Borderlands 4 developer Gearbox is "confident" that its upcoming looter shooter is "turning out to be better" than Borderlands 3, according to boss Randy Pitchford.
Pitchford has been doing some investigation on Twitter over the last week or so, polling Borderlands fans on which factors they consider are more likely to correlate with a "better" game, from average play time to positive user reviews. Overall, his polls suggested that fans value "high actual play time" above other factors, although he's since pointed out that, in an "interesting" twist, players also voted Borderlands 2 as a "larger" game than Borderlands 3, despite the actual stats showing a higher average playtime on the latter.
In his latest post on the matter, Pitchford notes that "I wouldn't focus on the time – it's the relativity that matters." After all, in this context, average playtimes are a slightly inaccurate way to measure things since you've got people on both extremes – those who'll play for all of five minutes, and others who rack up hundreds if not thousands of hours – influencing the overall figures. That, and "BL2 has an advantage for having been out so much longer than BL3."
Overall, though, his playtime results suggest Borderlands 3 "is 'better' than BL2 by the standard the people who responded to my poll have favored." Pitchford recognises that "obviously individual tastes vary and entertainment is subjective. We are all edge cases."
Concluding, however, it doesn't sound like the results of Pitchford's polls really mattered that much at all when it comes to Borderlands 4. "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 adds.
For now, it's just a waiting game to see if that really is the case. There's still quite a wait for Borderlands 4, with it set to arrive on most platforms on September 12, but hey, that's 11 whole days sooner than we originally expected.
