Borderlands 4 has been out for a few weeks and we loved it, but the game is not done yet as there is a lot of content to come. Some members of the Gearbox team were in Melbourne for PAX Australia 2025 and we had the chance to sit down and ask them some questions about their DLC plans.

One of the questions I did have for Randy, which was not about Borderlands 4, was actually about Borderlands 3 and how it does not run on Nintendo Switch 2. Randy noted that they only found out about the compatibility issue when the console released and that they do want to fix the issue, but with how studios and production timelines are often planned out years in advance, there are no plans at this time to work on it, but they wanted to.

So, if you are like me and want to enjoy all the Borderlands games on Nintendo Switch 2, you might be waiting a while and not just because Borderlands 4 was delayed on the console.

Now, on with the interview.

Maxi-Geek: Now you are down here in Melbourne in order to talk about the first post launch content and you are going to do that later today at, I think your first ever Gearbox Panel.

RP: Sure.

MG: So, you have a seasonal... the Halloween thing. We are obviously in Australia, where Halloween's not a big thing. The only people that really push it are the candy companies.

Randy Pitchford: You don't have to worry about Halloween. It's just the spooky season and it's your Spring.

Sam Winkler: Right, yeah. You know, we are inspired by traditions around the world, but these aren't one-to-one real-world holidays.

RP: Yeah, there is no Earth in the Borderlands, that's why we have Mercenary Day. (As opposed to Christmas Day - Ed)

MG: So that's one of the things I was going to ask is obviously because there is no Earth and you've got a Halloween-inspired celebration. What other Earth-based holidays would make for good Borderlands celebrations.

RP: Yeah, we're kind of random at it. I don't, we don't really have a rule book.

SW: We usually think character and vibe first and then we expand past that. Like I could probably pick any NPC that operates on Kairos and be like what would this character be super jazzed about and then and then just pick and choose from the calendar and mix them up because our ideal is that it isn't a one-to-one that it is just its own holiday and suddenly you have fans doing you know holiday cards for this holiday that doesn't exist anywhere except on Kairos right, that's the dream.

MG: Because I was thinking like one of the cool things would be like a frustration venting sort of holiday where people like, under the Timekeeper they can't do a lot. Maybe they do something in secret where they whack a version of the Timekeeper or something.

SW: That is in Borderlands 4, you get to whack them.

MG: Yeah, NPCs could not do that, but if they did they would need to do so in secret because obviously if they get found out they’d be in real trouble. What else could you do? I was thinking, well, people would use whatever they have and then I was like, well, maybe they'd take Claptrap units and I was like, maybe claptrap pinatas, they were bashing, and it was a celebration event in secret.

SW: Clapping day, yeah. I pitched that for the real-world Rage Room of like; we should have a claptrap in there.

RP: Yeah, yeah, yeah, just beat the shit, yeah. We actually did a Rage Room in PAX West in Seattle where people could go and just become a psycho and beat the shit out of anything break glass and all kinds of stuff it was awesome, it made a lot of noise the other exhibitors were not happy.

SW: Yeah, yeah there was some noise complaints.

MG: It's alright they generally have boost where they shout on microphones.

RP: In the war of noise making we were winning yeah.

MG: After the Halloween-inspired event there is the first Bounty Pack coming out in November. Now the first game didn't really have sort of the seasonal stuff. There was really just sort of the DLC after that with Dr. Ned and all that sort of stuff. How have you found, as the series has evolved, the progression of what people expect post-launch in a game? Is it something that you're like, we want to stay on top of this, or we're just going to do our own thing, and if it lines up, it lines up.

RP: You know, it's kind of both. Like, it's such a weird balance. It's such a weird relationship, you know, especially at Gearbox, because when we do something, it's only really good when we really are having fun and want to do it. Every developer being passionate and being really committed to the bit, is what makes it good. So, thinking purely from what does the external world expect from us only, and if it doesn't line up with where a passion would be from development, it's not going to be a good result. The converse is true too. If we just go down some rabbit hole only because it tickles us and we don't think about the audience at all, there's not going to be an audience for it. So, finding the nice place where they meet is the trick and one of the cool things about post-launch stuff is the stakes are a little different. So, it makes it more comfortable for us to take risks and sometimes the risks pay off and work and really connect with an audience, which then leads to future expectations and starts to create this weird feedback loop.

I think it's one of the things I love about being this kind of an entertainer, is I love that relationship and I love that dance and I love that it's never, ever perfectly perfect and easy to perfectly predict. Because I think if it was, it'd be boring and it's so stimulating that it's always amazing and always a little messy and navigating that balance between all of this like energy that can be created and joy and happiness and people finding, like spending huge amounts of time having fun with the fact that there's always a hope and a wish and a dream and like everyone's got ideas and trying to fulfill all that like, it makes it necessarily never ending. Which, it makes it possible for people like Sam and I to literally commit our lives to. to doing it and never getting bored.

SW: Yeah, games and like Gearbox specifically, what's really cool is we can just take, you know, a formulaic thing and throw it out the window, right? Like all of the cool, we have to size them out appropriately. Because we have development teams that need to follow production schedules.

It means that when we come to the creative part of it, kind of sky's the limit as far as we're concerned. You know, we don't have to, we're not rigid about the structures of DLCs and, whether they're the smaller ones or the full campaign size ones. So, we never say like, this has to be a holiday, this has to have this many NPCs. No, like it's the stories we want to tell the ones that we're excited about and take risks on, we did that on Borderlands 3 and we're doing that on Borderlands 4.

RP: Yep, and the process is fun too, or we'll tend to get some of us together, depending on what the thing is, and we'll think about, like, we'll throw things out that are interesting or exciting for us, but simultaneously be thinking about like what we're imagining, either expectations or hopes and wishes are from the audience we're trying to entertain.

All of that are just ingredients in the kitchen, you know, as we're trying to figure out what goes in the soup and it's a really fun process. I love it for post-launch because we get to kind of do it more times, it's not exactly iteration, but we get like a lot of bites of that apple. We get to make a lot of dishes.

MG: So you're not following the recipe, just going by feeling.

RP: Sometimes, yeah. We're tasting the broth as we're seasoning.

MG: Awesome. Mercenary Day is a big thing, you know, coming up with Rush. What character, I suppose, from BL4 have people like... you know, gone to as like the surprise for you because there's obviously a lot of characters in the game.

RP: I'm sure we can both say, I'm like, Sam, you go.

SW: Oh no, like what he said about Law of Large Numbers before, right? Of like, at the scale of Borderlands fandom, every single character has thousands of people doing cosplay and fan art and fanfic and just like all this stuff, so like... I don't think there is a character that didn't get that treatment. That sounds like a cop-out, but it's so overwhelming.

RP: But it's kind of fun for us to be like, know that, like, you know, there's people that it's like, oh, Rush is my guy.

SW: Yeah, Rush.

RP: But there's all this, also people are like, Calder is pretty great. You know, like, I'm a Calder kind of guy, you know? We were talking to someone earlier that just really wanted to know if there's going to be more Levain, like, or have you seen the last of Levain, and as creators, it's really gratifying when that's the case, because it's not always the case. We have made characters that sometimes specifically a large people, a large number of people say, I never want to hear from them again, you know?

When we're in this weird spot with Borderlands 4 where, there's different people with different opinions, but almost every character has some group that loves them and wants more time with them.

That's a really, it's kind of a gift and a curse. The gift is, wow, we really did something with these characters, but the curse is it's actually going to be impossible to spend as much time as everybody would want with all of them. We're gonna do the best we can, and we're literally working our asses off right now to do the best that we can.

SW: And that's just with Borderlands 4, right? Like, this is a long-running franchise, we have this huge stable of characters from previous entries that, like, Look, if they didn't die on camera, as far as I'm concerned, they're still there. They're still out there.

MG: Handsome Jack and Scooter are the only two that I can think of that are no longer around.

SW: Yes.

RP: Roland's gone gone.

SW: Roland's gone, gone, gone, gone. Yeah, Maya's gone. My, yeah.

MG: Oh yeah, I forgot about Maya

RP: I miss you, Maya.

SW: But yeah, I mean, that's... I am very much of the opinion that if a character dies, they're dead. You can still tell stories about them. I mean, I don't know if you've played Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, but there is some stuff about Roland in there that is, I think, hard-hitting. But it's not... We're not cheating the story there.

MG: When we talked in May, we sort of talked about what characters were coming into fall from past games and I suppose for fans, when they find their favourite character has made the jump and they're continuing their stories, it's a big rewarding moment for them. Is there any character that you haven't brought into four for whatever reason yet that you're like, If we did this, fans would go nuts, because it's that character. Like Eli obviously is coming up with the big DLC. Is there some character you would love to bring into four, because you know the fans would go nuts?

RP: I don't know if I, definitely the first part, of the sentence. Like, there are many characters I would love to spend more time with and my list might not be exactly the same as Sam's, but there's probably going to be a lot of crossover. Then there's also things that we think, you know, some different fans would have different wishes to spend more time with and it's such a weird thing, right? Because there's absolutely people out there that think Jack was the greatest villain of all time and want to, like, don't care what rules we break as long as they're allowed to, like, feel that again.

Then there are others that could not tolerate us if we break said rules, you know? How do you, and you can't reconcile that mutually exclusive kind of thinking. So, you know, we have to, we have, we, We care a lot about this stuff, so we take it very seriously and we don't, we're not likely to do a thing that we think violates our integrity and commitment to the universe. Even if we know that there's some group of fans that would lose their minds over it. Yeah.

SW: Yeah, we have to do it justice. I mean, even just from a production consideration, right? If you want to have a character show up for eight seconds in an Avengers movie, you pay them $50,000, they show up for a few days, you film it, everything like that. If we bring back a character, we fully remake them, right? We concept, Oh, what do they look like now? Has their personality changed? How do they work, if they're a player character, how do they work as an NPC now? And so that is so much work that we have to put in that we have to be really considerate of making sure that it's worth the time.

MG: Yep. I mean, I'm longing for the days where there's a vault hunter who's not actually a vault hunter, but they just think they are a vault hunter.

SW: They've just wandered in.

MG: They're just struggling through every encounter that they have to deal with.

SW: What's the play loop on that one?

MG: I would imagine it's half an hour.

SW: We should have a vault hunter that doesn't know how to reload. Like they pick up a gun, they shoot it until it's empty and then have to pick up another one.

RP: There was a pitch like that. And if this was my idea, then forgive me, but I don't think it was. I think it was back when a decade before the Borderlands movie when someone else was wanting to do a Borderlands movie. And the idea was to have like a massive actor, like someone huge, like the biggest star you could think of. And they're in like a dropship and they're suiting up.

SW: Kitted out, yeah.

RP: They're getting like full vault huntered up, you know, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then drop. That's freaking awesome. And the CG is just off the charts and they land and they step out on Pandora and they're like, they're like ready to go, full gear, you know. Legendary's out. They're just the most badass and this is like the biggest superstar you could imagine in whatever, and then one second later, like a rack hive just steps on them and flattens them and they're just gone.

SW: A single skag.

RP: And that's it. And it's like, sorry, buddy. You're not a fault hunter. You just got wiped out in your first second on Pandora.

MG: Like Brad Pitt and Deadpool 2.

RP: It's something like that. Maybe that trickle because this was like 13 years ago. It was right after Borderlands 2 launched, when that was pitched to me. I remember that it was pitched to me, but it might have been my idea. I think it was pitched to me though. I'm gonna say it was someone else's idea. I'm not gonna take any credit for it.

MG: That would be great. You were recently in Tokyo and revealed the first DLC Vault Hunter that players will get to enjoy in 2026 and that was C4SH, how was that response?

RP: Oh my gosh, Japanese, I love Japan. I love freaking Japan, and I love Japanese gamers. And I think it's true that I'm not sure I'd even be a game developer if it wasn't for the Japanese game industry back when I was getting started. So, there was it was cool to be in a room you know I'm on their main stage equivalent at the Tokyo Game Show and there's a room full of Borderlands fans there, Japanese Borderlands fans and they're so polite but they're so awesome so you can feel the reaction but it's a little different it's not like people screaming, they do clap but it's polite you know and it's when you're supposed to okay fair you know what I mean it's never out of turn.

There was a moment when I jumped on stage at the end of it and danced with the mascot, and they were doing a choreographed dance, and I just broke the script and jumped on stage and did it with him and as much as a Japanese audience can lose their minds, they kind of lost their minds, and I really felt them, but yeah, it was really fun. It was really fun to announce C4SH there and to feel the reaction.

MG: When we spoke in May, you said, you know, you're going to play with your wife. Have you played for with-?

RP: Okay, so I watched her play an entire solo playthrough. I literally watched her play the entire solo playthrough because she used Harlow, which is a character I also wanted to use in my first retail playthrough and then when I get back from this, we're starting co-op together and we haven't decided yet, but between Vex, Amon, and Rafa, we're gonna have two of those three, we haven't decided yet. If she wants to play Vex, that's cool. I've played Vex so much. I kinda wanna play one of the other ones. But yeah, so I'm down to play either Rafa or Amon, so if she picks one of those, I'll pick the other one. But she's going to choose, but we're going to get started as soon as I get back and I cannot wait. But yeah, I watched her play and I kind of cheated. I wasn't going to, however, get started until the game launched, but I kind of cheated and I got a PlayStation 5 code for her about five days early.

SW: With the streamers, right? Like, yeah.

RP: It was no, nobody had that and I got I it was really lucky actually because she found a very, very strange esoteric audio issue only for the intro logos, that only occurred on a retail PlayStation didn't occur on any of the test systems and we were able to get it and fix it and get it in there before the real time launch and I estimated that probably, you know, because we've sold a lot of units on PlayStation 5, but even though it's rare and esoteric.

SW: Yeah, enough, a lot of large numbers, yeah.

RP: Yeah, it would have been probably about 120,000 people would have experienced this bug, and they'd be like, why isn't there any sound in the intro videos and in the Marcus Intro.

SW: Oh no.

RP: Can you imagine? That would have been really bad.

SW: If they missed the little kid saying Gearbox, I'll live with that. If they missed Marcus, the dulcet sounds of Marcus.

RP: That would have been really, really bad and I don't know if I should have said that or not, but it's true. So, I'm grateful to my wife for being my biggest customer.

MG: But sometimes these things just line up that way before that happens.

RP: You know, it's so weird how you can test everything and there's some things that just only will happen in the retail wild public environment.

MG: Yep.

RP: Because the QA department at 2K is amazing and they tested everything a million ways and this literally is only possible with this very specific kind of way that the TV handles audio. If you have a television that won't, it was something to do with the way the channels are distributed to the PlayStation and the audio channels.

MG: That was all that I had to ask about, so thank you.

My thanks to both Randy and Sam for taking the time to speak with me about Borderlands 4 and their views on DLC. If you are curious what the team revealed at their first ever PAX Australia panel for the game, you can scope that out here.