Borderlands 4 team says its humour has “evolved” for a mature audience after BL3 trapped players with annoying characters and terrible for 40+ hours

Borderlands 3 was a chore. While the gameplay of Gearbox’s long-awaited third entry was pretty damn great, listening to the constant barrage of outdated meme references and screaming toilet humour felt like swimming nude through a pool of razor blades. For Borderlands 4, Gearbox is doing literally anything else.

Borderlands 4 has good jokes now

In the past, Borderlands 4 narrative director Sam Winkler confirmed that there will be no references to “Hawk Tuah” or “Skibidi Toilet” as the very idea caused the writer to want to put their “hand down the sink grinder”. Instead, the upcoming game is aiming to be more mature in its humour, and actually funny.

In a new interview with Destructoid, senior project producer Anthony Nicholson explained that the new game has an “evolved tone and narrative” that focuses on “dry and grounded humour” without constant toilet humour, screaming and the like.

“I mean, obviously, we hear those types of things and we see that feedback,” Nicholson explained. “But we’re really proud of what we’ve done on each of the stories for all of the different reasons for each of the individual titles in the franchise”.

Nicholson explained that the team is working hard to “keep humour as one of those pillars of the Borderlands title”, but that the game’s more high-stakes story means that the toilet humour and, well, everything else about Borderlands 3 doesn’t work for Borderlands 4.

The new game’s new setting of Kairos sees a secret planet decimated by a moon smashing into its surface, disrupting the political and environmental climate of the new locale. Nicholson explained that the style of humour seen in the previous game isn’t only annoying, but wouldn’t fit in the fourth game’s story, like, at all.

“All of these people have been under his [The Timekeeper’s] hand of power and subjugated for their entire existence, that changes how people approach it and how the tone kind of comes out throughout the narrative,” he explained. “But not without its wittiness, the banter that goes back and forth, or the side missions that have a lot of the zany and crazy stuff, too.”

According to previews of Borderlands 4, the humour of the upcoming looter shooter is vastly improved over the last game. Borderlands 3 made the sinful mistake of not evolving its humour with its audience, instead doubling—if not quadrupling—down on what were once easy wins in 2012. Unfortunately, for Gearbox, that humour didn’t land in 2019. Hopefully, BL4’s humour makes sense for a 2025 audience.