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Gearbox’s developers are continuing to clarify expectations on how they intend to shape Borderlands 4.
Of course, the developers are deliberately engaging with their community on how to keep tweaking the game further. What’s interesting is to this day, a lot of the Borderlands 4 discourse still revolves around the crit knife.
Last week, Gearbox creative director Graeme Timmins argued that they don’t want the game’s balance to be hurt by what he referred to as ‘bad gear.’
At the time, he brought up the example of an Invincible boss they were planning to add to the game in the future. Timmins doesn’t want a scenario where all the players were using the same item to take the boss down.
Because that one item discouraged players from making other builds, he refers to that item as ‘bad gear.’ Gearbox wants the players to keep looking for more weapons and items to get OP. They just want them to keep looking.
This time, Timmins erases any doubts that they are looking to nerf some things.
As Gearbox Intended
Timmins said this on Twitter in response to the community:
We love seeing one shot builds when they are built into and not the result of a single piece of gear or single skill behaving in a way that we hadn’t intended. When a single aspect creates a massive disparity in power, that’s when we look at making an adjustment.
And this is where we get to the crux of the matter. Timmins implies that they did build Borderlands 4 in such a way that you could create one shot builds, and you can carry them around the game.
But there are situations when there is a ‘massive disparity’ caused by those builds. And that’s a situation that the developers did not intend.
So, this would be the argument to nerf items like the Crit Knife.
Is This Really The End Of The Crit Knife?
Timmins has given fans an out so that they could hope that the Crit Knife could still be overpowered. The key issue is not that it’s so powerful, but that it creates a disparity in power.
Gearbox could earnestly look into buffing up other weapons and items to gain that rebalance to make the Crit Knife OK, instead of nerfing the Crit Knife itself. They would not have to adjust every weapon. They just need to figure out what items could make the gamers go trying to make other builds.
It is also still possible they make some kind of nerf, but not something that inoculates the Crit Knife completely. Crit Knife could still be a one shotter in the future – but one that could be outdone by other weapons and builds by other Vault Hunters.
We may not have to wait that much longer if Gearbox plans to do something about the Crit Knife or not, as the big patch could be coming up later today.
