Summary

• Borderlands 4 needs to address the series' persistent issue of story beats interrupting gameplay.
• The story in Borderlands games interferes too much with gameplay, with unskippable dialogue or conversations that pause quest progress.
• Borderlands 4 should allow players to skip dialogue or make it entirely non-intrusive, focusing more on shooting elements.

While the recent teaser for Borderlands 4 revealed at Gamescom Opening Night Live might have pleased some fans of the franchise, the game itself will need to make some major improvements to how its story is told if it wants to have a better reputation than past entries. Borderlands 4, previously only "soft confirmed" through statements from developers, has finally been officially announced for an unspecified 2025 release date, but more than five years after the release of Borderlands 3, the game's developers may need to rethink their approach to story.

While the Borderlands series has never been known for its story - outside the original looter shooter gameplay being praised. Even aside from the debatable quality of BL3's story, though, there's one issue that it and other Borderlands games suffer from, which hopefully won't be repeated in the next game.

Borderlands 4 Needs To Keep Its Story Out Of The Way

The Story Of Borderlands Interferes Too Much With Its Gameplay

Putting aside the actual quality of the story, Borderlands has a major issue with its story getting in the way of its gameplay - to the point that it's a relatively common suggestion for even new players to remove dialogue and cutscene files from their Borderlands 3 installation. But while BL3 has it the worst, owing to the contentious quality of its writing, the problem has been present in every mainline Borderlands game to date, resulting in drastically slowed-down gameplay and an especially frustrating experience for players who replay the games on different characters.

A large part of the problem is that very little of the story of Borderlands is ever skippable - aside from the cutscenes of Borderlands 3, which were eventually made skippable in a post-launch patch, the franchise as a whole forces players to engage with the story. And, while this is fine for an initial playthrough, Borderlands is also a series that encourages replaying each game multiple times, with several distinct playable characters in each game that don't share progress between them.

It should also be noted that even on a first playthrough of a Borderlands game, the story gets in the way of the gameplay, drastically slowing down the pace. Even in Borderlands 3, with the ability to skip cutscenes, the majority of the story is still conveyed through in-game dialogue and world events that stop the player from advancing objectives until they're finished, and the result is that players will end up spending a lot of their time doing nothing but waiting for NPCs to finish their dialogue or complete some action that allows them to advance.

How Borderlands 4 Can Make Its Story Less Intrusive

How The Next Borderlands Can Improve Its Storytelling

One area where Borderlands 4 could immediately improve upon the previous games is by cutting down on the amount of time players spend doing nothing but waiting for dialogue to finish. The most simple way to do this, conceptually, would be to simply allow players to skip dialogue, allowing them to engage with the story as much or as little as they want. Another solution would be to cut down on the amount of waiting time by placing dialogue during fights or travel time, or simply not locking objectives behind dialogue completion.

These fixes, or other similar solutions, would give the gameplay of Borderlands 4 more time to shine, creating a smoother first-time experience and especially streamlining the process of replaying the game multiple times. So, while players might not have much confidence in the quality of Borderlands 4's story, especially after the poor reception to Borderlands 3, New Tales from the Borderlands, and the Borderlands movie, the game can at least shine a spotlight on the series' more reliably well-received aspects.

Tales from the Borderlands and New Tales from the Borderlands are narrative-heavy spin-offs emphasizing player choice akin to interactive novels, eschewing the series' signature looter shooter gameplay.

While the story and characters of Borderlands can be appealing for some players, the series' greatest strengths have usually been gameplay-related. But with how the Borderlands games have handled story and gameplay in relation to each other, the story can often feel like it ends up getting in the way even for players who don't dislike it, leading to long periods of downtime where no gameplay is happening. To truly improve the series and set a better direction going forward, Borderlands 4 may need to rethink the series' approach to storytelling and give the shooting more of the spotlight.