Borderlands 4 desperately needs to make one major gameplay change to improve its story

While the latest teaser for Borderlands 4 Revealed at Gamescom Opening Night Live may have pleased some fans of the franchise, the game itself will need to make some major improvements to how its story is told if it wants to have a better reputation than past entries. Borderlands 4Previously only “softly confirmed” by statements from developers, was finally officially announced for an unspecified release date of 2025, but more than five years after the release of Borderlands 3, The developers of the game may need to rethink their approach to the story.

While the Borderlands Series has never been known for its story – outside the original Tales from the Borderlands Developed by Telltale, or breakout characters like Handsome Jack – Borderlands 3 It received a largely negative response to its story upon release, with heavy criticism for its pacing, plot, and treatment of characters from past games, though its shooter gameplay was praised. Even apart from the debatable quality of BL3s history, however, there is one issue that it and others Borderlands Games suffer from, which hopefully won’t be repeated in the next game.

Borderlands 4 needs to keep its story out of the way

The story of Borderlands interferes too much with its gameplay

Setting aside the actual quality of the story, Borderlands Has a major problem with its story in the way of its gameplay – to the point that it is a relatively common suggestion for even new players to remove dialogue and cutscene files from their Borderlands 3 Installation. But while BL3 At worst, due to the combative quality of her writing, the problem was present in every main line Borderlands game to date, resulting in drastically slowed-down gameplay and a particularly frustrating experience for players who replay the games on different characters.

A big part of the problem is that very little of the history of Borderlands is ever skippable – Except for the cutscenes of Borderlands 3Which were eventually made skippable in a post-launch patch, the franchise as a whole forces players to engage with the story. And while this is fine for an initial game, Borderlands is also a series that encourages replaying each game multiple times, with several different playable characters in each game that do not share progress between them.

It should also be noted that Even on a first play of A Borderlands game, the story gets in the way of the gameplayDrastically slowing down the pace. Even in Borderlands 3With the ability to skip cutscenes, the majority of the story is still conveyed through dialogue and world events that keep the player from advancing objectives until they are completed, and the result is that players will end up spending a lot of their time doing nothing but Waiting for NPCs to finish their dialogue or complete some action that allows them to advance.

How Borderlands 4 can make its story less intrusive

How the next borderlands can improve his story

One area where Borderlands 4 Can immediately improve on previous games Cut out the time players spend doing nothing but waiting for dialogue to finish. The simplest way to do this, conceptually, is to simply allow players to skip dialogue, allowing them to interact with the story as much or as little as they want. Another solution would be to reduce the amount of waiting time by placing dialogue during fights or travel time, or simply not closing objectives behind dialogue completion.

These fixes, or other similar solutions, would give the gameplay of Borderlands 4 More time to shine, creating a smoother first time experience and especially streamlining the process of replaying the game multiple times. So, while players may not have much confidence in the quality of Borderlands 4s history, especially after the poor reception to Borderlands 3, New Tales from the BorderlandsAnd these Borderlands Movie, the game can at least shine a spotlight on the series’ more reliably well-received aspects.

While the history and characters of Borderlands While appealing to some players, the series’ greatest strengths have usually been gameplay-related. But with like these Borderlands Games have handled story and gameplay in relation to each other, the story can often feel like it ends up in the way even for players who don’t dislike it, leading to long periods of downtime where no gameplay is happening. To truly improve the series and set a better direction forward, Borderlands 4 May need to reconsider the series approach to storytelling and give the shooting more spotlight.