What struck me about the Borderlands 4 trailer shown at The Game Awards is that the graphical fidelity has advanced so far that the comic book art style that defined the first game is fading away. It looks like the characters are doing Borderlands cosplay, with black Sharpie lines on foam props, and in the daytime scene at the start of the trailer, the signature Borderlands style is almost entirely absent from the rocky terrain.
I still think it looks great, even if the style that once set the series apart—one of the most successful pivots in videogame history—is becoming vestigial. Borderlands fans, however, had their eyes fixed on more substantial matters: the new vault hunters, whose reveal has divided opinions. The Borderlands subreddit is currently awash with both posts that call the new protagonists "bland" and counter-posts declaring that everyone is being too negative.
"The designs of the vault hunters might be my least favorite in the franchise," reads one popular thread. One of the complaints is that they're all human—no robots, no aliens. As they do the slo-mo shoulder-to-shoulder astronaut walk together in the trailer, they all have the same expression and their clothes are similar, so I get the complaint. But maybe we just haven't seen enough of them to know what makes them distinct.
Plenty of fans are pushing back on the negativity, and in fact much of the conversation I'm seeing is more about the nature of reveals and fan reactions than expectations for the game itself. "One of the greatest things I've read on here is that if you love a game, don't visit its subreddit," said one wise Borderlands fan.
It's a pretty normal response to a big reveal from a long-running series—scattered feelings of disappointment countered with variations of 'unpopular opinion: I liked it'—but it does speak to the challenge of keeping a long running series fresh. The Borderlands games have all been hits, but no series is bulletproof. There used to be armies of Halo fans who'd descend on you if you said a single bad word about the Chief, and back then I never thought I'd see the series as disrespected as it was when Halo: Infinite was revealed—that was brutal.
The Borderlands movie that finally came out this year wasn't exactly a blockbuster—we called it "an irredeemable mess"—so Randy Pitchford and company are perhaps under a little extra pressure to prove they still have it. What little movement and shooting we saw in the trailer looked fun to me, and my gut says this one will do just fine.
Borderlands 4 is set to release sometime in 2025.
