There’s precious little information available about the upcoming Borderlands 4. Gearbox has done an excellent job keeping details of the game under wraps, including the identities of the next slate of vault hunters. Each mainline entry into the franchise has introduced four adventurers for players to play as. Sometimes they’re returning NPCs made playable, sometimes they’re all-new characters, but either way, they’re one of its most important aspects. The wait for the new vault hunter announcements is one of, if not the biggest part of a Borderlands title’s pre-release hype.
All that said, nobody does pre-release hype quite like Blizzard. Overwatch had a legendary marketing run with massive amounts of hype built up in advance of its final release. Unsurprisingly, a lot of it was focused heavily on the game’s cast of colorful characters. Because Borderlands 4 is sure to focus more on its own eccentric but lovable oddballs, there’s one easy trick Gearbox can poach from Blizzard to get similar levels of excitement for the game.
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Borderlands 4 Should Incorporate Overwatch-Style Character Cinematics
Borderlands 4 Cinematics Can Establish New Characters While Hyping Up the Game
One of the biggest reasons Overwatch was so anticipated was Blizzard’s beautiful character cinematics released as trailers ahead of the game’s final release. Shorts like Recall, Alive, Hero, and the beautifully presented Dragons were technically and visually impressive in their own right, but as advertisements for the game, they are unrivaled.
A title like Overwatch lives and dies by how well the audience likes its characters. Blizzard was so sure the characters would be beloved that there were plans to make an Overwatch Netflix series many years ago. The series never materialized, but the cinematic shorts still serve as a great entry point into the game’s universe. Something like Dragons does a great job of establishing Genji and Hanzo as these incredibly skilled, hyper-competent warriors, but also gives plenty of breathing room for the emotional storytelling of the brothers’ conflict.
The original Borderlands may have been light on story, but as time has gone on, the series has been taking more and more pride in showing off its characters and focusing on an overarching narrative. And with players sinking more and more hours into the game and grinding for loot, the vault hunter characterization needs to be pitch perfect; nobody wants to spend hours upon hours playing as a bland, uninteresting, and underwritten character.
Character Cinematics Can Help Flesh Out the Borderlands Universe In Ways the Game Can’t
In the likely event that Borderlands 4’s cast of vault hunters are new to the series, a series of five-to-ten minute long cinematics would be the best possible way to introduce them to the fanbase. Newer games in the series have done wonders when it comes to making the vault hunters more fully fleshed out characters, with in-game dialogue where they add their two cents on the events playing out in front of them. Letting them shine in their own cutscenes would both be a great way to showcase how compelling they are (and how fun they’ll be to play as) but also give a sneak peek as to what type of people they are.
What few scraps of information Gearbox has released regarding Borderlands 4’s story indicate it’s going to be an event. With a villain who’s been promised to be even more sinister than Handsome Jack, it’s safe to say the story intends to be ambitious. Cinematic shorts could do a lot to flesh out the rest of the Borderlands universe: the characters living in it, their motives, their personalities, their relationships, and more. As good as the storytelling has become in the Borderlands games, the focus is, and always should be, keeping gameplay as fun as possible. Where the game itself may not have time to focus on these character beats, cinematics can pick up some of the slack to give the story the depth that Gearbox is striving for.
See if you have what it takes to go down in history as a legendary Vault Hunter as you search for secret alien treasure, blasting everything in sight.
Looter Shooter
Action
Adventure
RPG
- Franchise
- Borderlands
- Released
- 2025