Everything we've seen about Borderlands 4 so far, which to be fair isn't much, very strongly suggests that yes, it will be a Borderlands game. But some things are changing. As we said when the first Borderlands 4 trailer dropped at The Game Awards last week, the art style that made the previous games so visually distinctive appears to be fading into the background. And earlier today, narrative director Sam Winkler said on X that the "toilet humor" so prevalent in Borderlands 3 is going to be dialed back too—pretty dramatically, from the sounds of it.
I don't think anyone would say that Borderland was ever a "serious" game series, but Borderlands 3 was a bit much, to put it mildly.
"It's stuck in the late '00s, when surface level vulgarity was enough to qualify as edgy—Borderlands 3 is seriously obsessed with turds—and when the series was first conceived," we wrote in our 2019 review. "It's stuck in a time when memes lasted months rather than days, when referential humor was still a novelty and not exhausting, when you could point at something the slightest bit abnormal or gross and call it a joke."
That style of comedy hadn't aged particularly well even then, and five years down the road I imagine it hasn't gotten any better. Luckily, Borderlands 4 appears to be aiming higher on the comedy front: Narrative director Sam Winkler said today that he's "gotten to work with some of the funniest people I know as contract writers" on the game, but in response to someone who expressed hope for "dark humor instead of fart jokes," he replied, "Not at liberty to talk much about the content of BL4, but I remain firm in my criticism of BL3's overabundance of toilet humor."
Lest there be any doubt as to where Winkler stands on the matter, he was somewhat more pointed in another post: "I’m not gonna say there's no toilets but if the word 'skibidi' ships in the game under my watch I'm gonna cry real tears. Paul Tassi joked that we were gonna have a gun called Hawk 2A and a fellow dev asked me if it was real and I wanted to put my hand down the sink grinder."
That's good news. I like scatological humor as much as the next guy but it's a rickety frame to build a narrative on, and at some point, enough is enough: "Pull my finger" was funny when my grandpa did it, but I was also eight, and he didn't do it over and over repeatedly for 30 hours. I don't expect Borderlands 4 will be a "sophisticated" game in any sense, and we'd all probably be disappointed if it was, but stepping it up from an endless litany of poop jokes is definitely movement in the right direction.
Back at a PAX panel in September, Winkler said something similar, though less direct.
"We want to make sure the world is reactive, that the world is grounded," Winkler said. "That while we keep our humor that brings a lot of people coming back to our franchise, in the game, we want to make sure that it's situational, that it emerges naturally. So while we're building these characters, we're always making sure that they have strong personalities, that they will react differently to different situations, that we see the effects of that."
Borderlands 4 is set to drop sometime in 2025.
