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Borderlands 4

Borderlands 4 is a first-person looter shooter set on Kairos, a planet ruled by the Timekeeper and his synthetic army, the Order. You pick one of the Vault Hunters, team up with up to three friends, and cross a connected world of frozen peaks, desert canyons and a walled fortress city. You travel on foot, by grappling hook or on a summoned hover bike, collecting procedurally generated weapons along the way.

Developer:
Gearbox
Publisher:
2K
Release date:
Languages:
EnglishGermanFrenchItalianPolishJapaneseKoreanPortugueseRussianTraditional ChineseSpanishThaiSpanish
MATUREPEGI 18
Borderlands 4

About the game

Borderlands 4

Borderlands 4 is a first-person looter shooter with RPG progression, set on Kairos, a planet hidden from the rest of the galaxy and run by a dictator called the Timekeeper. You play as one of the new Vault Hunters, collect procedurally generated guns and gear, and work through the campaign alone or in a squad of up to four. Gearbox Software developed it, and 2K released it on September 12, 2025, for PC (Steam and Epic Games Store), PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.

Top 3 Reasons to Play

  1. Every Vault Hunter can double jump, glide, dash, climb and swing on a grappling hook, and the regions of Kairos connect without loading screens. A firefight on a cliff edge can end mid-air, with you gliding down to the valley floor. For longer trips, the Digirunner hover bike can be summoned almost anywhere.
  2. The manufacturer name on a gun doesn't tell the whole story. Licensed parts mix traits between brands – a Ripper part, for example, adds full-auto fire to guns that don't normally have it. Firmware works on top of that and gets stronger the more pieces of your gear carry the same one.
  3. In co-op, drops are instanced, so nobody has to race a teammate for a legendary. Difficulty is set per player too: a veteran can crank it up while a friend new to the series stays on Easy in the same session.

Story and Lore

Borderlands 3 ended with Lilith teleporting Pandora's moon Elpis away. Six years later, the moon has ended up over Kairos and cracked the barrier that kept the planet hidden. The Timekeeper rules through the Order, his synthetic army, and through bolts – implants that give him control over whoever wears one.

The new Vault Hunters don't get far before they're captured and bolted. The Crimson Resistance breaks them out, and its last surviving leader is, of all robots, Claptrap. From there, the job is to win over the planet's factions and break into the Timekeeper's capital, which means taking the command bolts from his three lieutenants. You can hunt them in any order:

  • Idolator Sol, who controls food and supplies in the Fadefields
  • Vile Lictor, whose research into Sirens and the Phase dimension is warping reality
  • Callis the Ripper Queen, a former loyalist who tore out her own bolt

Critics also noticed a change in tone: the main story takes its conflict more seriously than Borderlands 3 did, and most of the jokes live in the side missions.

Gameplay and Mechanics

Kairos is split into four regions:

  • Fadefields: beaches, farmland and forests, where the campaign begins
  • Terminus Range: frozen peaks with some of the most vertical terrain in the game
  • Carcadia Burn: a canyon-cut desert, the slowest region to cross by vehicle
  • Dominion: the Timekeeper's fortress city, which opens up after the three regional questlines and doesn't allow vehicles inside its walls

ECHO-4, your drone companion, marks the way to objectives. It's also where you upgrade SDU ammo capacity and change cosmetics, no station needed. Safehouses and captured Order silos add fast travel points, and collecting Vault Key Fragments reveals Primordial Vaults, high-level combat arenas that end in a boss fight.

Outside of guns, the loadout covers a shield, a class mod, an Enhancement, an Ordnance slot for grenades or heavy weapons, and a Repkit, a healing item with limited charges and its own cooldown. Eight companies make the weapons: Daedalus, Jakobs, Maliwan, Order, Ripper, Tediore, Torgue and Vladof. Order, Ripper and Daedalus debut in this game, while Atlas, Children of the Vault, Dahl and Hyperion no longer produce guns, though some of their technology returns through licensed parts. Those parts start dropping around level 15, and Firmware begins rolling on gear at level 25. After the campaign, a Firmware Transfer Machine can move a Firmware from one item to another.

Each Vault Hunter has three skill trees, each built around a different Action Skill. After the credits, Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode adds difficulty ranks, and the weekly rotation brings Big Encore bosses and Wildcard missions. The hardest fights are Invincible bosses like Bloomreaper and the Takedown at Hadron Abyss, an underwater raid with the Child of Terramorphous waiting at the end. Photo Mode arrived in January 2026.

Characters and Factions

Four Vault Hunters are playable from the start, and two more arrived with the Story Packs:

  • Vex the Siren: fights alongside summons, including her Phase Phamiliar Trouble, and converts her Action Skill and melee damage to the element of her current gun.
  • Rafa the Exo-Soldier: a former Tediore soldier in an exo-suit who switches between the Apophis Lance arm cannon, auto-targeting Peacebreaker Cannons and melee Arc-Knives.
  • Harlowe the Gravitar: an ex-Maliwan scientist who traps enemies in stasis with Zero-Point, fires the CHROMA Accelerator and deploys a Flux Generator field. Her Entanglement trait spreads damage between linked enemies.
  • Amon the Forgeknight: the sole survivor of a cult that worshipped a Vault monster, now a melee tank with Forge weapons such as a rocket-powered Forgefist and a damage-absorbing Forgeshield.
  • C4SH the Rogue: a former casino dealer bot whose kit runs on chance, added with Story Pack 1.
  • Loveless the Hacker: an ex-Anshin hacker turned assassin who shares her mind with a digital virus that can take physical form, added with Story Pack 2.

Among the returning faces are Mad Moxxi, Marcus Kincaid, Zane Flynt, Amara and Lilith, and Claptrap has a bigger role than usual as the head of the resistance. The factions you meet across Kairos include:

  • The Order: the Timekeeper's synthetic army
  • Rippers: a bandit army that has broken away from the Timekeeper's rule
  • Outbounders: off-world travelers stranded on Kairos, led by Rush
  • Electi: Order nobles under Levaine, abandoned to hold out against the Rippers
  • Augers: clans of the Terminus Range, including a rebel faction led by Defiant Calder
  • Crimson Raiders: the veteran Vault Hunters' outfit, which crash-lands on Kairos during the campaign

Editions

Three editions are available:

  • Standard Edition: the base game.
  • Deluxe Edition: the base game, the Firehawk's Fury weapon skin and the Bounty Pack Bundle (Bounty Packs 2 to 5).
  • Super Deluxe Edition: everything in the Deluxe Edition plus the Ornate Order Pack (four Vault Hunter skins, heads and bodies) and the Vault Hunter Pack with both Story Packs.

Bounty Packs are the smaller add-ons: a repeatable mission area, a boss and a Vault Card full of cosmetics and gear. Gearbox gave the first one, How Rush Saved Mercenary Day, to everyone for free. The four paid packs are Legend of the Stone Demon, A Zane to Kill For, Murders and Acquisitions, and Amara and the Vile Shadows. Story Packs go bigger, with a new zone, a campaign and a new Vault Hunter each. Mad Ellie and the Vault of the Damned, a cosmic-horror story starring Ellie, launched on March 26, 2026. FL4K and the Last Resort followed on September 10, 2026, sending the returning Beastmaster to the island resort of Providence to find Mr. Chew in the middle of a Tediore invasion.