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Borderlands 4's creators break down the secrets of the game's first teaser trailer
At PAX West 2024, Gearbox execs and developers revealed how Borderlands 4 starts seconds after the climactic end of Borderlands 3...
Some teaser trailers offer the faintest glimpse of what lies ahead for a project. For 2025’s Borderlands 4, it turns out the teaser is also an epilogue to the last game — and has far more secrets than fans might have expected.
“The teaser trailer, we started that work about two or three months ago,” Gearbox chief creative officer Randy Varnell told the crowd during Friday’s Gearbox Main Theater Show panel at PAX West 2024. “We get together and we’re like, how do we think about the journey we’ve been on, in previous Borderlands [games], and what are they cool things that we do? What are the cool images? Where’s that first image you put on screen?”
“The Firehawk is the beginning of this trailer, but really, it’s the ending of Borderlands 3,” narrative director Sam Winkler continued. “The last thing we saw in Borderlands 3 was the climactic events in which the moon of Elpis was going to destroy the planet Pandora, and our hero Lilith — a siren who is able to teleport using phasewalk — sacrifices herself in order to teleport away the entire moon of Elpis. That happens mere seconds before [the trailer].”
The moon that opens the trailer…? That’s Elpis. And what happens next sets the scene for the new game, literally.
Elpis, according to Winkler, ends up in “a patch os pace that no-one’s seen in a long, long time, and there’s a reason for that. We see the moon collide with this cloaking veil, that is obscuring a planet — and what we see next tells us a little bit about what’s going on in that planet.”
That’s right, it’s a brand-new planet that has never before been mentioned in Borderlands lore, and the trailer shows what happens when a misplaced moon destroys a shield hiding a planet from the rest of existence.
“There’s a reason everything’s in the trailer,” added creative director Graeme Timmins. “Elpis shows up here, and it rains down these meteors on the planet as an important element of what we’re look at in the future. We wanted to have spectacle and effects and audio going on to give people a little insight into this new world, this new undisclosed planet.”
Turns out, Timmins was very intentional when he said there was a reason everything was in the trailer. “If you kind of go frame-by-frame through this, there’s some secrets in there,” teased global creative executive officer Andrew Reiner. “There’s also a city, there’s civilization…”
Sounds like a challenge to fans, if you ask me…
Borderlands 4 will be released in 2025, and is available for pre-order now. PAX West 2024 continues through September 2 at the Seattle Convention Center.
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