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Borderlands 4’s next update is not that big, but it will bring in something fans have been asking for.
Gearbox Associate Creative Director Grant Kao revealed the news on Twitter:
This week we’re going to tune some pistols and put in a damage increase for the hellwalker that we didn’t get in time when we converted it to fire. ARs will come next!
What Is The Hellwalker?
The Hellwalker is an incendiary shotgun made by Jakobs. It’s at Legendary level of rarity, and it originally appeared in Borderlands 3.
This shotgun only has fixed parts. That means it will have the same parts every time you find it.
Hellwalker’s special weapon effect is called Soothslayer. Because of this, its shots come out in an invested pentagram pattern.
It also plays a guitar riff every time you equip or fire it. This gun has a lot of novelty, because its whole presentation is a reference and in-joke to Doom and its super shotgun, also known as the double shotgun.
We won’t tell you how to get the Hellwalker. It’s easy to look this up if you are that curious. What we will say is that you’ll want to get Moxxi’s Encore Machine to set you up to farm it.
The gun also comes with this flavor text quoted from the 2012 novel Between Two Fires:
A piece of the moon hung in the sky like a polished bone.
Will Gearbox Lean Into The Doom Reference?
When the Hellwalker was introduced in Borderlands 4, it wasn’t particularly more powerful or effective than other shotguns of its class. So there was some novelty in picking it up, but it certainly wasn’t as essential as the ‘legendary’ Crit Knife.
But based on Kao’s claims, Gearbox could lean more into making this as ‘super’ as the super shotgun that apparently inspired it.
In the original Doom, the super shotgun is simply a double barreled shotgun. In 1994, having two shotguns that hit a lot of damage in a wide area was already overpowered for the game. Short of the BFG, the super shotgun is the most satisfying weapon you could play back then.
id software had to take extra effort to recreate that satisfying feeling when they brought back the super shotgun in future Doom games.
This isn’t a gun that requires a lot of tactical play to get the most out of. So you can see why Gearbox would want to make a gun like that for their games too.
We should be looking forward to some buffs for the pistols as well, but it should be obvious why everyone noticed the news about the Hellwalker.
