Highlights

  • Borderlands series pioneering looter shooters for 15+ years with diverse gun types and legendary gear rain.
  • Gearbox should assess drop rates and focus on legendary weapons balance for Borderlands 4's success.
  • Next entry could benefit from reducing redundancy in loot, narrowing down specific useful traits for players.

Gearbox Software's Borderlands series sits high atop the hill of looter shooters. Having had a big hand in helping solidify the genre, Borderlands has been one of the poster franchises for it for over 15 years. Borderlands' inspiring array and iterations of gun types and other equipable items form the heart of its identity, with the titles having loot literally rain down upon players' characters at times during the course of their adventures through its satirical sci-fi futuristic world.

While fans have been speculating on how Borderlands' arsenal of weapons will appear and function in the next entry, this may be a good time for Gearbox to take a step back and assess the bigger picture by stripping away some of the excesses on display in recent releases in terms of the types of its legendary gear, and how frequently they drop. Taking such a stance and possibly shifting focus in this area could serve to bring Borderlands back to its roots while showcasing one of the elements the studio does best, alongside what else may be in store for its latest outing.

Long assumed to be in the works, Borderlands 4 was recently confirmed to be in development following the announcement of Gearbox's sale by Embracer Group to Take-Two Interactive/2K, with the studio experiencing layoffs as one of the results.

borderlands 3 vault hunter group standing and shooting
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Borderlands 4 Could Scale Back its Legendary Drop Rates to Better Results

Borderlands' Legendary Loot Pool Through the Years

Borderlands' core gameplay loop is largely defined by the chase for better guns with either more outright firepower and/or bonus effects that hopefully then create further synergies between class builds. Classified by colored tiers, also in large part invented/standardized by the series, it is always a thrill for players to see a glowing orange legendary item fly from a defeated enemy after a hard-fought battle, or pop out of a well-hidden treasure chest. Notably, legendary items were comparatively rarer in earlier Borderlands titles, carrying more heft and a sense of reward. BL3's drop rate, though, generally increased for legendaries. While this may have been a welcome change at the onset, it also came with drawbacks, as too much of a good thing can risk diminishing what makes it special.

Eventually, players could find themselves in the possession of a veritable arsenal of legendary equipment, with a portion going entirely unused. Latter entries did introduce recycling machines, allowing players to recombine less class-relevant or outdated weapons into a Frankenstein's version of better or at least different versions, rendering cluttered leftovers back into forms that could be efficiently reintegrated into preferred playstyles. Borderlands 3 even featured a gun that shoots other guns, which precisely fits into the franchise's identity and design philosophy. However, this idea ended up feeling a little undercooked in execution, and not quite able to realize its true potential given the nature of the series. With the next generation Borderlands currently in the oven, it's important that Gearbox gets this recipe right for it.

How Borderlands 4 Could Fine-Tune its Legendary Weapons and Drop Rate

An increasing amount of less desirable legendary items can distill the total reserve, and diminish their discovery until receiving ones that meaningfully complement the variety of builds fans can design for their Vault Hunters in Borderlands. In this sense, perhaps the next title could include an option/setting to have loot of either legendary, or all rarities, containing only traits and bonuses applicable to the current active character. This would reduce redundancy and aid in keeping some weapons' utilities. It might also help the grind often found in farming high-level bosses etc. for god roll weapons, or at least ones that are more in line with players' carefully crafted setups.

Borderlands has tweaked the functionality of its guns throughout the course, sometimes to the disapproval of fans. As it strives to find the latest balance against its previous iterations while moving forward, reining in the number and rate at which legendary items are handed out, and instead narrowing them down to be more specifically useful and thus more treasured, may prove to be to Borderlands' advantage in making its loot loop exciting for the upcoming entry.