The first time Bethesda boss Todd Howard was selling us all on Skyrim, somewhere around the Cretaceous period, he famously insisted that "that mountain is not just a backdrop, you can walk all the way to the top of that mountain."
This 'you can climb that mountain' promise has evolved into one of the many memes stuck to Howard's leather jacket like a fish hook in your thumb, and it's a promise that Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford has now one-upped with extremely similar verbiage in his excitement for Borderlands 4.
Speaking at a PAX East panel earlier today, Pitchford discussed the scope of Borderlands 4's not-technically-open-world environments. He reiterated that the new setting of Kairos is "by far the biggest universe that we've built. And it's seamless. There's no load times."
And then Howard seems to astral project and assume control of Pitchford, who says: "You see something anywhere on the screen, a mile away, up in the sky, you will be able to get there."
Lots of games with big worlds have made similar promises, and plenty have generally lived up to the idea, including Skyrim. There's a reason Skyrim is now a verb used to describe climbing mountains like a particularly stubborn goat.
I think the best way to avoid getting too hung up on this or similar design semantics is, like with the law, to respect and follow the spirit, if not the letter. Will this stop some fastidious Borderlands 4 players from posting granular video breakdowns of the limitations that any environment is sure to have because it turns out game worlds can't go on forever? Absolutely not.
As a longtime Borderlands enjoyer, I am genuinely intrigued by the environmental depth and verticality that Gearbox is promising in Borderlands 4. Movement mechanics have been expanded and modernized, a grappling hook is always catnip to me, and Pitchford spent quite some time talking up the ability to go a zillion miles away from your co-op partners to explore and then instantly teleport back to each other with no downtime.
I don't think I'll be jumping 10,000 times to scale the set dressing – these games often forget to put something interesting atop the proverbial mountain – but I guess it's cool that I have the option.
With Borderlands 4, Gearbox says "we've overhauled our drop rates and loot across the game" – and admits that "in Borderlands 3, [Legendaries] dropped too often."
