Borderlands 4 has ‘more passive perks than all the previous Borderlands combined’. Uh, is that a good thing?

Why More Passive Perks Might Actually Break the Game

Here’s the thing about passive perks – they’re supposed to be the cherry on top of your build sundae, not the entire ice cream shop. When developers start bragging about having “more than all previous games combined,” my spider-sense starts tingling like I just walked into a used car lot.

Think about it this way: Borderlands has always been about that sweet spot between chaos and strategy. You pick your character, you spec your tree, you find some ridiculous gun that shoots exploding teddy bears, and you go to town. It’s beautiful in its simplicity. But what happens when you’ve got so many passive perks floating around that building a character feels like doing your taxes?

I’ve seen this movie before, and it doesn’t always end well. Remember when World of Warcraft decided that every class needed forty-seven different abilities? Yeah, that was fun for exactly nobody except the people who enjoyed writing 50-page rotation guides on forums at 3 AM.

The Analysis Nobody Asked For But Everyone Needs

Let me paint you a picture here. I’m sitting there, controller in hand, staring at what used to be a reasonably straightforward skill tree that’s now transformed into something that looks like a subway map designed by someone having a caffeine-induced breakdown. Do I take the perk that increases my gun damage by 3% when jumping on a Tuesday, or the one that makes my grenades explode into smaller grenades that explode into even smaller grenades?

The beauty of the original Borderlands games was that you could pick up and play without needing a PhD in theoretical physics. Sure, the endgame builds got complex, but you didn’t need a spreadsheet just to figure out why your character suddenly started setting themselves on fire every time they reloaded.

What Gearbox Might Be Thinking (Spoiler: It’s Complicated)

Now, before I completely torch this idea, let me try to channel my inner optimist for a hot second. Maybe – and I’m being generous here – Gearbox has learned from the mistakes of other games that tried to do too much. Maybe they’ve figured out how to make a billion passive perks feel meaningful rather than overwhelming.

Perhaps they’re thinking about player retention in a world where everyone’s attention span has been reduced to the length of a TikTok video. More perks mean more combinations, more builds to experiment with, more reasons to keep playing. It’s not the worst logic I’ve ever heard, even if it makes my brain hurt a little.

The Real Question We Should Be Asking

But here’s what really gets me: instead of focusing on quantity, why not focus on quality? I’d rather have twenty really interesting, game-changing passive perks that make me feel like a badass space cowboy than two hundred forgettable stat bumps that blend together like elevator music.

The best Borderlands moments have always come from discovering some absurd synergy between your skills and weapons that makes you feel like you’ve broken the game in the most delightful way possible. That magic doesn’t come from having more options – it comes from having better options.

So yeah, Gearbox, you’ve got my attention. But you’ve also got my skepticism cranked up to eleven. Here’s hoping that when Borderlands 4 finally drops, all those passive perks add up to something more meaningful than just checking boxes on a feature list.

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