More info has been dropped about Gearbox’s upcoming looter-shooter Borderlands 4, in particular how the endgame will play out.
You can expect a lot of returning features, but there are smart adjustments that have been made here to make the loot farming grind less of a hassle.
One in particular change is how there’s now a built-in mechanic to repeat a boss fight.
In Borderlands 3, the looter-shooter introduced dedicated drops, in which specific enemies/boss fights will have a tendency to drop specific weapons. The issue was that to farm for specific loot, you’ll have to quit the game and then reload to respawn those bosses if you need another game. Being a loot-based game, you’ll definitely need a few more gos, so it becomes a tedious process as the game seemingly not designed for repeated boss fights within the same session.
Borderlands 4 will rectify this issue with Moxxi’s Big Encore Machine. To re-attempt any boss fight, just spend Eridium on the Big Encore Machine. No need to save, quit and load game over and over again. Though we’ll have to see how much the Eridium costs will affect the flow of the endgame grind.
Alongside this quality-of-life feature, Borderlands 4 will include the following as part of its endgame offering:
- Ultimate Vault Hunter mode: enemies scale to current level, but with more “intimidating modifiers like higher damage, bigger health pools, or resistance to certain elemental effects.” XP gains, cash and Eridium gains are also scaled up.
- Five difficulty tiers, complete enough challenges to unlock the weekly Wildcard Mission, and beat that to unlock the next UVH mode tier.
- Weeklies
- Weekly Big Encore Boss- tougher variant of bosses with better loot pool. Accessed via Moxxi’s Big Encore Machine
- Weekly Wildcard Mission- guaranteed Legendary drop when completed
- Maurice’s Black Market Machine- special merchant that spawns in different location weekly (ala Xu from Destiny), unique inventory per player. Returning feature from Borderlands 3
- Firmware
- Set bonuses on non-weapon gear (Repkits, Ordnance, Class Mods, Shields, and Enhancements)
- Firmware bonus can be transferred to another gear, destroying the original gear donating the Firmware bonus
- Specializations
- Account-wide progression ala Badass Rank from Borderlands 2/Guardian Rank in Borderlands 3
- Invincible Bosses
- Superbosses that are not literally invincible, but close enough
- First Invincible will arrive post-launch in Q4 2025
- Pearlescent Rarity
- The highest rarity of loot will return, was missing in Borderlands 3
- “Incredibly difficult to find, but their power level will match their coveted rarity”
- Will be added via a free update in Q1 2026
Borderlands 4 has also outlined what to expect of its post-launch content, which will come in the form of free updates and paid DLC. One of the two post-launch DLC Vault Hunters will be revealed during Tokyo Game Show 2025, next month.
Speaking of Vault Hunters, Gearbox and publisher 2K have published a series of character shorts detailing the lives of the four Vault Hunters, playable characters, before they ended up in Kairos for Borderlands 4.
We’ll find out if Borderlands 4 is a game where you don’t have to mute the character audio or not soon enough. The game will be out on September 12 for the PS5, PC (Steam, Epic Games Store) and Xbox Series X|S, and later on October 3 for Switch 2.