Borderlands 4 will cut back on 'toilet humor,' says Gearbox: 'If the word skibidi ships in the game under my watch I’m gonna cry real tears'
Everything we've seen about Borderlands 4 so far, which to be fair isn't much, very strongly suggests that yes, it will be a Borderlands game. But some things are changing. As we said when the first Borderlands 4 trailer dropped at The Game Awards last week, the art style that made the previous games so visually distinctive appears to be fading into the background. And earlier today, narrative director Sam Winkler said on X that the «toilet humor» so prevalent in Borderlands 3 is going to be dialed back too—pretty dramatically, from the sounds of it.
I don't think anyone would say that Borderland was ever a «serious» game series, but Borderlands 3 was a bit much, to put it mildly.
«It's stuck in the late '00s, when surface level vulgarity was enough to qualify as edgy—Borderlands 3 is seriously obsessed with turds—and when the series was first conceived,» we wrote in our 2019 review. «It's stuck in a time when memes lasted months rather than days, when referential humor was still a novelty and not exhausting, when you could point at something the slightest bit abnormal or gross and call it a joke.»
That style of comedy hadn't aged particularly well even then, and five years down the road I imagine it hasn't gotten any better. Luckily, Borderlands 4 appears to be aiming higher on the comedy front: Narrative director Sam Winkler said today that he's «gotten to work with some of the funniest people I know as contract writers» on the game, but in response to someone who expressed hope for «dark humor instead of fart jokes,» he replied, «Not at liberty to talk much about the content of BL4, but I remain firm in my criticism of BL3's overabundance of toilet humor.»
Lest there be any doubt as to where Winkler stands on the matter, he was somewhat more pointed in another post: «I’m not gonna say there's no toilets but if the word 'skibidi' ships in the game under my watch I'm gonna cry real tears. Paul Tassi joked that we were gonna have a gun called Hawk 2A and a fellow
Read more on pcgamer.com
