Gearbox wants to make sure that Borderlands 4 is the smoothest co-op experience you’ve ever played, and to that end, it’s bringing back many hallmark features of the series, as well as some new ones like teleporting to players, in order to polish it off.
In a recent post on Xbox Wire, the team divulged some details on how co-op will factor into the upcoming shooter. Co-op has always been central to the Borderlands games, as well as its spin-off, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that the feature is back and seemingly better than ever in Borderlands 4.
For one, Borderlands 4 continues the franchise’s streak of including split-screen co-op for up to two players, and allowing those players to then take their game online. This means that the game will be able to support a full online party of four players where each duo is sharing a screen.
The same Wire post makes mention of the fact that Borderlands 4 will apparently have a streamlined lobby system, the ability to freely drop in and out of sessions, and dynamic level scaling, which has long been a staple of the franchise.
As an interesting new wrinkle, Borderlands 4 will introduce the ability for vault hunters to teleport to one another. In the past, Borderlands has allowed for teleportation between fast-travel spots, and even offered vehicles for players to speed up the process of moving through the world manually, but it has never outright allowed players to zip to one another’s side in an instant like this.
The change seems to be motivated by Borderlands 4’s new open-world design, which moves the series away from the zone-based approach the games have typically employed. As a result, Kairos, the upcoming game’s entirely new setting, is seemingly quite large and designed with plenty of points-of-interest dotted around the map that might draw players in different directions. There don’t appear to be systems limiting how far apart players can be, so squads can theoretically divide and conquer during a session and then come back together if a skirmish starts getting too tough.
Despite the introduction of this new form of fast travel, Borderlands 4 will once again feature player vehicles in the form of the personal Digirunners, and even appears to feature new movement mechanics, like balloons the player can use to zip up into the sky and then glide through the immediate area.
In short, when you boot up Borderlands 4 there will be a bevy of quality-of-life features ensuring that you and your vault-hunting friends have a painless time getting around and playing together. Borderlands 4 launches on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on September 12, and will be coming to Switch 2 a few weeks later on October 3.
