Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford has talked about how the team approached realism for Borderlands 4, and the answer seems to be to not approach it at all.
We're still a bit away from Borderlands 4 arriving (even longer if you're waiting on the Switch 2 version), but Gearbox has announced that the game has gone gold around a month and a half early. Now that it's ready to go, 2K and Gearbox have been ramping up the marketing machine with new character trailers, and from the new gameplay it's been pretty easy to notice that the movement looks way better this time around with the likes of double jumping introduced into players' kits.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Pitchford explains why the team has gone in on the movement this time around. "The thing we most wanted to explore was to free ourselves," he states when speaking about the game's new movement mechanics. He adds: "Borderlands is already batshit; why do we care about the laws of physics? We're a video game, you know? What if we just freed ourselves and found the most fun way to maneuver around? That's where you get into things like double jumping and gliding through the air for no reason."
While I'm not expecting Titanfall-level greatness from Borderlands 4's movement, it's refreshing to hear it was a priority this time around, as the older entries felt very Call of Duty-esque to me; which is fine in a confined twitch shooter, less so in a big game with an expansive world. Now I just need to hear the writing got a major overhaul and I'm in.
