Making a gargantuan game like Borderlands 4

Like the talkative robot mascot Claptrap, the Borderlands series keeps on chugging. The newest entry, Borderlands 4 has debuted to seemingly strong sales and positive praise from critics, adding to Gearbox’s track record of producing successful hits even as the industry navigates troubled times. 

To learn more about making a massive game like Borderlands 4, we invited Gearbox creative director Graeme Timmins and global creative executive Andrew Reiner to this week’s episode of the Game Developer Podcast. 

It proved to be a wide-ranging conversation about game direction, wrangling large teams, and the reasons Gearbox is more candid than other studios about their successes and missteps.

Assessing the impact of making big budget games in Unreal Engine 5

This conversation—recorded before the game launched and the fresh conversations about the impact of Unreal Engine 5 on the PC performance of Borderlands 4—also dives into Gearbox’s relationship with Epic Games and how it makes the most of the widely-adopted engine. We also chat briefly about Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford’s strategy for communicating with players.

The Game Developer podcast is a bi-weekly podcast chronicling the triumphs, catastrophes, and everything in-between of game development, sharing lessons and strategies fellow developers can use to hone their craft. The Game Developer Podcast is hosted by Bryant Francis, edited by Pierre Landriau, and features music by Mike Meehan.

Follow Game Developer on Bluesky or on LinkedIn.