It’s been nearly six years since Borderlands 3 debuted during the previous console generation. This fall, Borderlands 4 is taking advantage of the power of the current consoles by thrusting players into a large “seamless world” that doesn’t need many loading screens during the long hours it will take to explore it all. That’s a major improvement over Borderlands 3’s Pandora, which had enough loading screens to test the players’ patience.
While speaking with Game Informer, senior project producer Anthony Nicholson noted that the Borderlands 4 team didn’t initially set out to make Kairos an open-world environment. However, the power of Unreal Engine 5 “gave us other advantages to be able to do things and kind of went into being able to make a seamless world and things of that nature.”
World-building director Jason Reiss added that there are “a lot more 360 combat areas where players can enter into spaces from any direction, including from the air–and we have to account for that now with all these crazy movement abilities. It’s been all about, ‘Let’s create a large, dynamic, awesome place where players can feel like badasses.'”