Everything we’ve seen of Borderlands 4 so far, and honestly it’s not much, strongly suggests that yes, it will be a Borderlands game. But some things change. As we said when the first trailer for Borderlands 4 dropped at The Game Awards last week, the art style that made the previous games so visually striking seems to be fading into the background. Earlier today, narrative director Sam Winkler said on X that the “toilet humor” so prevalent in Borderlands 3 will also be toned down – quite dramatically from the sounds of it.
I don’t think anyone would say that Borderland was ever a “serious” game series, but Borderlands 3 was a bit much, to say the least.
“We’re stuck in the late 2000s, when superficial vulgarity was enough to qualify as edgy – Borderlands 3 is truly obsessed with shit – and when the series was being created,” we wrote in our 2019 review. “We’re stuck in a time when memes lasted for months rather than days, when referential humor was still new and not comprehensive, when you could point to something even the slightest abnormal or disgusting and call it a joke.”
Even then, this style of comedy hasn’t aged particularly well, and I don’t think it’s gotten any better five years later. Fortunately, Borderlands 4 seems to be aiming higher in the comedy department: Narrative director Sam Winkler said today that he “worked on the game with some of the funniest people I know as contract writers,” but in response to someone who expressed hope for “dark humor instead of fart jokes,” he replied: “I can’t speak too much about BL4’s content, but I stand by my unwavering criticism of BL3’s excess of toilet humor.”
Lest there be any doubt about Winkler’s position on the matter, he was a bit more explicit in another post: “I’m not saying there are no toilets, but if the word “skibidi” appears in the game under my watch, I will cry real tears. Paul Tassi joked that we would have a gun called the Hawk 2A, and another creator asked me if that was true, and I wanted to put my hand in a sink grinder.
This is good news. I like scatological humor as much as the next guy, but it’s a shaky skeleton on which to build a narrative, and at some point all it takes is, “Pull my finger” was funny when my grandfather did it, but I was eight years old too and he didn’t this over and over again for 30 hours. I don’t expect Borderlands 4 to be a “sophisticated” game in any sense, and we’d all probably be disappointed if it was, but breaking out of the endless litany of poop jokes is definitely a move in the right direction.
Returning to the PAX panel in September, Winkler said something similar, if less direct.
“We want to make sure the world stays responsive, stays grounded,” Winkler said. “While we retain our humor, which is what keeps many people coming back to our series, in-game we want to make sure it is situational and comes naturally. So when we’re creating these characters, we’re always trying to make sure that they have a forceful personality, that they’re going to react differently to different situations, and that we can see the effects of that.
Borderlands 4 is scheduled for release sometime in 2025.
