By Griff Griffin

Copyright newsweek

With “Borderlands 4”, the long-running looter shooter series hits a rare milestone: an estimated 100 million total copies sold.Randy Pitchford is better equipped than anyone to tell you why.Ahead of “Borderlands 4″‘s release date on September 12, 2025, we chat to the energetic Gearbox CEO about how he’s making sure the game delivers – and what’s different this time around.From the seamless open-world that leaves loading screens in the dust, to cutting down on some of the more juvenile humour, “Borderlands 4” marks a fresh chapter. Pitchford says it is, without question, the best “Borderlands” game ever made.”Is that grandiose? I don’t think so. I love this game. I’ve spent a lot of time in it. I am excited to talk about it.”Borderlands 4 InterviewNewsweek: Can you walk us through the big new feature this time around?Pitchford: Oh, I mean as if there’s just one feature. “Borderlands 4” is the culmination of my work with Gearbox, the incredible team—gosh, over the last 20 years. I’ve been working on “Borderlands” with my friends for over 20 years. We’re starting to get pretty good at it. One of the cool things about making the sequels is you learn what works and what doesn’t work with each prior attempt. And we’re really honing in on it.So, look, we push boundaries where we wanted to, and we’ve got plenty of innovation.One of the coolest things about “Borderlands 4” is the technology has finally caught up to our ambition. You can tell, for people that have been with this for a long time, we’ve always wanted to have a wider, more open world. But you’ve always had those load times, you’ve always had the constraints, and you give every in and out of the computer, dealing with the limitations of what computers can do.But with the new hardware and the new software that we built, we can seamlessly include all the content we want in wherever you are—to be passive, seamless world. It’s the largest world that we’ve ever made before. And there’s no load times from area to area—as you go through the world, you find that it’s seamless. This is really, really exciting because it changes everything.Now I can see for miles and everything I can see, I can explore. So, of course, we’ve built traversal features—and I’m not talking about simple things—from the character’s perspective, like being able to double jump, glide, dash around the environment with more freedom than we ever had before. But you can even digistruct, use technology to summon a personal vehicle—even if it’s miles and miles away.Newsweek: I wanted to touch on the lack of loading screens. So are there any loading screens if you go from exterior into an interior – is it completely zero?Pitchford: Not from interior to exterior, no. There’s a couple of occasions where—it’s not really a load—but, you know, like if you die, there’s a process to respawn, and you’ve been playing with that, the length of time.If you fall in combat, it’s not the end of the game. You’ll be digistructed, and you reappear in a location. And we send you into a tunnel through the void, through the phase with this vortex kind of experience, and that takes a few moments, but that’s a game design decision. Not really a technical limitation.You can be outside and look from the tallest vista in the distance to the deepest canyon – even see the moon – and see a shack with a cave system underneath, and everything you see is explorable: into the interior, down into the caves, all the way up to the moon. If you can see it, you can get there. I love that.Newsweek: In terms of traversal, what vehicles are in the game?Pitchford: One of the biggest things that we wanted to contribute with “Borderlands 4” was the introduction of a personal vehicle. And there’s lots to choose from. You’ll unlock more as you play, and you’ll also discover customization, so you can trick it out to be a very personal version of your personal vehicle.And this is something that you can use in the game in your constant travel. There’s a lot of stuff you’re going to get. The game is a genre reinvented—from shooter to looter—and it’s about collecting all this stuff: guns, gadgets, even vehicles.Newsweek: A key part of “Borderlands” is the humor. What’s the tone of this game?Pitchford: “Borderlands” has always lived in a space that is in between comedy and drama. In fact, that’s where the title “Borderlands” comes from. A borderland is that weird zone between things that don’t get along. It’s a borderland between a role-playing game and a first-person shooter.It’s a borderland between realism and surrealism. It’s a borderland between comedy and drama. And every “Borderlands” game has always had a very serious centerline with very high stakes, where what’s going to happen matters a lot to your character and the characters of the world. But we’ve also had a lot of fun. So it’s not a comedy, and it’s not a drama, but it’s somehow both.And there is insane, crazy humor. Like, you can feel the creators of Gearbox. You can feel the artists and the authors and the talent, because everything we’ve done is handcrafted, handmade in the game. And you can feel our personalities come through. And a lot of times, we don’t take ourselves too seriously.And sometimes, in past “Borderlands” games, we played with the range of humor that we allowed ourselves to hit. And we’ve even been criticized. You know, in “Borderlands 3”, we went pretty nuts with some base humor. We had plenty of poop jokes.And I think when we say that we’re going for a very serious tone, the game’s never wholly serious, and the game’s never wholly a comedy. It definitely is in a borderland between those two things.What we’re really saying is, we have pushed the boundaries in past games, and we’ve also discovered when we’ve gone too far. And so with “Borderlands 4”, it’s sort of the refinement of all our experiences. And we feel like we’re closer to the bullseye.Newsweek: In this game you’ve got different weapon parts. Can you walk us through what abilities and perks come with those different parts?Pitchford: In “Borderlands 4”, we have a fun idea. You know, we’ve invented these manufacturers – there’s a whole universe, a whole fiction – and our fans get really, really immersed in it. And there are corporations that are running planets, almost like governments, in the “Borderlands” universe. And they can be very capitalistic.And of course, some of them have figured out that they can make even more money by licensing their technology to other corporations. So it’s now possible to find a weapon manufactured by one corporation, which has a very specific proprietary technology, like, say, a Hyperion Corporation, which has shield projectors that come up on the front of a weapon. So I have a gun that’s also basically a shield at the same time.And if I have a Hyperion-made gun with that shield technology, it’s hard to find that where it also is a licensed part from, say, the Maliwan Corporation, which has become an expert in manipulating elemental effects, having bullets that shoot electricity or fireballs coming out of machine guns.And combining technologies from different manufacturers, that’s when all kinds of interesting new permutations happen.Newsweek: How does a character at the start of the game compare to a character at the end of the game?Pitchford: So one of the funnest things there is to do is: at the beginning of the game, in hour one, we might stumble upon an enemy or an area that is just too different. It’s just too challenging. Ignore it. Don’t worry about it. Go do stuff you can deal with.Get stronger and more powerful because you’d be surprised. Before too long, five, six hours later, time flies by when you’re having fun, you go back to that thing that was hard and you’re a God, man.You are a god. You can walk through it, just destroy everything by looking at it. And it just feels amazing. I love that sense of power and that sense of strength that comes from growth and progression.And I think that’s why – gosh, what are we at now? I think we’ll cross over 100 million customers with the Borderlands franchise, which is just a phenomenal achievement in all of media, not just video games.It’s very, very rare to have something that has reached over 100 million people, and here we are. It’s just an incredible thing, and I can’t believe we’re part of it.