Borderlands 4 laughs in the face of Borderlands 3's 1 billion guns as Gearbox says there's 30 billion this time, which the devs kept track of using a Matrix-style "wall" of weapons

I hope you weren't planning on getting too attached to any one weapon in Borderlands 4, because Gearbox is touting the 30 billion number this time around.

Since Borderlands was birthed onto the scene back in 2009, the series' go-to talking point is just how many guns it has. It started with 87 bazillion (17,750,000) guns in the original game, and since then, the number of guns has grown with each entry at a pace equal to how much worse the comedy has gotten, with Borderlands 3's 1 billion. And now that we're two console generations ahead and procedural generation has gotten way more elaborate, Gearbox is now touting even more guns.

Speaking to the Epic Games Store, Gearbox Software Art Director Adam May explained the process this time around. One of Borderlands' biggest features was that weapons were split by specific manufacturers, and this was a good way to tell what type of gun you're about to pick up by sight. For Borderlands 4, you'll be able to mix and match manufacturer parts, as May explains, "You can have a Daedalus underbarrel on a Maliwan shotgun, and suddenly you have Daedalus and Maliwan visually on one weapon."

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Gearbox producer Anthony Nicholson recalls that the game's art director, Jimmy Barnett, created a "wall of guns" akin to The Matrix (or Conker's Bad Fur Day). "It was this really large gun map where you could see all of the individual parts for all the individual guns, for all the individual manufacturers," Nicholson explains. He adds that the room was created "so you could see how each of those things were and how we could have those combinations roll together and how they would work – the slides, the animators, the actions, the art all fitting together. Because a certain gun, if it pumps one way, but there’s a long barrel that goes on the bottom, obviously those parts can’t go together."

Granted, as someone who doesn't love the loot aspect of Borderlands (or the comedy, so maybe the series isn't for me), this amount of weapons just screams that there's no point sticking with anything until the endgame.

Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford says Wolfenstein 3D and Diablo influenced the OG Borderlands as the devs aimed to "blend the moment-to-moment fun of a shooter" with the satisfaction of progression.