Borderlands 4 is almost here, bringing four new playable Vault Hunters to the 16-year-old looter shooter franchise. Earlier this year, I went hands-on with Borderlands 4 and got a chance to play as the exosuit-wearing Rafa and fall in love with the delightfully dark Siren, Vex. As we approach the game’s release, I spoke with lead character designer Nick Thurston to delve into the abilities, creation, and play style of Amon, a warrior-poet and Viking-inspired warrior who offers a little bit more gameplay complexity for fans who want that in a Borderlands game. Our conversation is detailed below, edited for both brevity and readability.
Like its predecessors, Borderlands 4 is all about stopping a world-ending threat and uncovering the location of a treasure-filled Vault on an alien planet as one of four Vault Hunters. Along the way, you’ll run across a truly enormous number of unique firearms and fight through hordes of monstrous creatures, vengeful dictators, and murderous machines, all while befriending (or growing increasingly exasperated by) a network of quip-loving characters. Borderlands 4 adds several long-requested features that fans have wanted in the series as well, like mission replay and a seamless world.
Borderlands 4 is set to launch for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC on September 12, with a Switch 2 version slated for release on October 3.
So earlier, y’all described Amon as “the most complicated yet approachable Vault Hunter to date.” What does that mean?
Nick Thurston: Yeah, I mean, complexity can mean a whole bunch of different things depending on your lens, but I think when people talk about Amon being complex, it’s just the fact that he has so much that he can do as far as abilities. Historically, most Vault Hunters have “I press a button” [abilities. It’s fire and forget, and [you set up] a nuke or a buff over time.
Amon’s stuff is all about summoning a thing and doing a bunch of damage, but then he has a press one button and that does one thing, or press a different button and hold that to do another thing. Sometimes, through customization options, you can double tap your action skill button to do two different things and then press and hold to do a third different thing.
He just has more abilities than any other Vault Hunter numerically because of his trait, which allows him to have forge skills. I wouldn’t say he’s super complicated, but he has a lot more going on in the middle of combat, and he’s a lot more active than I think a lot of people historically expect from Vault Hunters.
How early into Borderlands 4’s development did the Vault Hunters like Amon get finalized, gameplay-wise?
It really just depends, which isn’t a great answer. A lot of times, we work in phases where we’re like, “Here’s the theme. Okay, now that’s locked in. Here’s action skill one. Now that’s locked in. Here’s action skill too. Now that’s locked in.”
And then sometimes even though we do it and we’re happy with it, a year into development, when we start actually playing the game, the game fully comes online, and you can actually do combat. There’s been times where we’ve had a fully realized action skill and where we’re like, “Oh, this isn’t going to work in our game.” Maybe it was cool on paper in a test map, but in real gameplay, it doesn’t work.
So sometimes we have to scrap the whole thing, and that’s devastating. That’s the worst part. But ultimately, what happens is Vault Hunters evolve over time pretty organically, and by the time that it ends up in the user’s hands, it’s something that we’re really confident in.
How does the team decide which Vault Hunter gets to be in the next game? What sort of process did Amon go through where the team figured out that the fantasy Viking needed to be picked?
There’s a lot of nuance, but different people get rolled onto the project at different times. When I get rolled on, it’s usually they have some concepts of where they want to go. Sometimes it’s tied to narrative hooks where they’re like, “Here’s a darker theme which is going to go with our darker game. We want to operate in this space for this character.”
That’s an example of Vex where we were like, “The tone of the game is going to be a little bit darker. We haven’t really had a dark-leaning Siren before, so what if we had a Siren that had spooky powers?” And by the time I rolled onto [the project], that was already a thing that was established, but then I had to flesh it out and realize it.
Sometimes, however, we only have this general idea of, “Hey, we need a brute character. We need someone who’s big and beefy. We need a guy that’s going to make enemies tremble in their boots just by seeing him.”
And that was Amon. And Amon was an entirely different Vault Hunter when I started and went through a bunch of [iterations], but a lot of it didn’t work out. And needless to say, we ended up switching over to Amon, and I actually had quite a bit of agency with who I thought Amon should be and what he should act like his powers should be. In a lot of ways, Amon is the one I’m most proud of, but that’s because I’ve had the most influence on him.
But to go back to your point about how we deal with having a bunch of ideas: We constantly have ideas and we’re throwing away ideas. We’re not going to talk about DLC Vault Hunters [in this interview], but we did say that we are going to have them [in Borderlands 4]. And in that scenario, we actually polled the company and we were like, “Hey, does anyone have ideas?”
And we had probably, I don’t know, 50 to a hundred ideas pitched. Some of them are like, “Oh, this could be a thing.” And some of them are like, “Oh, the technology isn’t there.” And some of them are like, “This needs to be more fleshed out.” Sometimes we’ll combine ideas.
I love that you talk about Amon like he’s your baby.
I think they’re all my children. [laughs] It’s hard to choose. People are like, “Who are you going to play?” And I’m like, “I don’t want to pick between my kids.”
In trailers, we see Amon primarily use incendiary and cryo damage in his abilities. Any narrative significance to these elements that necessitated their inclusion as opposed to others, like corrosive or shock?
It’s much less narrative. When it comes to picking elements, it’s much more about the gameplay. Borderlands, as you know, has elemental matching where fire against fleshy enemies deals more damage, shock destroys shields, corrosive melts armor, [etc]. We always have to look at the elemental grid that we have and [make sure] every Vault Hunter [has] their own gameplay hooks, their own strengths and weaknesses.
When we’re thinking about the elements that we say, “This is the primary character,” we’re really trying to identify what are his strengths and his weaknesses. Fire and ice, I just think go together aesthetically. I think there’s some poetry there. He also has a lot of shock stuff, but that’s more of a secondary thing. But yeah, I mean really we just want to create different experiences. If every Vault Hunter was good at fire damage, then fire would be less interesting.
With Borderlands 4 adopting a seamless world, how far can I throw one of Amon’s axes? This is important Nick, I need numbers for my future career in trick shot compilations. [laughs]
[laughs] I’ll have to get you hard numbers later, but you can do some absolutely silly trick shots.
Excellent.
It won’t shock me if there [is] a YouTube video where it’s like, “There’s an enemy this far in front of me and I’m going to chuck [Amon’s axe] up in the air,” and then six seconds later it’ll finally come down and hit [the enemy] in the head.
If you aren’t being silly in a Borderlands game, then what are you even doing? Speaking of, so much of Borderlands’ narrative is tied to humor. How does Amon fit into that? What type of jokes does he bring to the table?
The big, brute character is often dumb, but Amon is definitely very smart, and that is all about his upbringing. He was a part of a cult as a child, and his family died from a Vault monster so now he’s filled with rage and filled with the need to exact revenge. But as you can see from a lot of the dialogue from the quips in the gameplay trailers, he’s actually a very warm person, and he actually speaks in this warrior poet, almost scripture kind of way. If I had to equate him to [a trope in humor], he’s the straight man.
Narratively, both Vex and Rafa have strong ties to long-standing pieces of Borderlands lore: the Sirens and Tediore. Is Amon also a callback to something familiar or is he mostly connected to a brand-new piece?
He does not have any direct ties to anything that fans would know about. Of course, long-time fans are aware of both Vault monsters and how they’re tied to the Eridians, and we’ll be diving into a little bit of familiar lore there as far as, “Oh, there’s cults that worship these Vault monsters that fans know about.” So that will be familiar. But everything about who his family worshiped and stuff–I don’t know if we will explicitly talk about it [ahead of launch], but that is all brand new stuff.
