Borderlands 4 director says use dialogue skip mod at your peril—it might turbo-brick your missions

Borderlands 4 unlock UVHM: A close-up shot looking down at Lilith, who's looking upwards with a worried expression.

(Image credit: Gearbox)

Sick of Borderlands 4's chatty characters? Just want to press ahead and get to the shooting? Wish you could hammer a button to speed through their dialogue like you can in most other games? Good news! A courageous modder has created a dialogue-skip mod.

Whatever you do, don't ever use it.

That's not me telling you that, it's Graeme Timmins, Gearbox bigwig and creative director on Borderlands 4. Okay, to be fair, Timmins wasn't quite as foreboding as that, but he did caution players against using this (or any other) dialogue skipping mod when they brought it to his attention. Not because he's precious about you hearing his game's lovely words, but because "skipping dialog could lead to broken mission states that might not be recoverable."

Borderlands 4 patch notes: An upper-body shot of Zane with his hands out to either side and a cautious, uneasy facial expression. — (Image credit: Gearbox)

Not having any marketable talent beyond writing, sometimes amusingly, about videogames, I don't have the technological know-how to tell you how much sense this makes. It strikes me as very weird that BL4 should take such an issue with a feature that's so basic in many other games, but perhaps there's a good reason for it. Or maybe Timmins really just does want you to hear that Claptrap dialogue and this is a cunning ploy.

It does add a new frisson to speedruns using dialogue skippers, though. Sure, you're shaving however many minutes off your completion time, but every circumvented line rolls the dice on your whole game going kablooey.

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One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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