I’m glad Borderlands 4 is on the way. Sure, I’ve lost a bit of my Borderlands sense of humor over the years, and of course I think Claptrap is one of the greatest torments ever inflicted on an undeserving human race. When it comes down to it, though, I’m as much of a fan of a bajillion procedurally generated weapons as anyone. Another Borderlands sequel is one I’ll welcome.
But damn, it really seems like this Gamescom teaser was meant to ride a larger wave of goodwill, right?
It was a good teaser, don’t get me wrong. I want to know why that moon came out of that wormhole, what the big, fragile cloaking field on that planet is, and what those alien glyphs mean at the end. This is gripping stuff! I’m hooked!
But for a game we basically already knew was coming, it’s a reveal without much substance. Those wordless 80 seconds, with the slow rotation of the series’ signature bandit mask, culminate in the raw confidence of something designed as a mic drop. It’s a teaser for an audience already hungry for more.
Unfortunately, if you drop the microphone after a performance like the debacle in the movie Borderlands, all many people will hear is a muffled sound.
That’s not to say people aren’t interested in more Borderlands. If you add up views from the official Borderlands channel and uploads from Gamescom and gaming news portals, the teaser has already been viewed several million times. But those views are coming from commenters who get 12,000 likes for jokingly saying it’s “Gearbox’s apology letter for giving us the Borderlands movie.”
We’ve seen how powerfully film and television adaptations can amplify a game’s impact on the public consciousness. Following the well-documented Netflix boom that League of Legends and Cyberpunk experienced, the Fallout TV series managed to increase daily player activity by six times. If Bethesda could have announced a new Fallout game in the weeks that followed, Todd Howard probably would have had a shot at canonization. (I don’t know how Catholicism works.)
The reveal of Borderlands 4 should have been a triumph for the team behind it. Instead, it’s only slowly coming closer.
