Borderlands 4 has had a rollercoaster six months. Since launching in September last year, Gearbox’s looter shooter has suffered various controversies, mostly to do with severe PC performance issues. Outspoken CEO Randy Pitchford went on the offensive, responding directly to complaints on social media to Claptrap back at disgruntled fans. Strauss Zelnick, boss of Gearbox parent company Take-Two, said Borderlands 4 sales suffered “a little bit of softness” as a result of the technical issues, but expressed confidence “it’ll all be made up” given enough time. All the while, Borderlands 4 remains on a ‘mixed’ user review rating on Steam. After launching to over 300,000 concurrent players on Valve’s platform, Borderlands 4 now averages a concurrent peak in the four digits. Steam numbers don’t paint the entire picture of a game’s popularity, but it’s clear Borderlands 4 needs a shot in the arm.Story Pack 1, titled Mad Ellie and the Vault of the Damned, is, Gearbox hopes, that shot in the arm. This premium DLC, out today, adds a new playable character, C4SH, a new map zone, two new major boss fights, 16 minibosses, and much more. All the while, Gearbox has worked to improve PC performance, and says it has made significant improvements to frame rate. So, is now the time to jump back in?In an interview with IGN ahead of the DLC’s release, lead game designer Josh Jeffcoat and managing producer Eli Luna made the case for C4SH and co to convince lapsed fans to return to Borderlands 4, and perhaps even convince newcomers to finally give it a shot.IGN: When Borderlands 4 came out, I think I put like 25, 30 hours into it, and then I stopped playing for a variety of reasons. But the release of this story pack is tempting me back. Is this a good opportunity for people who might have dropped off not even started playing in the first place to either come back or jump in for the first time?Josh Jeffcoat: It's definitely a good reason to come back. It's a brand new area of the game. It's all new content, plus with the new Vault Hunter. If you were looking for a different style of gameplay, you can start the DLC directly with a new Vault Hunter right away. You don't have to go level anybody up or play through any of the mainline missions, if you didn't want to have to deal with doing that. You're more than welcome to.But we know that there's lots of different customers that play the game for different reasons. Some people are really into the story and then when the story's done, they're done. So for those people, this is absolutely a reason to come back because we got hours and hours of new story content here. Some people are just in it for the grind. They're just looking for gear. We got a lot of new gear in the DLC, so we got a lot of stuff for them. Some people just want to do endgame boss fights. We got a whole bunch of new boss fights for them in this DLC as well. So if this is enticing you to come back, I think that sounds great because that's what we want. We're always trying to find ways to keep people entertained and just make experiences that they want to come and interact with. IGN: It would be great to go into more detail on the story aspect of what the DLC is bringing, what fans like me who are invested in that, can expect from it?Josh Jeffcoat: I think we're pretty well known for doing lots of big story DLC content historically throughout Borderlands. We've had big story DLCs for all of the Borderlands games, and some of them ended up doing so well they got spun off into their own games. The original Tiny Tina's DLC for Borderlands 2 became Wonderlands. So when we're in DLC land after the main game ships, is where we often get a little bit more experimental, where we're willing to take some risks or try some things that we wouldn't do for the scope of a full size game.And so for instance, Mad Ellie here, we're trying a little bit of a horror flavor, more so than we've ever done before. And there'd be no way we would commit to making a full length horror Borderlands game. That would be insane. That's not really what people are looking for. But in the DLC realm where we can tell these shorter stories, we can experiment with these things. We can try new gameplay techniques. And the things that work, maybe they get brought forward, the things that don't will get left behind. But we have a really long history of just experimenting and trying things here.I'm really glad that I got to be able to lead one of these experiments as it were, and I'm pretty happy with what we ended up with. So if you're really into story content — I play Borderlands for the story, that's who I am. That's the s**t that I really care about, and I really loved putting all this together for those types of players specifically.IGN: What sort of scope does the DLC have? I know developers hate attaching hours to these things!Josh Jeffcoat: Yeah. That's always going to be different for everybody. A person that's just doing mainline story, nothing else, is going to finish this a lot faster than someone who is doing the open world exploration like, "Oh, hey, what's that over there? Let me go explore. Oh, here was a secret cave and this tunnel took me to this area I've never seen before." We built a brand new large landmass. It's a new open world chunk. It's not directly attached to mainland Kairos. We wanted to be away from Kairos and away from The Order to tell a different story. But it's a pretty sizable chunk of content. If you remember in main game, Fadefields is that very first biome that you get to explore, the grassy area on the southern side of the city. Fadefields is divided into two separate halves, east and west, and we're about half the size of Fadefields West, a little bit bigger than that. But we've got as many hours long main campaign, lots of side missions, lots of micro missions, and we try to find interesting ways to vary up gameplay between all those things.I started my career here at Gearbox as a level designer a million years ago, 25 years ago. Oh, it's crazy! For me, storytelling and exploration are the reasons that I make games. They're the things that I want to do as a player, and those are the things that I always have felt compelled to make. And so getting this huge land mass and then carving a story through it and taking the player through all these different environments and trying to figure out like, "Hey, when we come around this corner, we want to have this amazing new vista that sets up this new area and kind of shows you and hints about things to come," I love planning all that stuff up and seeing it come to life. It takes a lot of people to do all that. And so directing all that at the high level for the first time was a really exciting experience for me and I hope all that kind of comes across whenever you're playing through it.IGN: Timeline wise, you're not continuing on from the end of the mainline story, right?Josh Jeffcoat: Yeah. So because we didn't want to require players to have to have completed the main story before they could then start any of our DLC content, we got the mandate from on high, from a storytelling standpoint, it has to make sense that it's happening contemporaneously as main game. You can't rely on any of the events in main game to have or have not happened because we don't know what players have done, and we always want to give players the option to play the game at their own pace, in their own way, however they want. That player freedom was really, really important at a high level for the whole game, and so we wanted to continue that here. IGN: It’s been 200 days since Borderlands 4 came out. How much has changed since launch? And it would be great to get some insight into what it's been like for you guys having to react to the feedback.Eli Luna: I would say obviously there was a lot of feedback with regards to performance and what we could do better. I feel like when it comes to building worlds this large, and especially when we're… Borderlands hasn't had this seamless world before. And so there was a lot of stuff that we were trying to do. But we didn't want to take away the essence of what Borderlands 4 is, with regards to how insane and crazy and over the top everything is. And so there were a lot of challenges for us with regards to keeping that world there, keeping performance up on a lot of things. And so there were a lot of things that we knew we could do better, and we already had a plan to tackle those things going forward. So when you're getting feedback and you're seeing stuff online, there is value in some of that, when you can see the constructive criticism and things that are there. We had already initiated a plan on what we were going to do. So every time we were finding gains and every time we were finding stuff that we knew we could do better over that time, and we knew that we'd be able to start adding to the patches, it made us feel better because we knew that if anything, it's just going to help with the immersion of the world.But with regards to how all that went, I feel like we had just the mission to try to really bring in as much as we could with regards to the optimization and things we could have done there. So it's been ... I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a little stressful, but at the same time, I feel like that's part of what our jobs are. When you're organizing these groups of people and nothing's really done in an assembly line, we don't wait for one part to be done, then we hand it off to the next part. Everybody's working simultaneously. And so trying to balance all that as we're moving along is always going to be a real challenge no matter what.But I feel like we did a pretty good job, as looking at the 200 days. We roughly got about 20% increase in FPS on just our rec spec. So I feel like we have done a pretty good job of taking the feedback, seeing what's there, trying to address it as best as we can. We have plenty of work to still do that we're doing throughout the rest of the year because we have more content coming out. And part of that balance is giving people like Josh and their teams the opportunity to have that ability to do those things. So yeah, it's been a lot. But it's been good. It's fun. It's part of the challenge of game development.IGN: PC performance almost came to dominate the whole discussion around the game at launch. Did the performance of the game surprise you? What were the things that came together to make it happen in that way? Obviously no developer wants to make a game that ends up having that sort of discourse around it at launch. So was there something about the very nature of what you're trying to do with Borderlands 4 that made the performance of it struggle at launch? Was it something else that contributed to it?Eli Luna: I think, especially when you have a large seamless world, and we're not loading levels the way that you would traditionally do, or the load that we're putting in a four-player co-op, a lot of those things when you're doing it in that scale… we're targeting the best approach that we can for this. Could it be 120 frames at a higher resolution? Yeah, I mean, those things are always going to be a challenge to hit, because we're also wanting to make sure that we hit a wide audience of players as well, which is why we have our min spec and our rec spec.But I would say it's not so much that we were surprised. We worked really hard to try to make that a playable experience. I think that the expectations of players, especially nowadays and moving forward with how quickly hardware is coming online, that's always going to be a challenge just to try to stay on top of, like trying to get everything in line for all these new features, but at the same time, not abandoning our min spec players and our rec spec players.And so it's like you were saying earlier, that feedback we get comes from a large ocean of people coming from both sides of that. And so we're always trying to balance that, especially on the PC side. Obviously on the console it's a little different because it's more fixed in. But at the end of the day, you can keep noodling and trying to make it perfect for a very long time, but at a certain point, you're really holding back the fun for people to just kind of jump in and start playing. Obviously, we want to continue to fine tune as we go, but we also don't want to hold the entire thing back just because of certain aspects of it.IGN: You’re raising the level cap as part of this update too, right?Josh Jeffcoat: Yeah, there's a lot of things coming out of the DLC that aren't strictly related to just the story or that new campaign. But yeah, level cap increase, we have 10 new levels for players. 10 more skill points into your character builds to be even crazier. It just gives players another goal to set for themselves because different players respond to different things. We have the shared progression so that players who want to play through the game multiple times or experiment with multiple characters can keep things like their SDUs (Storage Deck Upgrades), basically their ammo backpack stuff, the areas that they've unfogged on the map so that they're not blind when they're starting over a new game, if all they really want to do is try a character out and experiment. We're just trying to be a lot more user friendly with sort of sharing, like not having to redo collectibles with every new character. So if you want to finish a collectible hunt, you could start a new character and experience the whole game a whole different way while you're cleaning up those last few things while you're out there on that hunt. So we're trying to find ways to give people a better experience when they're playing the game.IGN: How does C4SH change the game?Josh Jeffcoat: So Tommy Westerman [senior game designer] was the designer for C4SH and he's been here at Gearbox for a very long time. One of the first player characters he actually developed was playable Claptrap in the Pre-Sequel. And so there's a little bit of continuity there because both of those player characters are about random chance and not knowing exactly what's going to happen when you press your action skill button. So Tommy had a blast being able to revisit that high level concept. Obviously Claptrap is about being silly and chaotic and annoying your friends, and C4SH is not in any way those things. One of his action skills, he has the Deck of Kanansi, and every time he draws a card, you don't know what card he's going to draw, but whenever he throws it, like whatever that card was, you're going to get a different effect whenever he hits an enemy with it or does an action there. And as you invest more skills in that Skill Tree, it adds more cards to the deck. And so it increases the randomness, but the risk reward is there because you don't know what's going to come up. So that's not a playstyle for everybody, but for people that love the like, this could go really right or this could go really wrong and just trying to survive when it goes really wrong for me, is really, really fun. I loved playing Claptrap in the Pre-Sequel because of that specifically, and our internal playtesting for C4SH has proven very, very popular. So I think players are going to like it.IGN: You’re able to just jump straight into the DLC with C4SH, right?Josh Jeffcoat: Oh yes. That was actually really important to me. I've always been a fan of games that release these big story DLCs, but those always take a long time to build and they always come way after the rest of the game. And coming back to a game after you've been away from it for a while and trying to remember, how do I play this? How do I get into it? Okay, I've got the DLC installed. How do I get to it? What do I need to do to get to the part that I care about? So we actually just baked into the main menu, if you click new game, you'll have the option to start the main game or you can start directly into Mad Ellie and the Vault of the Damned. You can just choose your character right there from the main menu, including C4SH. And whenever you click start, it will literally just start you right at the very first moment of the DLC. It'll give you a level 13 character with all of the experience points for you to spend however you want. We give you a handful of SDUs to get you started.And what this actually does is it skips the first four missions in the main game, because those are required to get you to the point where enough of the world is open that we know that you're free to travel anywhere. You've done all of the main game tutorial stuff so that we don't have to worry about like, "Oh, do you have a vehicle? Yes, you have a vehicle." All those types of things. So on the off chance that it's the first time that you've ever played Borderlands and you decided to start the game by going directly into Mad Ellie, it'd be crazy, but someone's going to do it. Whenever you return back to any of the main game areas, we have a big recap video that goes over those four missions that you skipped. Because from that point you can just go back to main game and continue playing main game. So it's a really good way to start with C4SH. It's almost like cheating a little bit because if you start at level 13, you get 12 points to spend immediately. So you can immediately start exploring the skill trees a little bit more than you would if you just started from the very, very beginning. So it's just a great way to shortcut directly into content.IGN: To wrap up, do you have a message to lapsed fans about why they should return to Borderlands 4 now? And is there any reassurance for the community wondering whether to invest their time and energy into getting back into the game?Josh Jeffcoat: I think I would just say, come enjoy a new adventure. Because that's really what the point of building all this was. That's the part of the game that always speaks to me, is the exploration, the adventure and the story. I'm not a person that's concerned with endgame or grinding out gear or getting a perfect build. I want to meet characters and I want to have questions about what's going on and then try to think like, what's going to happen next? And then see something cool on the horizon and then work my way over to it and have some big story reveal. And that is what the story packs are all about. It's very, very specifically for speaking to those customers that want that adventure. And so I loved being able to build it and I hope people love it.I love that we got to play around with horror this time. That's actually something that we don't touch on very much. Mancubus is returning in this. Mancubus has previously been in a Borderlands 3 DLC for Guns, Love, and Tentacles, and there's lots of sort of spooky stuff going on there, but it wasn't necessarily horror as far as the player experience was. So we're trying new things, new ways of exploring the world around you. I was really glad that we got real swimming in the DLC finally, because it was important to me to be able to explore worlds in a new way. And we have very limited swimming in main game, but we have like entire underwater areas that you can explore and go find secrets in now.So, come back for the adventure! That's why I built this, because I want to give people that opportunity to tell a story and go see a new place and have fun in it. Eli Luna: I would say just keep asking. Keep commenting and putting more into this, because it really does help shape the overall world and what the future of Borderlands will be. It's always good to hear that. So yeah, if people are passionate about things, we want to hear about that. Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.