Clearly this choice paid off for Gearbox.
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Gearbox senior project producer Anthony Nicholson shed light on one very big change they made to Borderlands 4.
He said this in Shacknews’ one hour documentary on the game:
So, some of the decisions that I’ve had to make as senior project producer along with my leadership team is things like our engine. Do we move forward to Unreal 5?
Once we started looking at a lot of the goals that we wanted to be able to meet with this game and some of our pillars and uh with performance, expanding our gameplay, our combat, our movement suite, it became evident that we wanted to go into Unreal 5 because it had so many more technical options for us to be able to explore.
Hold On – Isn’t Unreal Engine Bad For Open World Games?
As we know, CD Projekt RED is also using Unreal Engine 5 to make The Witcher 4. But a few developers have been critical about Unreal for open world games.
Warhorse studio co-founder Daniel Vávra argued that Unreal is slowing down development for The Witcher 4. He contrasted it to how they were able to develop Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and also add their own personal touches.
Similarly, Pearl Abyss talked up how they were able to do more for their upcoming game, Crimson Desert, by bypassing Unreal in favor of their own game engine, Black Space.
So, it’s surprising for Anthony to say that they found a lot of success using Unreal to make Borderlands 4. This is not just an open world game, but one that’s also a live service online multiplayer game.
What Unreal Did For Borderlands 4
Anthony explained what Unreal Engine 5 was able to do for their game:
It even allowed us the ability to have more robust zones in our seamless world to be able to operate that way as well. Borderlands always had a pseudo open world design or seamless world.
Like we tried to fake it, you know, before the art switch back on Borderlands 1. We had a world that was seamless, but our ambition in terms of the scope and scale just couldn’t work on that level of technology, in the Xbox 360 Unreal Engine 3 era.
Well, the art style has evolved in Borderlands 4 by leaning into the tech. There were just a lot of things that were limited in the past due to being a four-player co-op game.
And then, all the consoles that depending on the generation we’re coming out on, we have a lot of restrictions there, too. And Unreal just allows us to do things that we were never able to do before.
To be fair, Gearbox had different intentions and goals for Borderlands 4 than other studios had for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Crimson Desert, and The Witcher 4.
So maybe Vávra still had good advice for his peers in CD Projekt RED. But Gearbox’s choices definitely worked out for them. It could be smart if they kept using Unreal Engine 5 for the future.
