Borderlands 4: Everything we know about Gearbox's next co-op FPS

Gearbox says it started working on Borderlands 4 right after it shipped Borderlands 3 in 2019. Five years and a couple spin-offs later, the next mainline Borderlands game is almost here.

The studio has had a somewhat turbulent ride over those years, merging with Embracer Group in 2021 and then being bought in 2024 by Take-Two Interactive, the parent company of Borderlands publisher 2K Games. It also released a Borderlands movie to not-so-rave reviews, but Gearbox head honcho Randy Pitchford took it in stride.

"So what you're saying is: You like what my friends and I do with our Borderlands videogames even more than you like what some of the biggest and best cast and crew of film makers on the planet have done," Pitchford tweeted after the movie struggled at the box office in its opening weekend. "I'm super flattered! We're working extra hard four you on what's next."

Here's everything we know about Borderlands 4.

What is the Borderlands 4 release date? 

Borderlands 4 launches on September 12, 2025. It was going to be September 23, but Gearbox announced in April that it was moving the date up a week.

Before it got delayed, Grand Theft Auto 6 was also set to release sometime in the second half of 2025, on consoles at least. It was surprising that Take-Two would put two of its biggest games up against each other. I would say it makes sense that GTA 6 got delayed because of this, but let's be real—there's no way it was delayed to make room for Borderlands 4. GTA is its own phenomenon, so it really would have been the other way around if GTA 6 was delayed because of concerns with intenral clashing.

Before the delay, Pitchford said there was no connection when Borderlands 4 got pushed up a week. "Borderlands 4 shipping early is 100% the result of confidence in the game and development trajectory backed by actual tasks and bug find/fix rates," he said.

Borderlands 4 trailers and story

Here's the latest Borderlands 4 video, the story trailer released in June 2025:

Official Story Trailer | Borderlands 4 - YouTube

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There have been five Borderlands 4 trailers so far: a teaser in August 2024, a longer trailer at the 2024 Game Awards, another gameplay trailer at Sony's State of Play event in February, a 20-minute "deep dive" at the April State of Play, which you can see above, and the latest story trailer. All of the videos are on the Borderlands YouTube channel.

The first teaser's celestial fireworks showed the aftermath of the events of Borderlands 3, when Lilith saved Pandora by teleporting its moon, Elpis, which turned out to be a giant vault key and was about to destroy the planet.

The Game Awards trailer picked up where that teaser left off, and introduced the villain of Borderlands 4, The Timekeeper, "a ruthless dictator who dominates the masses from on high."

We also learned that Borderlands 4 takes place on a new planet called Kairos. At a PAX panel in September, Gearbox said that the planet was "completely hidden" from the galaxy until now, so we're probably not going to find references to it in existing Borderlands lore.

The 20-minute deep dive above fills out the rest of the backstory. The Timekeeper was dominating all of Kairos with mind-control implants called "bolts" and synthetic soldiers known as "The Order," but then Lilith went and crashed a moon into his cloaking mechanism and wrecked the Kairos ecosystem. Lilith doesn't exactly come across as the good guy in this scenario, but The Timekeeper is a ruthless overlord, and with his order finally broken, the planet's people are now ripping out their bolts and rising up.

The story of Borderlands 4 starts six years after the unwanted moon showed up.

Then in the latest story trailer, the main cast, environments, and some bosses were shown off. It looks a little more serious than the Borderlands we're all used to, but graphically, it also looks the best the franchise has ever been.

Borderlands 4's vault hunters

There are four new vault hunters, but we don't know much about them yet

The Game Awards trailer gave us our first look at the four new playable vault hunters in Borderlands 4, and at a September PAX Panel , the studio talked generally about its strategy for designing vault hunters.

"With Borderlands 4, we want to bring it back to the player," said narrative director Sam Winkler. "We want to make sure the player and the vault hunters are the central characters of our story. We want to make sure the world is reactive, that the world is grounded. That while we keep our humor that brings a lot of people coming back to our franchise, in the game, we want to make sure that it's situational, that it emerges naturally. So while we're building these characters, we're always making sure that they have strong personalities, that they will react differently to different situations, that we see the effects of that."

The initial reaction to the look of the new hunters was mixed—some fans think they look too bland—but we still don't know much about them.

The deep dive video features Vex, the new Siren, and Exo-Solider Rafa, "a former Tediore trooper who wears an experimental exo-suit capable of digistructing an arsenal of weapons." Some of their skills are highlighted at around 3:20, and then at 16:30 in the video.

We do know that all Vault Hunters now have three active abilities. So instead of the usual single ability, Vault Hunters can now cycle between three, allowing for more control (and chaos) on the battlefield.

New Borderlands 4 gameplay features

There are three new gun manufacturers

Borderlands guns are themed after the universe's fictional manufacturers. Borderlands 4 will include guns from series usuals Jacobs, Maliwan, Vladof, Tediore, and Torque, but there are also three new gun makers:

• Order: "powerful charge and release blasts"
• Ripper: "fully auto"
• Daedalus: "reliable and easy to use ... can use multiple ammo types"

There's also a new system which allows guns to spawn with parts from multiple manufacturers, and artifacts have been replaced with "enhancements," which award bonuses to guns according to their manufacturer(s). The example in the deep dive video gave bonuses to any gun with a Daedalus part.

Grenades and heavy weapons no longer need ammo

There's a new gear slot called "ordinance" that holds grenades and heavy weapons, such as rocket launchers, and rather than using ammo they now operate on a cooldown.

The idea is to encourage use of these weapons in regular combat, rather than just boss fights, by removing anxiety around special ammo wastage.

Loot drop rates have been revised

Gearbox says that, to "make rarity matter again," it has reduced the drop rate of Legendaries. At the same time, the developer says that all guns should feel great in Borderlands 4, whatever their rarity. (Well, it says that they do feel great, but we'll judge for ourselves when we can play it.)

There are several new movement abilities

One of the most obvious changes visible in the trailers is the addition of new movement abilities. In the April 2025 deep dive, Gearbox listed what we'll be working with:

• Glide (allows long floaty jumps between ledges)
• Double jump
• Climbing
• "Point grapple" (As in, the kind of grappling hook that pulls you directly to a target, rather than a Spider-Man-style swing)
• We also see the player dashing, ground sliding, and using zip lines

There's no minimap

Instead, Borderlands 4 will have a compass bar that points toward objectives. There's also an optional combat radar that highlights targets as well as destinations, and indicates their height at the same time.

Why no minimap? "We want you to play the game and not play the map," explained Pitchford during a PAX East panel in May 2025. "A local space map is not a good way to navigate when you're thinking about objectives and opportunities—several at the same time that might be miles away—and a compass really helps us do that"

The combat radar was non-existent when Pitchford made these comments, but after some fan backlash and previews bemoaning the lack of help, the combat radar was internally whipped up, and will be available when the game launches.

What other new gameplay features are in Borderlands 4?

• The new planet features "dynamic weather and events."
• Silos are one of "several new activities" on the map. In the deep dive video, the player quickly hacks open a silo door, earning them a fast travel point and vault key fragment, which are collected to unlock hidden high-level dungeons.
• According to the deep dive video, each player in a co-op party can set their own difficulty level—not quite sure how that works yet.
• There's now a replay feature that lets you re-do missions and boss fights without having to load an old save, which sounds pretty nice.
• Vaults of legends can be opened by using vault key fragments. These vaults are challenging side activities.
• You have a customizable personal hoverbike called a DigiRunner which you can manifest out of thin air. In our preview, we noted that "It makes this amazing noise... it can rotate on a dime and strafe, which makes aiming its front-mounted minigun relatively easy, but it's also fast and its momentum prevents it from changing direction instantly, so it takes finesse to round corners and thread gaps between trees."
• Repkits are the new way to heal. Generally, you just spend a charge to heal-up, but you can also get your hands on upgraded Repkits that apply bonuses when you heal (e.g. reducing your Action Skill cooldown).
• As expected, there are fair few different enemy types. There's floating wardens with big hats who shoot sparkly magic at you (basically wizards); mechanical martial artists with glowing red faces that spin giant blades at you; and badass dudes in golden armor.

Secret messages

Borderlands 4 - Official Teaser Trailer - YouTube

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What do the encrypted messages in the trailers say?

The first two trailers have ended with flashes of alien script, and fans quickly decoded them by substituting letters for the symbols.

The first teaser ended with the encoded message: "He is watching. Break free."

The Game Awards trailer ended with a longer message composed of new symbols, which was decoded by Skarrow9 on YouTube. Using an automated tool for cracking substitution ciphers, they came up with:

• "Invader cut me open, I died, and that's just the start. Now my knife is redly suddenning. She saw right through me and into you. His hand on your neck. Rip it out from the roots."
• "You're gonna like what comes with it"
• "Time kept is brain lost"
• "It's your turn"