Borderlands 3's story is… interesting. As someone who has played most of Gearbox's loot'em shoot'ems, I agree with the general consensus that 3's story is kinda the worst. Mind, I've never hopped into Pandora's (or its associated moons') deep narrative—but after hours of outdated memes, when a certain character sacrificed themselves to Beyonce's "This Girl Is On Fire", I straight-up laughed. Which is generally not a good sign.
Per a recent interview with IGN, that's something the Borderlands 4 team is keen to fix: "I think that we had [our] own internal critiques about the tone and the level of humor present in Borderlands 3," says narrative director Sam Winkler.
"[It's] something that we already were starting to address in the DLCs for Borderlands 3, but we wanted to really make that a central point of Borderlands 4," which Winkler explains involved a lot of self-reflection and question-asking: "'Where is this? What does it mean? Why are we doing this next big, monolithic game with a 4 in its title?' … 'How are we also going to evolve the storytelling, the humor, and the characters, and what we want to do with them?’"
Lead writer Taylor Clark puts it a little more bluntly: "When I was talking to Sam, the grounded tone was a priority. Grounding the humor in the world, he made it very clear that if I tried to put a meme in the game, he would come to my house with a baseball bat."
Winkler's quick to state, however, that he's not "anti-meme", and that "there's a specific meme in this game, and I feel justified putting it in because I accidentally created it." He plays it coy, but I'm almost 100% certain it's Zanzibart, a stone-cold and accurate roast of FromSoftware's storytelling, undercut by the fact he'd recently written, uh, Borderlands 3.
In fairness to Winkler, he later confirmed that "I WILL consume the Charnel Amulet in the Cathedral of the Dusk Knight to unlock the secret door into Zanzibart's tomb so I can read the flavour text on his mouldering deathmask that says '... am I remembered?' and then spend an hour on his Wiki Page", so it was all in good fun. Anyway.
Lin Joyce, managing director of narrative properties, adds that the team is regularly "gut check"-ing itself: "'Is this as funny to the characters and their lived experience as it is to the player? Can we do both?' That situational comedy and context helped us also keep the tone grounded, and the comedy then has purpose."
Overall, Winkler talks as though he wants to strike a balance—goofy and whacky circumstances that sometimes produce jokes, with characters that take the situation seriously. He makes a comparison to Star Trek: Lower Decks: "[That show] works really well—it just won a Hugo Award—because it takes its characters seriously. It takes its circumstances seriously.
"It's a project that is clearly made out of love for Star Trek and the characters in the story, rather than some sort of parody of it. I think that on Borderlands 3, in our worst hours, it sometimes felt like parody, and that is where we edged into a red line." Winkler adds that the team intends to "balance both humor, levity, and authentic character storytelling that takes itself seriously."
I'm tentatively hopeful. Again, I don't need Borderlands 4 to win awards, but while I had a stupid amount of fun zipping around as movespeed Zane in BL3, the story nearly spoiled it all. But I've seen evidence that Gearbox has been cleaning up its act. The DLCs were downright fine, and while BL4's character trailers haven't been mind-blowing, they've left me genuinely curious as to whether ol' Gearbox can pull it off. Also apparently Claptrap will make you cry or something. I'll believe it when I see it.
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