What is the most important part of the game development process? One could very easily make the case that it’s the Q&A phase. After all, you can make a game look as beautiful as you want, and think that you’ve come up with the most impactful gameplay loop ever, but if you don’t program it properly or think things a few steps ahead, it’ll fall apart. The Q&A department of most game studios and support studios is there to help ensure the games are good at launch. For Randy Pitchford of Gearbox Software, though, Borderlands 4 will have the players be an extra part of its Q&A system.
This came in an interview with TechRaptor, where the CEO noted that for his team, they know that the fans will let their “feelings be known” about their games no matter what:
“One thing that we can count on from our audience is they’re not going to hold back. If they have opinions, we will hear about them. But we love them.”
Indeed, and for a game like Borderlands 4, that will be needed, because the game has a LOT going on within it, including billions of guns that players will get their hands on and an incredibly chaotic gameplay loop via all the shooting and destruction that’ll take place.
Randy himself says he loves that gamers “break” their…uh…stuff…and the more people that are playing the game, the more opinions that will be heard, and the more data that’ll be collected for Gearbox to work with:
“When we have millions and millions of players playing the game—let’s say there’s 5 million people playing—that 1% of god-roll player, well guess what? That’s now 50,000 people that are just f**king crushing because they got the sh*t. It’s really wild how the edge cases are massive numbers of people when you have the game launch at the scale.”
Swearing aside, he had a habit of doing that in this interview, Randy isn’t wrong that having so much data and player input is a good thing. Another team member was also in the interview, and he noted that they welcome that data because they got the team to fix it quickly when the problems become known.
That’s not to say that the game will be “broken at launch,” like certain other AAA titles of recent years, but instead, the team is promising that things will be quickly updated so that maximum carnage and enjoyment can be felt as you play.
