Borderlands 4 is out now, and the latest iteration of Gearbox’s looter-shooter series is no iteration. It’s taking some big swings that change how the FPS-RPG plays, including an open world design to levels and a revamped UI.
That being said, these new changes haven’t been something I’m keen about. I’ve put about ten hours into the game so far, and while I reserve judgement about the change to open world design for now, I have a solid opinion on the changes to the UI.
I don’t like the UI. I’m greatly bothered by its incompetencies. I don’t think the the redesign was worth it.
To set the stage, the Borderlands series, including the spin-off Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, have never had a major UI revamp.
The UI elements in the previous games were vertically oriented (you’ll scroll a lot), diegetic in that it’s supposed to be projection in front of the player character (though by Borderlands 3 and Wonderlands, you get a full view of the player character—so one minor change to the UI through the years) and designed to for a controller rather than a mouse and keyboard due to how little room to click the elements have. That said, it’s just a intuitive with a KB+M setup as it is on a controller.
The UI design works to fill its purpose, unique to the series, and charming. Managing the inventory is a bit of a hassle due to having to scroll up and down a long list.
Borderlands 4 decided to give the UI a modern revamp. It’s now a complete menu where you get to see the front of the player character instead of their backs. The menu makes use of all the space on the screen instead of beholden to a vertical list. There’s a proper inventory list that displays all the items in your inventory like how the Bank Storage does it. And there’s now a Destiny-style cursor on consoles.
My biggest peeve is how terrible the cursor feels to move around. Though this isn’t a Borderlands 4-only issue, I can’t remember a good Destiny-style cursor other than, well, Destiny and Destiny 2. I have to fiddle around with the cursor settings to make it feel right, and it’s only bearable. It’s nice to have settings to fiddle around with, but you know what’s better? Destiny 2’s cursor just works great out of the box.
I feel so many games misunderstood how and why those cursors work so well in Destiny. The whole menu is designed around a big cursor instead of d-pad navigation, so interactable elements are big and chunky. They’re also spread apart far enough so you don’t need to precisely move the cursor around to land in specific small boxes. But the biggest trick is how the cursor itself moves. The velocity of the cursor movement isn’t constant, and there are tricks like making it stickier when it lands on an interactable element that makes it not only workable, but also good enough that you don’t miss d-pad-based controls.
Meanwhile, Borderlands 4’s cursor moves awkwardly. It has too many tiny elements like a drop-down list with tiny fonts for each item that requires you to move the cursor precisely to select them. And it doesn’t feel smooth interacting with all the elements. Icons for guns don’t load up fast enough. Scrolling the item list feels framey and not smooth. Sometimes the list of items don’t even populate with all the items until you wait a few seconds! That’s no good, not good at all.
Even worse, on PS5, the UI also has a bug where if you have a large inventory of items, and you want to tag an item from the bottom of the list, it will instead tag the item one row higher (or more) on top for some reason.
So until a patch fixes this I have to resort to selling all my loot manually as I can’t properly mark the loot I don’t want as trash. I refuse to believe this wasn’t flagged by the QA, but I insist this issue be bumped into higher priority, maybe not as high as PC performance issues (Steam reviews are currently mixed as players find the game unoptimised even on high-end machinery) but high enough that I don’t have to wait a month for the ability to properly manage my loot, which should be there day-1.
There’s more inconveniences still. The UI allows you to filter or sort the items by various qualities, which is nice. What’s not nice is that these values don’t save or stick, they’ll reset back to default every time. So if you sort my guns by level, and then open the list for say repkits, and sort those by level as well, and then go back to the guns list, it’ll sort back to default. Selecting from the drop-down list is fiddly due to how small the fonts and hence you’re required to be more precise moving that cursor, which is unpleasant.
There are other minor details I am peeved about. For some reason, you have to highlight icons of the money and ammo element to display a pop-out of all the currency and ammo you have currently… when there’s space to put them right then and there, at least in the main equipment screen. I get the vision of not cluttering it with too much numbers, but it’s a looter-shooter. I get my high for looking at the many big numbers!
This goes to when you do collect money in the world. It just shows how much you picked up, but not how it adds up to the total you have, for some reason. Come on. Give me the numbers, I want to see numbers go up! I play looter-shooter specifically to see numbers go up!
The game is so afraid of showing how much money I have at hand that it took me by surprise that when I first respawned, I lost five-digit figures in cash. Compared to past games, that’s an insane amount of money to lose as penalty for death.
Apparently, Borderlands 4 still abide to the similar rule of past games where it takes a percentage of your total money on respawn. It was only then, after some amount of faffing through the menu, that I found out I have six-digit figures in cash, within the first five hours of play. Why is Borderlands 4 so afraid of letting me know Kairos has an inflation issue?
I wish there’s an option to just have the ammo and money count not hidden away from the menu screen, rather than have to drag the awful cursor to highlight the two boxes on opposing sides of the screen. And an option to show the total currency you have on hand when you’re picking up or spent them, like the previous games does.
Essentially, the new UI in Borderlands 4 causes more problems than it solves. Even worse, you can navigate some of the menus by d-pad and you know what, it’s more reliable and easier to use that way than a cursor! And even that has its issue, the cursor doesn’t fade away and disappear if you navigate the menus with the d-pad.
There are so many aspects of Borderlands 4 where Gearbox cooked, but the new UI needs more time in the oven. I find it frustrating to use and taking out the enjoyment of discovering and sifting through the enormous loot. I get it, making good UI is an unsung task. A good UI is when no one complaints about it, which also means that it won’t get its due when it’s done correctly. And I do feel that Borderlands’ classic UI didn’t get enough dues to how it endured this long without much issue.
But it’s too late now.
I’ll still continue to play Borderlands 4—it has its fun moments!—though I hope the UI gets some much-need attention alongside the performance woes many players are vocal about. As it is right now, I’m greatly bothered by Borderlands 4’s UI. The redesign was for the worse, made much more by how it’s a bit buggy. I’m not hoping for a do-over of the UI, no. That ship has sailed. We just have to live with the consequences. But at least have it working as intended, please and thank you.
Borderlands 4 is out now on PS5, PC (Steam, Epic Games Store) and Xbox Series X|S. Stay tuned for our full review of the game.