Borderlands has always been a series about guns, lots of guns, and the latest title isn’t bucking that trend. In a recent interview on the Epic Games Store, Gearbox Entertainment art director Adam May confirms that there are over 30 billion guns to discover.
It’s an overwhelming number, but understandable given how often players swap out weapons and experiment with different variations, types, and elements. The sequel further ups the ante with Licensed Parts, allowing weapons to have parts from multiple manufacturers.
“Players have some recognition when they’re picking up a certain manufacturer’s weapon and have a rough idea of how it’s going to function,” said May. “It’s a back-and-forth with the design team and art team, making sure that visually things line up with how they’re supposed to work mechanically. If you want a really fast shooting weapon, you shoot for sleeker, more angular, more aggressive-looking shapes. If it’s shooting giant rockets every time, you want something bigger and rounder and more bulbous.”
Interestingly, Jimmy Barnett, principal art and art director, illustrated the sheer number of guns with a “wall of guns,” as described by senior project producer Anthony Nicholson.
“It was this really large gun map where you could see all of the individual parts for all the individual guns, for all the individual manufacturers. It made it so you could see how each of those things was and how we could have those combinations roll together and how they would work—the slides, the animators, the actions, the art all fitting together. Because a certain gun, if it pumps one way, but there’s a long barrel that goes on the bottom, obviously those parts can’t go together.”
It all fits the game’s setting, which introduces three new weapon manufacturers and a population of consumers desperate to grow their arsenals, especially when rebelling against the Timekeeper. Whether the loot is satisfying enough to facilitate repeat playthroughs remains to be seen.
Borderlands 4 launches on September 12th for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC and on October 3rd for Nintendo Switch 2. It’s $69.99 because Take-Two Interactive wants to deliver “more value” than its price.
