Summary

• Borderlands 4's teaser trailer was revealed at Gamescom with plenty of clues regarding characters and story.
• The trailer opts for realistic visuals over a cel-shading art style, leaving fans curious.
• The trailer has a "Not actual gameplay" disclaimer, hinting at a potential return to cel-shading.

After plenty of Gamescom Opening Night Live event. The look was a mere teaser, and nothing overt was revealed about the story, although there were many clues dotted throughout.

This led to plenty of speculation as to what characters could be returning and what the story could be. The most obvious being Lilith, as the trailer opens with the her Firehawk call sign right before Elpis, Pandora’s moon, teleports into view. Lilith has appeared in every Borderlands game to date, along with the recent, critically reviled movie, so her appearance in Borderlands 4 seemed inevitable at this point. Meanwhile, others speculated that Handsome Jack had returned due to the alignment of the Vault symbol on a face in the trailer matching the scar he had from having the vault key punched into his face in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, something that was quickly debunked by Gearbox's CEO, Randy Pitchford, who said it was "something far more dangerous and sinister."

Borderlands 4's Trailer Seems To Have Dropped Its Cel-Shading Art Style

Opting For A More Detailed Aesthetic

One thing that immediately stood out to me was that the trailer seemed to drop the Borderlands franchise's cel-shaded art style, opting for a far more realistic visual over the vibrant cartoony style of its predecessors. While it could have been said that this was just for some features like fire and space effects and that characters and locations would be cel-shaded as no human characters appeared throughout Borderlands 4's teaser trailer, there was a shot right at the end of a robotic hand - potentially introducing the tech-based Eridians - picking up a Psycho's mask at the end. Neither the arm nor the mask looked cel-shaded.

The Psycho mask pattern was painted in a cel-shaded way to match the past games, but the item itself was done in a photorealistic style.

While I'm interested in seeing where the Borderlands story goes next, I'm not entirely sure how I would feel about this change if Gearbox had opted to move away from the art style of the past games. While newer game engines do allow for far more detailed visuals, and there's often such a push to strive for photorealism in the AAA game space, I'd argue that, more often than not, games that have an art style that doesn't do this - such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Limbo, Cuphead, and the previous Borderlands games - stand a greater chance of looking more appealing years on from launch, while those "realistic" titles can look dated extremely quickly, which is something I find when revisiting so many titles that boasted "realism" on the PS3 and Xbox 360 era that now have an "uncanny valley" feel to them due to characters having overly shiny, flat skin textures, or eyes with no real life to them.

The uncanny valley is a phenomenon with computer-generated imagery in media in which an artificial entity appears almost, but not exactly, like a real person. This causes a sense of unease in the viewer because the artificial being is close enough to reality to be recognizable but not close enough to be indistinguishable from reality.

Borderlands 4's Teaser Trailer Did Have A Disclaimer

Noting That It Is "Not Actual Gameplay" Gives Me Some Hope

One thing that does give me some hope that Gearbox hasn't abandoned the cel-shaded visuals for a more realistic approach is that the trailer sports a "Not actual gameplay" disclaimer and a recreated image of the robotic hand holding the mask in more of a traditional cel-shaded style is being used for the game's poster. While it should have been fairly obvious that it wasn't gameplay, as there was no first-person looter-shooter action in the play, it's still interesting not to have the game's signature style throughout the teaser trailer unless this was done purely to keep those who hadn't been following the leaks guessing until later. However, Lilith's Firehawk call sign opening the trailer should have been enough of a giveaway for fans of the series early on.

The last time Borderlands featured a more "realistic" art style was back before the release of the original game. This seemed to be changed to the more vibrant cel-shaded look fans are familiar with late into development, with earlier promotional material - including a unique cover from the now-closed Game Informer in 2007 - showing off a far duller post-apocalyptic looking world swathed in a brown and grey color palette that was becoming all too common in other games of the era. In a 2017 interview with IGN, Pitchford stated that he knew that when he decided to go with the cartoon art style, it would "fix the dissonance" between the visuals and the gameplay of the original title but it would also put a limit on Borderlands' potential audience as "there's just a huge percentage of the gaming audience that does not want a cartoon."

Of course, now Borderlands is an established name in the gaming space, and players are accustomed to the series' cartoony-yet-violent aesthetic. Therefore, it would be interesting to see how players respond to a realistic-looking game in the franchise that retains its rich and striking color palette - those space shots as Elpis is being teleported did still look incredible after all - even though I personally would miss the previous visuals. Time will tell, as Borderlands 4 has just been teased with no release date in sight, so the title's likely some way off and there are bound to be plenty more reveals prior to its launch.

Sources: Randy Pitchford/X, IGN