The loot shooter has more guns than we could ever play in our entire lives.
Weapons have always been the icing on the cake in Borderlands, so to speak. What would a good loot shooter be if you didn’t find a new gun every few minutes and then meticulously compare its stats with your current equipment?
And Borderlands 4 is once again showing off with some astronomical numbers: Game Director Adam May from Gearbox has now confirmed on the Epic blog that there will be over 30 billion weapons.
And no, that’s not a typo. That’s actually 30,000,000,000 weapons.
A really, really, really long weapon list
For big games, we at GameStar often publish weapon lists for new shooter releases. However, we hope you understand that we’re going to skip that for Borderlands 4, given the sheer number of weapons. Because an article like that would be relatively… um, extensive.
I asked an AI how many pages I could expect. Here’s the result:
A DIN A4 sheet can typically hold about 100 lines with a standard font size in Word and single line spacing.
Since each weapon will probably be listed as a bullet point, the total number of pages required can be calculated as follows:
30,000,000,000 entries at 100 lines per page = 300,000,000 pages
I actually wanted to calculate how many years it would take an author to compile this list, but that might be taking things too far.
How does Borderlands do that?
Of course, all these weapons are not built by hand. Instead, Borderlands 4 relies on a sophisticated system that procedurally generates weapons from a large pool of components.
This results in wild and exotic combinations in all possible shapes and colors with various manufacturer features, fire modes, attachments, and elemental effects. Supposedly, up to 2,000 components are jumbled together in this random generator.
The previous game already featured over a billion different weapons created procedurally. For the sequel, the developers have apparently found a way to increase that number 30-fold.
One new feature is that, for the first time in the series, parts from multiple manufacturers can be combined in a single weapon.
Appearance matters
How can players tell all these guns apart? According to Adam May from Gearbox, this is a key issue for the development team:
It’s a back-and-forth between the designers and artists on the team. We want to make sure that the exterior matches the mechanical functionality. If you want a really fast-firing weapon, the design is sleek, angular, and has an aggressive look. If the thing fires really thick rockets, it should be big, chunky, and heavy.
What weapons will you be looking for when Borderlands 4 is released on September 12? And do you find the prospect of 30 billion different weapons more appealing or perhaps even daunting? Feel free to share your thoughts on the game’s arsenal in the comments below!
