Me and J played about four hours of Borderlands 4 this evening. It's been fun so far and the positive (non-Steam) reviews have us hopeful.


The teaser video seemed to show Pandora's moon (Elpis) phase shifting and crashing into some faraway planet. BL4 begins on this planet, Kairos, months (or was it years?) after the incident. Though it's on the other side of a Lilith phase shift, Kairos seems to be connected to the rest of the galaxy; it has human inhabitants and the standard weapons manufacturers (Jakobs, Maliwan, Vladof, etc.). I imagine the plot will eventually take us back to Pandora but for the moment our focus is on escaping The Timekeeper.


Oh yeah, Claptrap is there too.


BL4 plays a lot like the other games in the series: guns, grenades, skills, knockdowns/second winds, sliding, butt slams. This one has a double jump and seems to be designed to let you use the vertical freedom to easily roam the entire map.


I went with Harlowe. Her action skill (that I chose) is to throw a large ball of plasma or whatever at baddies, doing lots of damage and freezing the ones that can tank it. The freeze is nice for the handful of badass enemies we've encountered. I haven't explored the locked options yet, in time.


An article Kevin sent said that oranges are quite rare and purples are underrated. In Borderlands 2, purples were often important to minmax builds, perhaps that is the case here. At this point I've only seen early game loot but it's nice to see a Borderlands weapon name like "Thrown 0% APR Widget".


There are a few quality of life improvements in BL4, the most notable one at this stage is the ability to spawn vehicles anywhere. There's something to be said for having to hoof it around - particularly when you've gotten your vehicle blown up - but I'm not complaining. Kevin's article also mentioned that raid bosses can be respawned quickly for a small fee.

On the flip side, the menu transitions are slow. Not as slow as Witcher 3, but still pretty bad.


We did a very Borderlandsy sidequest. We fetched moonshine ingredients for some old hermit then dealt with his test subjects when it inevitably made them go berzerk. Classic. There are also some activities that aren't common to the series, like unlockable fast travel towers and recurring flag defense landmarks. The variety is nice but I need more stick time to judge where the side tasks fall on the spectrum of 'interesting' to 'tedious'.

	Hey, you. You're finally awake. You were trying to cross the border, right? Walked right into that Imperial ambush, same as us, and that thief over there.	�
	From Skyrim (pic unrelated)

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