Borderlands 4 is hiding greater than 200 collectible Marcus bobbleheads in hard-to-reach locations, and Randy Pitchford reckons 'most gamers won’t ever see any of them'
When Borderlands 4 launches on September 12, a few of chances are you’ll be inclined to hurry in the direction of the tallest peaks and the best-hidden nooks and crannies—simply to see how a lot of it you may truly discover. Similar to these pioneers who found you might gracelessly hop up Skyrim’s seemingly unsurmountable mountains.
Gearbox boss and occasional magician Randy Pitchford guarantees that you can “get all over the place” by “double-jumping, grappling, dashing, gliding”. And for making these difficult journeys you will get a wee reward: bobbleheads depicting goatee-clad arms vendor Marcus. For the orienteering obsessed, greater than 200 of those collectibles might be up for grabs.
Pitchford has quite a bit to say about them—sufficient to make a 12-tweet thread discussing how they took place. That looks like various tweets, however what do I do know? I acquired off social media three years in the past so I might change into insufferably smug about my unimaginable willpower and improved psychological well being.
Once we got down to make a big, seamless world in Borderlands 4, we didn’t fairly know what we had been stepping into. We designed an enormous world and we dedicated ourselves to filling it! Thread: 1/12July 13, 2025
Truthfully, although, fairly a little bit of thought does appear to have been put into these collectibles, and whereas there are a heck of lots of them, their existence nonetheless feels extra justified than most of their ilk—it definitely would not seem to be they’ve simply been added to test one other open-world trope off the listing. Not solely, anyway.
As Pitchford tells it, he challenged Gearbox Software program CEO Andrew Reiner to “discover these unreachable spots and, effectively, attain them”. Pitchford wished Reiner to “uncover all of the locations that we by no means anticipated gamers to go to”,
“Reiner started working and made screenshots of those locations,” says Pitchford. “Positive, artists and designers made them look nice and flitted round them of their instruments, like ghosts. However within the recreation itself, with the bounds of physics and gravity and stable partitions, these spots felt like virgin soil.”
As out-of-the-way as a few of these spots may be, if Reiner might attain them, that meant gamers would be capable of as effectively. Borderlands 4 inventive director Graeme Timmons determined that there wanted to be “one thing for gamers to search out after they made their technique to these distant or uninhabited areas,” Pitchford remembers.
Gearbox settled on Marcus bobbleheads and concocted a motive why these novelty objects may be scattered across the place. Sure, there’s lore.
“Somebody on the moon of Elpis had a crate, purchased from their favourite native vendor. And, within the cataclysm, the crate, nonetheless stuffed with collectibles, was hurtled in the direction of Kairos. It broke aside and scattered the 200 or so of this stuff everywhere.”
Pitchford says that “every has a narrative”, although it seems prefer it’s all instructed by way of environmental storytelling. He teases a few particular bobbleheads with screenshots—one left on a desk in an deserted constructing, one other on high of a mountain, sitting in a chair subsequent to a portray that might have been unimaginable to deliver again down the mountain.
I dig this. Collectibles that add one thing, even when it is only a little bit of flavour or the trace of a narrative, really feel a lot extra price rooting round for—so long as they don’t seem to be audio logs, naturally. And placing them in fascinating locations fairly than randomly dotted across the map makes me truly need to make the trek.
Pitchford reckons that “most gamers won’t ever see any of them”, although in posting the map with their basic areas, I think he is elevated the quantity of people that’ll a minimum of discover just a few.