The Borderlands 4 teaser at Gamescom’s Opening Night Live was many things: a confirmation for a rumored sequel, a reveal unfortunately forced to follow in the immediate wake of the franchise’s box-office fumble, and according to Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, a devious brain-tickler.
There are several secrets in the teaser for Borderlands 4. Some I have not seen commented on yet. What have you found! pic.twitter.com/0206xwQqeFAugust 21, 2024
After the teaser aired, Pitchford tweeted that it harbored “several secrets,” some of which he said he hadn’t seen fans discover yet. That’s a noteworthy clarification for two reasons: one, because fans—as they are wont to do—immediately began tearing the teaser apart in frame-by-frame analysis. Two, because Pitchford started replying to those analyses almost as soon as they started. (Randy likes to tweet.)
So, what might those secrets be? To begin, let’s run through the beats of the teaser. It starts with a moon warping into space; this looks like it’s Elpis, the moon of Pandora that was the setting for Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel and was “sealed” by Lilith at the end of Borderlands 3 with the same tell-tale phoenix symbol seen before the moon emerges here. It looks like Lilith might’ve teleported the whole dang moon, causing it to collide with a mysterious planet’s cloaking field in the teaser.
Some fans think that the teaser’s first secret happens just seconds into its runtime. As Twitter user @Primidian highlighted, you can see something streaking towards and impacting Elpis’s surface moments after it emerges from the fiery wormhole. This could be Lilith herself, colliding with Elpis after launching at it with her Siren magic in Borderlands 3’s closing moments.
There’s some proper ARG shit at the end of the teaser, too. In its last few seconds, it rapidly flashes an orange face overlaid with the Vault symbol, followed by a series of alien glyphs. The face, many fans have guessed, could be Handsome Jack—repeated series antagonist, who at one point had that same symbol branded onto his face in a similar orientation to what’s seen in the teaser.
Pitchford, seemingly of the opinion that letting a mystery speak for itself is for chumps, has responded to those theories by tweeting that it’s not Handsome Jack, but “something far more dangerous and sinister.” My guess is he’s being coy, and it’s both Jack and something worse. We’ll have to wait and see.
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As for the glyphs, Redditor pskought thinks they’re functioning as a substitution cipher for the messages “HE IS WATCHING” and “BREAK FREE.” If that’s accurate, the first bit could be a reference to The Watcher, a survivor of the mysterious Eridian precursor race who made an appearance in the Pre-Sequel but whose motives remain unclear. If The Watcher’s been manipulating events throughout the Borderlands games, maybe we’ll be “breaking free” from his machinations—or at least trying to before unleashing yet another alien horror.
What other secrets might the teaser hold? Can we puzzle out what the mysterious, cloaked planet is? Can we suss out what’s up with the robotic arm that plucks the bandit mask out of its crater? Perhaps, but only Pitchford knows for sure.
Borderlands 4 is set to release in 2025.