot of the content that we made for Endgame: Borderlands 3, we felt that there was content but without much purpose. What we wanted to make sure that in Borderlands 4 was that all the content types, whether it’s a vault or whether it’s a
Travelling through the open, the seamless world of Kairos, that players had purpose in doing so. So we sprinkled in different boss encounters, harder boss encounters inside the vault,
What will the new bad-ass Guardian fight look like?
Specializations. So specializations are replacing what the badass rank is and we showed some of that in apparel today where players have a whole new skill tree that they can invest, basically specialization points, which replaces badass points to equip new passives to hopefully augment their build or accelerate some of what they’re trying to improve on different skills and different passives they have.
Is there anything you can tell us about writing for the game and what that process looks like? The writing well, one of my favorite things about it is it’s so collaborative. So we work together as the writers and the machine designers and kind of brainstorm different things and then it grows and then we keep brainstorming and then we make sure we’re all on the same page. So the collaborative effort I think is the biggest takeaway for me.
So
Borderlands 4 for me is an awesome idea. Borderlands 4 has their own in-game controls and things that players are going to apply for. So we don’t want to reveal every single thing there, but trust me, getting 100% completion in Borderlands 4 is a long journey. So grind it out. Roll their resources and skill points.
Nope. Skill points are all through the level up. There will be some given through the mission system at the beginning of the game, just to celebrate the growth. But after you get out of the portal, it’s all through the skill points.
leveling up the character level. However, there’s other upgrades such as the Echo tokens, or what we traditionally call the SDUs, which are like the ammo upgrades and whatnot, that exist outside of the skill system. There’s also the specialization skills, which players are also gaining outside of the skill system. So local progression maps are playing.
Can you give a more detailed explanation on how lifesteal works and is different from the core? A lot of the damage in the core is additive now. So what that means is that no longer do we have the same massive scaling numbers from external sources. And because everything is additive, lifesteal is one of those sources where we can supply
a bunch of different things without having to completely break the game. So achieving like a 100% life steal is very, very difficult to do. But you can get pretty close with like a massive combination of passives and firmware and different gear pieces. How close will players have to get to an area enemy hotspot before enemies spawn? Will it be fair enough to allow the option of initial striking?
Ooh, good question. Sniping is heavily promoted in our seamless world, and yes, you will see enemies spawn at long distances so that you can snipe them from places that are opportune to the player’s choice of where they are and what vantage point they come from.
How does Harlow’s group study Capstone and interact with other skill nodes that mention Foxglobe? Oh gosh, I don’t remember exactly what the Capstone does, but so much of Harlow’s entanglement character passive is about sharing damage, so her Capstone,
her skills affect so many enemies in the same spot. So I think I’ll leave that capstone. Actually, I don’t remember exactly what the capstone is off the top of my head, so I’d have to get back to you. I’d love to email you the answer to that. What can you tell us about the post-match content? Well, it is one of the DLCs, Valley Returns. We’re very excited about that. Me in particular. And it
It’s a creepier, spookier vibe, kind of like Guns Love and Tentacles, where you’re all back enjoying and creeping out people, maybe giving them a few nightmares, things like that. – Yeah, okay. And that story campaign is a big story campaign. Alongside that, parallel to that, we have two other efforts. One is basically seasonal mini events, and the other is our founding packs that we’re releasing every…
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