Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford has once again taken to social media platform X, this time around to talk about how confident he is about the quality of upcoming co-op looter shooter Borderlands 4. In a lengthy post on X, Pitchford said that the entire studio is finding Borderlands 4 to be an improvement over Borderlands 3 in “every measurement we have”. This likely includes both objective measurements, like raw visual fidelity and frame rate performance, to more subjective ones, like the quality of its writing.
Pitchford’s post comes in response to an earlier one he made about the average play time for Borderlands players across Borderlands 2 and 3. According to his figures, the average play time for Borderlands 2 was around 13 hours and 42 minutes, with more than 87 percent of all players having played the title for more than an hour. Borderlands 3, on the other hand, came in around 18 hours and 48 minutes of average play time, with 92 percent of all players having played it for more than an hour.
“So what is meaningful here is that BL3 seems to engender a meaningful degree more average playtime than BL2,” wrote Pitchford. “Earlier, the folks responding to a poll seemed to believe that actual play time is a better correlation to quality than user reviews.”
Pitchford then went on to dissect why more players might have spent more time with Borderlands 3 over its predecessor, noting that it might come down to the fact that the more recent entry in the franchise was an improvement over Borderlands 2. He does note, however, that these numbers essentially came about through an informal poll he ran on social media.
“So it suggests that BL3 is ‘better’ than BL2 by the standard the people who responded to my poll have favored. Obviously individual tastes vary and entertainment is subjective,” he explained. “We are all edge cases. I tend to be in line with the crowd for most things, but I sometimes love some things others do not and I sometimes don’t prefer things others love. This is why we still have artists and entertainers – we’re all different and we’re all changing our tastes over time.”
Ultimately, Pitchford notes that Borderlands 4 is also turning out to be an improvement over the previous game, noting that these improvements have led Gearbox as a whole to be quite excited about its release.
“In any case, by any standard we’ve thrown at it, we are confident that BL4 is turning out to be better than BL3 by every measurement we have, including subjective ones, so that makes us very excited about the launch,” he wrote.
Borderlands 4 is slated for release on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch 2 on September 12. So far, however, the studio is yet to confirm how much the game will cost. In a social media post earlier this month, Pitchford said that publisher 2K will be announcing the price for Borderlands 4 “soon”.
