One of the most known marketing lines in videogame history is the absolutely ludicrous promise that Borderlands has 87 bazillion guns. Obviously this is hyperbole—the guns are randomised. It has a lot, but a bazillion is not a real number and thus should not be taken seriously. It was a goof, a gaff.
Well, that tagline now has a competitor. Borderlands 4 has 30 billion guns. Apparently. That’s per an Epic Games store post that quotes art director Adam May.
Because big numbers are hard to conceptualise sometimes, I want to remind you that one billion is 1,000 million. One million seconds is about 11 and a half days, one billion seconds is over 31 years.
In other words, Gearbox is claiming that watching a video consisting of one second clips of all the possible gun combinations in Borderlands 4 would take you just 45-odd years short of a millennium. If you started said video in the year 1080, you’d be celebrating your freedom right about now.
Given the looter shooter is no longer novel, you and I both know better than to take this at face value. Mathematically there might be 30 billion guns, but in practice, we’re talking about a randomised stat-stick with a bunch of different lego parts with indiscernible numbers. The main difference in how guns handle—in other words, the important bit—is down to the manufacturer, a fact May is quick to emphasise.
“Players have some recognition when they’re picking up a certain manufacturer’s weapon and have a rough idea of how it’s going to function,” he says. “It’s a back-and-forth with the design team and art team, making sure that visually things line up with how they’re supposed to work mechanically.”
That’s a pretty solid question, actually—how are you gonna keep all of your guns from looking like pre-transmog World of Warcraft characters in firearm form? Senior project producer Anthony Nicholson says you put ’em on a wall. That’s how. Like in the Matrix.
“It was this really large gun map where you could see all of the individual parts for all the individual guns, for all the individual manufacturers,” he explains.
“It made it so you could see how each of those things were and how we could have those combinations roll together and how they would work—the slides, the animators, the actions, the art all fitting together. Because a certain gun, if it pumps one way, but there’s a long barrel that goes on the bottom, obviously those parts can’t go together.” Oh my. But isn’t that the fun part, Nicholson?
I’m being a touch glib about the same uberbazillio-jillion (a new word I have made up and am in the process of patenting, step off, Pitchford) guns, but I do figure the process of figuring out, logistically, how you make a looter-shooter’s randomised gunslop all look cohesive is actually difficult. And, hey, if the Matrix wall works, it works. Who knows—maybe the story’ll be semi-decent this time around, too.
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