2025 Preview: Borderlands 4 needs to get the tone right in today’s meme culture

When a new Borderlands project is coming, the question is never about whether or not it will play well. The Borderlands series is always fun from a gameplay perspective, and in some cases – such as the first two games – results in excellent shooter RPGs that have yet to be beaten in some aspects.

The problem is always with the tone. Some people love the humour in Borderlands, others find it jarring. The games strike the vibe of an HMV t-shirt of Rick and Morty. They are a 3 for 2 offer on vape refills. It feels almost impossible to imagine a Borderlands game devoid of that, but what we’d love from Borderlands 4 is something that leans much closer to the first game in the series than the third in terms of writing.

Sure, the first game had a bit of internet humour, but this was in a pre-Marvel dialogue climate, one before the internet and meme culture had parasitically infected everything. Compare that to Borderlands 3, where the whole game was desperately trying to rely on internet memes and references that were probably out of date as they were being written.

We don’t think this is ‘old man yells at cloud’ stuff, we just think it feels like a game being written for an audience that doesn’t exist. Games take a long time to make. Memes are born, live, and die within a week. When the internet was a kinder, more novel place, you could get away with a Leroy Jenkins joke or 40, but in the age of TikTok, leave the internet humour to the internet.

We’d love Borderlands 4 to rely on the characters and their relationships as the basis of humour. Introduce more excellent side characters like the first two games did, and put down the shotgun that is jokes about Rizz and Skibidi Toilet.

This won’t happen entirely (because we already know that Lilith will likely return), but we’d love Gearbox to completely cut ties with the established lore and characters and try something else with the same gameplay foundation. Sure, you can keep Claptrap – we were all 14 once and found his dubstep quest in Borderlands 2 funny – but we’d happily pay £600 for a version without Tiny Tina.

From a gameplay perspective, there’s not a great deal we would change from the recent entry. The thing the series has never wavered on is how well it dishes out loot. No game other than perhaps Diablo has so expertly captured the drip feed of new weapons, and we want that exact same system to return.

Come up with new grenade modifiers, insane effects, guns that shoot out 100 bullets at once in every direction, we don’t massively care. The act of picking up a gun and shooting at something as numbers explode off of them is still fun, we just want to be given a more compelling reason to do it.

Borderlands is an absolutely massive franchise for Take-Two and we imagine the game will be massive, so we’d love for the series to find its feet again. An absolutely awful film aside, there’s a lot to like about Borderlands, and while the third game was a bit of a side step, a sequel in the mold of 1 and 2 could be excellent.

More 2025 game previews:

• Death Stranding 2
• Monster Hunter Wilds
• Omega 6