When Borderlands 4 launches on September 12, some of you may be inclined to rush towards the tallest peaks and the best-hidden nooks and crannies—just to see how much of it you can actually explore. Just like those pioneers who discovered you could gracelessly hop up Skyrim’s seemingly unsurmountable mountains.
Gearbox boss and occasional magician Randy Pitchford promises that you’ll be able to “get everywhere” by “double-jumping, grappling, dashing, gliding”. And for making these tricky journeys you’ll get a wee reward: bobbleheads depicting goatee-clad arms dealer Marcus. For the orienteering obsessed, more than 200 of these collectibles will be up for grabs.
Pitchford has a lot to say about them—enough to make a 12-tweet thread discussing how they came about. That seems like quite a lot of tweets, but what do I know? I got off social media three years ago so I could become insufferably smug about my incredible willpower and improved mental health.
When we set out to make a large, seamless world in Borderlands 4, we didn’t quite know what we were getting into. We designed a massive world and we committed ourselves to filling it! Thread: 1/12July 13, 2025
Honestly, though, quite a bit of thought does seem to have been put into these collectibles, and while there are a heck of a lot of them, their existence still feels more justified than most of their ilk—it certainly doesn’t seem like they’ve just been added to check another open-world trope off the list. Not exclusively, anyway.
As Pitchford tells it, he challenged Gearbox Software global creative executive Andrew Reiner to “find those unreachable spots and, well, reach them”. Pitchford wanted Reiner to “discover all the places that we never expected players to visit”,
“Reiner got to work and made screenshots of these places,” says Pitchford. “Sure, artists and designers made them look great and flitted around them in their tools, like ghosts. But in the game itself, with the bounds of physics and gravity and solid walls, these spots felt like virgin soil.”
As out-of-the-way as some of these spots might be, if Reiner could reach them, that meant players would be able to as well. Borderlands 4 creative director Graeme Timmons decided that there needed to be “something for players to find when they made their way to these remote or uninhabited areas,” Pitchford recalls.
Gearbox settled on Marcus bobbleheads and concocted a reason why these novelty items might be scattered around the place. Yes, there’s lore.
“Someone on the moon of Elpis had a crate, bought from their favorite local vendor. And, in the cataclysm, the crate, still full of collectibles, was hurtled towards Kairos. It broke apart and scattered the 200 or so of these things all over the place.”
Pitchford says that “each has a story”, though it looks like it’s all suggested via environmental storytelling. He teases a couple of specific bobbleheads with screenshots—one left on a desk in an abandoned building, another on top of a mountain, sitting in a chair next to a painting that would have been impossible to bring back down the mountain.
I dig this. Collectibles that add something, even if it’s just a bit of flavour or the hint of a story, feel so much more worth rooting around for—as long as they aren’t audio logs, naturally. And putting them in interesting places rather than randomly dotted around the map makes me actually want to make the trek.
Pitchford reckons that “most players will never see any of them”, though in posting the map with their general locations, I suspect he’s increased the number of people who’ll at least find a few.
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