Borderlands 4

Up to this point, the coverage we’ve provided for Borderlands 4 has focused on the world, core gameplay, and story. But longtime fans of the Borderlands franchise know the game doesn’t necessarily end when the credits roll. During our recent trip to Gearbox, we asked creative director Graeme Timmins to share all he could about the Borderlands 4 endgame.

Clearly, the studio wants to keep most of the details under wraps, as when I ask Timmins about the kind of endgame that exists in Borderlands 4, he initially starts with, “We will have an endgame; I can say that.” However, after Gearbox global creative executive and former Game Informer editor-in-chief Andrew Reiner chimes in by saying, “It’s very ambitious,” Timmins opens up a bit more.

“I care about it a lot personally, as my role on Borderlands 3 was curating what became the endgame for that,” Timmins says. “I know what’s important to our community, and that’s built already into the game. Like, we made purposeful decisions with our Action Skill tree, assuming what will come in the future with our endgame. It’s not a secret that we always eventually do level-cap increases, right? That’s built into the high-level design of saying, ‘Okay, if that’s going to still be in our future, how can we make our Action Skill tree this time anticipate that and be balanced from the jump?'”

The team drew lessons from past games, including the most recent entries in the series, in designing Borderlands 4’s endgame. “In Borderlands 3, we ended at 72 skill points,” Timmins says. “It’s a really high number, right? And so, for the game designer in me, that can create a lot of chaos with how those Action Skills were designed. You lose build diversity as you add more skill points because everyone’s homogeneous, because they all have the same skills ultimately unlocked. We’ve thought about [Borderlands 4’s] endgame from the jump, and we have some great plans for it that we’re going to share, but I think we’re taking a lot of the lessons from both [Tiny Tina’s] Wonderlands and Borderlands to make sure that we execute the best version of the endgame yet for Borderlands.”

Presumably, we’ll learn more about the Borderlands 4 endgame before it arrives on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC on September 12.