Borderlands 4 lead character designer Nick Thurston has revealed one specific area in which the upcoming looter-shooter is taking surprise influence from Baldur’s Gate 3. Despite the two games being completely different genres, the Borderlands 4 team evidently felt there were still some transferable lessons to be learned from Larian’s two-year-old title.
Borderlands 4 is the next iteration of Gearbox’s long-running looter-shooter franchise, featuring an all-new cast of Vault Hunters. Over the last couple of months, Borderlands 4 has been revealing more details about its Vault Hunters, giving players a better idea of what they can expect from the characters when it launches on September 12. However, one recent interview has offered a unique insight into Borderlands 4‘s influences when it comes to actually building these characters throughout a playthrough.
Speaking to Polygon, lead character designer Nick Thurston spoke about how character builds in Borderlands 4 are designed to be more varied than ever, citing Baldur’s Gate 3 and Path of Exile as specific examples, saying, “I’m a min-maxer. When I play an action RPG, I want to hit the end game and be doing billions of damage, but I want to do it in the way I want to do. In a lot of cases, there have been times where previous characters in our franchise have been very focused on one thing. But it was always really important to me that if you have this really cool character, you’re going to want to use him in a bunch of different ways.”
The specific comparisons to RPGs continued, with Thurston stating that, “For me, whenever I’m playing an RPG and my friend picks a class, I don’t want to pick the same class. It’s like you’re already doing this function, why do I need to do it? In previous Borderlands titles, you could be like ‘If you’re going to be Zero and I’m going to be Zero then we’re both going to do the same thing.’ Maybe that’s fine and fun for you, but I really want to be like, we have four Amons in this group and every single one of them has a different build.” If the approach comes together as intended, then it sounds as though Borderlands 4 will be more replayable than every Borderlands game prior.
It’s less than a month now until Borderlands 4‘s release date on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S, although the game will also arrive on Nintendo Switch 2 in October. Although it’s great to get a closer look at the game before release, hopefully there are still a few surprises left in store for players, even for those who are tuned into the game’s entire marketing campaign.
September 12, 2025
Rating Pending
Unreal Engine 5
Online Co-Op, Online Multiplayer
Yes – all
