I'm feeling a bit lopsided after the big Borderlands 4 State of Play live show, which ended up being pretty generous with details even with Gearbox holding back for a more in-depth show timed coming later this month. The latest entry to the somehow 16-year-old series makes some big changes to one of its core pillars, gunplay, which looks pretty promising at first blush.
This follows the news that Borderlands 4 is launching more than a week early, which Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford says has nothing to do with the timing on GTA 6, the heavyweight project of publisher Take-Two.
Borderlands 4 features five returning weapon manufacturers and three new ones with their own quirks. Here's the full list:
- Jakobs focuses on headshots
- Maliwan spills elemental damage
- Vladof brings big magazines and a rate of fire to match
- Tediore guns explode when you chuck them on a reload
- Torgue specializes in explosions
- (New) The Order deals in "charge-and-release blasts"
- (New) Ripper doubles down on full-auto
- (New) Daedalus are "reliable" and "easy to use" with support for multiple ammo types
The glue holding these manufacturers together is a new "Licensed Parts" system that sounds a lot like weapon modding, but is seemingly tied to RNG. "This allows for behaviors and abilities from multiple manufacturers to spawn in a single weapon," Gearbox explained during the show.
In one example, a Vladof rifle sported a Torgue mag, Hyperion attachment, and Maliwan switch, "meaning it shoots fast and explodes things." It's currently unclear if we'll be able to customize these components ourselves, but it sounds like it's all down to what weapons drop with.
Still, this ought to make your umpteenth version of the same gun more interesting.
"The higher the rarity, the more parts it can randomly spawn, creating wilder and wilder loot," Gearbox added. "And that's before even getting into alt-fire modes, underbarrels, and elemental damage."
Another significant change is found in the gear menu. You've still got four weapon slots, with an Enhancement item taking the place of Artifacts and adding "bonuses to specific manufacturers" or guns with their parts, but I'm most interested in the new Ordnance slot.
Ordnance is a cooldown-based, not ammo-based, weapon slot shared by grenades and heavy weapons like rocket launchers. My current read of this slot is that grenades will have a short cooldown for better uptime, while rocket launchers or the chain guns demonstrated during the showcase would have a longer cooldown but pack a much greater punch.
My previous go-to Borderlands loadout generally included a rifle or submachine gun, a shotgun, a sniper, and a rocket. With Borderlands 4's Ordnance addition, my rocket slot is suddenly wide open. What will I do without my quadrilogy? Two rifles? Two shotguns, dare we dream? Grenades often felt a little throwaway in previous games, so as much as I hate change, I think I'm willing to make the trade here.
It's not quite a fifth weapon slot, but it sure sounds close enough in practice. And with no heavy ammo to worry about, you can fire a little more liberally too.
"No more saving the big guns for boss fights," as Gearbox put it. "Now you can blow stuff up as often as you want."
