In the prologue of Borderlands 4, the villainous Timekeeper captures the player and attaches a mind-control bolt to the back of their neck. They can’t take it out, and the Timekeeper can access it anywhere, any time. A rogue agent bursts in and frees the player, starting a prison break, and the game begins – with sort of a pending question around the mind-control thing. When’s that going to become a problem? Throughout the prologue there are multiple conversations about mind-control. The prison break, you’re told, is more of a distraction. It’ll take a while for the Timekeeper to mind-control them all and get them back into their cells. Arjay, the agent, has a bolt too, but he’s protected by a robot companion – which, fine, whatever. At the end of the prologue there’s an introductory boss fight, and then – oh no! – the mind-control bolt is activated, and the player falls under the spell of the Timekeeper, who explains why he let the player get so far through their escape: “I wanted to see how useful my new Vault Hunter could be in action.” Arjay gives his robot companion to the player, freeing them, and in response the Timekeeper takes control of the unprotected Arjay and makes him stab himself in the chest and die. Thus the basic outline of the game: the Timekeeper is evil and controls everybody, and you’re trying to set the planet free.

Throughout the rest of the game, the player works with resistance groups and freedom fighters against the Timekeeper. All of them have mind-control bolts, and you sort of think – why are they able to get away with all of this? One of the first big story events has you meet the Outbounders, a group trying to escape the planet. The Timekeeper’s forces know where the Outbounders live, and they know who their leader is – you’re introduced to the Outbounders under attack from the Timekeeper’s forces. And you sort of think – hang on, why is the Timekeeper attacking these guys? Why doesn’t he just mind-control them and make them kill each other? Why do you need military forces at all on a planet where you can mind-control the population? There’s not really any justifiable narrative reason – in short, it’s for the sake of gameplay. By itself, that’s not the worst reason in the world – and previous games in the Borderlands series do have superficially similar sequences. Overlook in Borderlands 2 and Reliance in Borderlands 3 are both towns liberated by the player, where the antagonist sends a few waves of troops and then, in essence, gets bored and drops it. However, in both of those examples, the antagonists aren’t really interested in controlling those specific towns. In Borderlands 2, Handsome Jack is trying to stop you connecting to Sanctuary, your home base, and only attacks Overlook as long as you’re setting up the connection. In Borderlands 3, the Calypsos are looking for the Vault, so your control of Reliance is annoying, but not ultimately that important. It’s reasonable for both groups to eventually sort of shrug and move on. In Borderlands 4, though, the Timekeeper is trying to control the world. He wants to master each area. Destroying the resistance is his overt, singular goal, and he has the power to do it directly. Why’s he not sorted it out?

Borderlands 4 is a 2025 looter-shooter from Gearbox Software. I wrote about having mixed feelings on the game in October last year, when it came out, and returning to it a year or so later, I think those feelings have crystallised. The game marks a tonal shift for the series off the back of some very vocal criticism about the plot and characters of 2020’s Borderlands 3. For what it’s worth, I’m a defender of Borderlands 3 – I think it makes mistakes, but it’s probably my favourite Borderlands story. I love the style of Eden-6 and Promethea (southern swamp and neon city), I like Katagawa and the Maliwan enemies, I like seeing all the characters from previous games – I enjoy it. I think it’s pretty good. It deals competently with the theme of family. The drop rates for different types of guns feels weird, but that’s not fatal. And I’m not really bothered by the thing that most people complain about – the character of Ava.

Ava is a new character introduced in Borderlands 3. She’s an orphaned stowaway who gets picked up by Maya (previously a playable character in Borderlands 2) and dragged along on your adventure. Ava’s characterised as a bratty teenager. She’s a scrappy survivor, and a thief, and Maya’s trying to train her up as a future Vault Hunter. It’s part of the game’s family motif: Ava is Maya’s rebellious surrogate daughter. Ava wants to go on missions and search for Vaults; Maya thinks she’s not ready, and keeps her on the spaceship Sanctuary to keep her safe, and Ava gripes about it. In one mission, Ava sneaks off the ship and into a Vault, which she’s totally not ready for, and Maya dies trying to protect her. People sort of get mad about that – there’s a real confusion between being mad at a character and being mad about the quality of the writing. Ava is, in the scope of the story, a stupid teenager who gets Maya killed. That character flaw is treated as a flaw in the creative process, as a narrative mistake. It’s treated as bad writing. You’ll often see comments that say Ava’s annoying, and therefore badly written, or she’s stupid, and therefore badly written. It’s very easy to google ‘Ava Borderlands 3’ and find examples like this Reddit thread:

“When you have a character who has not done anything positive, and literally everything they do is a mistake, you end up with a character the audience hates because they’re a total fuckup endangering everyone around them constantly.”

Many of these types of comments and posts try to explain how Ava’s bratty teenage behaviour is somehow evidence of bad writing. I do think there is actually a problem with Ava’s characterisation, but it’s not that she’s annoying or immature, it’s that she doesn’t fit the character palette of the game.

Broadly speaking, the Borderlands games are built around the dichotomy between badasses and dorks. That’s – not a very graceful division, but it’s correct. Powerful enemies are described as ‘badasses’. That’s literally how the game categorises them – it’s part of their name that pops up above their head. Players are described as badasses too, as when Lilith meets the player at the start of Borderlands 3. The opposite of the badass, in Borderlands, is the dork. Scooter is a dork: he’s a backwards hillbilly who makes great cars but sounds like a donkey. Claptrap is a dork: he wheels around the place acting like he’s a powerful warrior and brilliant general, and you spend a bunch of time protecting him from bandits. Borderlands is about badasses and dorks. Both groups can be good or evil – both players and enemies can be badasses, while both allies and enemies can be dorks. Killavolt, a tech bazillionaire, is an evil dork you encounter in Electra City in Borderlands 3 – he thinks he’s really cool, and he has fans (also dorks), and he makes a bunch of sexual, leering comments that are honestly very uncomfortable. Dorks are often portrayed as socially awkward, while badasses are effortlessly cool. Sometimes badass characters have dorky moments: in Borderlands 2, for instance, Roland and Lilith date and then awkwardly break up, and they have plenty of dorky conversations afterwards. Lilith keeps making up excuses to talk to Roland: “Uh, um, because you – how, how are you doing?” The joke of Borderlands, the doubled fiction that fuels its engine, is that it’s a dorky game for nerds where you pretend to be a badass. It shares the psychology previously discussed with SteamWorld Quest: dork and badass are the two psychological poles that underpin the game.

Ava, under this definition, is a dork, but she doesn’t operate according to the narrative rules of the dork. She acts like she’s a badass, and there’s not really a lot of pushback from the world around her to contradict that idea. That’s where a lot of the hostility to Ava comes from. I don’t think it’s well-articulated, a lot of the time, but people instinctively recognise that she doesn’t fit. She’s a dork acting like a badass. She makes dorky mistakes, gets real badasses killed, and nothing ever happens to her to put her back in her place. She exists in the narrative as a category error. People complain that she’s embarrassing and stupid, but so is every dork in Borderlands. That’s fine. It’s not that she’s a dork, it’s that the story doesn’t seem to see her as a dork. It’s almost like Borderlands 3 reaches for an emotional register outside of the poles of badass and dork, and I don’t think it quite works. Borderlands 3 has its biggest badass, Lilith, leader of the resistance, lose all her badass mojo, and Ava the dork goes around shouting at her and blaming her for Maya’s death. It feels like an usurpation: the dork gets out of line, and the badass gets benched.

So people took umbrage with Ava, and it seems like the received message at Gearbox was that they were doing too much – they were getting too wild, too crazy. Their response was to pare back the narrative – to make it all very simple and thin, and not really put too much into it, and focus instead on the gunplay. And the gunplay is – look, it’s the best in the series. It feels amazing. But it’s built into a game where the core premise doesn’t make sense. The Timekeeper is presented as a badass, but he doesn’t go out and solve his problem. He could defeat the resistance, and he doesn’t. There are some little bits of framing that try to explain it – he’s delegated each region to his lieutenants, so the failed attack on the Outbounders is framed as Idolator Sol’s fault rather than the Timekeeper’s – but why would the Timekeeper leave it to Sol? Why wouldn’t he fix the problem himself? As it becomes clear that the Timekeeper’s not really a badass, all of the jeopardy of the game drains away, which undermines a sense of achievement in your own actions. You’re fighting to free the world from a bad guy who doesn’t seem invested in keeping it under control. He steps in sometimes, when it suits him (for example, taking over the spymaster Horace), so he is paying attention – and he knows what you’re up to, but he lets you muck around with all your unprotected resistance buddies and ultimately overthrow his order. It feels like fighting against a cardboard cutout, a prop villain with no real agency. He’s not a badass. It’s the same type of issue found in Borderlands 3. Both titles struggle to maintain the polarity of the previous games, but where Borderlands 3 fumbles a minor side character, Borderlands 4 fumbles its main villain. Borderlands 3 has a messy, problematic plot, with some obvious missteps and problems – but Borderlands 4 has empty stakes.