Ever wondered if the guns in the Borderlands games are in any way realistic? The answer could surprise you.
There’s a new YouTube video that actually puts Gearbox’s gear to the test. EXP has a new video where historian Jonathan Ferguson looks at Borderlands 4’s guns to decide if they seem real.
An Introduction On Our Expert’s Bona Fides
Ferguson works at the Royal Armouries, a national museum in the UK. It is the UK’s oldest museum, and one of the oldest in the whole world.
Ferguson is the Keeper of Firearms & Artillery at the Royal Armouries. In the past few months of videos with EXP, he has demonstrated a real knowledge in the history of guns and other modern weapons.
Borderlands’ Guns Are Just Unrealistic… Right?
If you’re a casual fan, you probably never put thought into this. Who cares if the guns are historically accurate? All we care about is that it feels good to shoot.
But if you looked at this from the other side, Gearbox absolutely had to worry about this. They knew that the players who know about real life guns would be calling them out for something that’s too unreal.
But at the same time, Gearbox had to make these guns look real to casual observers too. So Gearbox’s gun designers absolutely had to understand how real guns work to make believable fictional guns.
How Do You Invent “Real” Fake Guns?
As it turns out, it’s easy to identify what guns inspired Gearbox. From the onset, Ferguson points out that Vladof’s guns look like guns that were invented by the Soviet Union.
Feguson would go on to identify the finer details of different gun types, how their magazines (not cartridges) fit in, how attachments work, etc. And these were all things that he could easily explain in Gearbox’s guns.
But There’s Something Else…
If you play Borderlands games, you know that no single gun ever appears the same. Procedural generation was always part of these games, even before OpenAI became part of Microsoft.
So it’s really interesting to see that Ferguson could still tell what Gearbox picked up from real life to make these randomly generated guns.
We do see that Gearbox chose specific variables, such as manufacturers, to make this possible. So it also reflects on how clever their game design is.
Ultimately, if Gearbox made guns that acted weirdly, that would draw attention to itself. They did add some fantastic elements, but these guns operate on the same ‘rules’ that make real life guns look believable too.
If you’d like to learn more, you can watch EXP’s video below.
