Category: Video Games

Pokémon Go is introducing a new, higher level cap and rebalancing the XP requirements for existing levels — though no player will see their current level reduced.

The game’s current level 50 cap, introduced back in 2020, will rise to level 80, giving players a significant new milestone to aim towards.

But the game’s levelling curve should be smoother, developers told IGN in a pre-announcement briefing, meaning XP levels overall should be hit more frequently. This will be achieved by a rebalance of all XP levels to date, and the removal of additional, time-consuming levelling tasks between levels 41 to 50.

Indeed, players who have already earned the necessary XP will be boosted up to the new level system’s requirements when they go live on October 18 — though the exact XP amounts required post-rebalance are yet to be confirmed.

Don’t expect hitting the new level 80 cap to be easy, however. Alongside the necessary XP requirements, a fresh set of levelling tasks will be added for the final climb from level 71 to 80, ensuring only the toughest Trainers hit the game’s new top level (and there’s still plenty to grind for).

New rewards for levelling up will include fresh avatar items, plus increased storage capacity for Pokémon, items and gifts — upgrades you would otherwise pay for. (And if you’re already at the game’s maximum limit for one of these, developers confirmed you’ll still be boosted above that.)

There’s even a new boost for friends at level 70 and above, who will have an increaed chance of becoming Lucky Friends with other players.

2025 is turning out to be a stellar year for fans of 2D ninja platformers. The 16-bit blood sprites have barely dried on Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound’s katana, and now Sega’s iconic Shinobi series has emerged from a 14-year stay in the shadows to fling a fistful of kunai straight into your adrenal glands. Shinobi: Art of Vengeance brings back the series’ slash ‘n’ dash with plenty of modern day flash. It empowers returning hero Joe Musashi with an enjoyably expansive suite of hypercharged ninja skills and presents it all in a gorgeous hand drawn art style, making for an adventure that’s occasionally hard on the reflexes but always easy on the eye. While the Shinobi series may have been in exile for an agonising amount of time, its triumphant return has been well worth the wait.

Art of Vengeance’s setup seems to have spilled straight off the circuit board of an ‘80s arcade machine. Led by the maniacal Lord Ruse, the nefarious paramilitary organization ENE Corp has achieved world domination by force, and the responsibility of toppling them falls squarely on the crisp linen-covered shoulders of Joe Musashi. Musashi had resigned himself to the simple life, mentoring young ninja students in obscurity like some sort of Obi Wan Shinobi, but when the ENE brings violence to his village he’s forced to seek vengeance on every soldier, spectre, and samurai that stands in his path over the course of a 10-hour cross-continental killing spree. It’s simple stuff for sure, but it’s really all the motivation I needed to turn the ENE forces into a series of slash test dummies, and I was perfectly happy for Musashi to let his blade do the talking. Quite literally in fact, as he only ever grunts during conversation cutscenes, which brings some welcome bursts of comic relief in between each sprawling showdown.

Its plot may be true to the uncomplicated action movie era the series was born out of, but its looks are strikingly modern. Much like developer Lizardcube’s Streets of Rage 4 before it, Art of Vengeance’s characters and environments have that painstakingly-drawn-by-hand style to them that produces consistently phenomenal results. From hulking container ships that loom in the backdrop of the fish market stage right down to the reflections in puddles that whip past Musashi’s unceasingly determined sprint, it turns out that vengeance isn’t the only art that this latest Shinobi has set out to nail. There are clear contrasts between each setting too that make them uniquely captivating to explore, from the lush bamboo forest of the opening level through to the disgustingly gloopy explorable innards of a Kaiju that seem like something straight out of a Rick and Morty episode.

No two of Art of Vengeance’s 14 levels are structured the same, either. One stage hustles the chaos across the carriage rooftops of a speeding train, another has you stalking across the skyline of Neo City in all directions in an effort to find and rescue hostages, while another still takes you deep into a labyrinth of dark corridors in a secret ENE base where Metroid-like mutants suddenly lunge at you through the shattered glass of their stasis tanks to keep you on your toes. There’s also plenty of variety within each level, like the mountain stage that shifts from a lava-lined steelworks area to a breathless rockslide descending into a chasm. While the occasional switch puzzle or chase sequence is repeated here and there, there are enough fresh objectives to complete and unique environments to explore that the journey remains as sharp as a shuriken from start to finish. There’s even a bonus stage that reimagines the surfing level from Shinobi III, which is a welcome throwback to that brief period in the early ‘90s when there was no cooler conceivable combination to kids than a ninja on a surfboard.

Art of the Steel

Of course, all of this would be for nothing if the combat didn’t pull its weight, but fortunately Art of Vengeance’s fighting is frenetic, fluid, and consistently fantastic. Unlike Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound’s enemies which can mostly be dispatched with single hits, the bulk of the bad guys in Art of Vengeance have health bars that need to be whittled away with snappy combo attacks, making it feel more like a platform-based brawler in comparison to Ragebound’s more demanding, precision-based striking. Musashi can pull off a growing number of combos over the course of the campaign built upon light and heavy sword attacks and kunai dagger throws – but as I unlocked new attack chains from the in-game merchant, I was soon juggling enemy ninjas in the air with sword slashes, divebombing them with flaming jump kicks, and shredding their defenses with spin attacks like a Catherine Wheel of katana blades as my combo tally ticked towards triple figures. It all feels incredibly intuitive, and there’s reward for sequencing your attacks just right – time an execution move when an enemy is on their last legs and they disappear in a spectacular spray of blood, but also valuable coins and health boosts that are funneled straight into your back pocket.

Each successful attack you land also fills up your Ninpo gauge, which allows you to trigger a powerful special move from four customisable slots. I tended to favour the Yoga Flame-style dragon breath to quickly wipe out the additional green health bar found on more heavily armoured foes like the riot shield-toting tank types, as well as the bomb that can be lobbed midair to stagger an enemy before you start your combo. Combined with the two amulet slots that can be equipped with a healthy variety of active and passive buffs, like a booster that increases your damage output the longer your combo lasts or a vampire ability that steadily replenishes your health bar with each enemy you dispatch, and Art of Vengeance provides a satisfying amount of flexibility in terms of being able to slay your own way.

Deepening your combat options even further is the Ninjutsu gauge, which fills as Musashi takes damage or collects rage orbs from fallen foes. This turbocharged update on the original games’ ninja magic is pretty slow to replenish, and as a result I tended to keep it up my sleeve until I reached each end-of-level boss, since it can greatly turn the tide of battle – either offensively, like dealing health bar-halving damage with flaming dragon blasts, or defensively, such as bringing a flatlining Musashi back from the brink with a revitalising wave of water.

Perhaps as a result of my strategic deployment of these super special moves, I didn’t really face too much resistance from any of Art of Vengeance’s bosses on the hardest Shinobi difficulty setting, but that’s not to say they weren’t still plenty of fun to encounter. Although the returning Mandara from the original arcade game is a bit clunky and probably should have remained trapped inside a dusty Master System cartridge, elsewhere there are some hugely entertaining battles with big bads to be found. My favourites are the twin mutants in the ENE laboratory that combine into one towering freak like a pair of kids trying to sneak into an adult movie, and the monster-conjuring beastmaster in the desert level that surprises you with minotaurs and griffins to force you to deftly maneuver from the land into the air and back again. The majority of these boss battles bring each stage to a climactic close, and typically reward you with another ability-enhancing trinket to further tweak Musashi’s skill set with.

Running Hack and Forth

To be clear, Art of Vengeance’s 14 main levels are not interconnected, so it’s not structured like a classic Metroidvania. However, while there isn’t any compulsory backtracking required to complete the story, there are still plenty of compelling reasons to return to earlier levels as you unlock new abilities for Musashi over the course of the journey, which in turn open up sizeable new areas to explore that were otherwise blocked off the first time through. A charged up punch for shattering Yokai barriers, ninja claws to scale walls and overheads, a glider to take advantage of updrafts, and even a grappling hook aren’t just crucial for reaching the story’s conclusion, but also for sniffing out all the secrets in each stage. Even though I’ve rolled credits on the campaign, I’m still steadily working my way towards 100% completion of each level and having an absolute blast doing it.

Some of these secrets are as simple as tokens to unlock more goods at the merchant or new costume colours for Musashi – I’m pretty partial to slaughtering ENE goons draped in cherry blossom pink myself – but there are also up to three Elite encounters to find in each level which drop you into an intense arena fight against hardened hordes like some sort of sword-swinging Super Smash Bros. battle. Clearing every Elite encounter in a level will grant you a new amulet to equip, further enhancing Musashi’s attack power or his ability to heal, which become invaluable buffs against the late game bosses.

My favourite optional extra, however, are the rift challenges. These typically punishing platforming tasks demand pinpoint chaining of Musashi’s double-jump, air-dash, and wall-running abilities in order to clear formidable Super Meat Boy-style obstacle courses of spinning sawblades and swirling jets of fire suspended over bottomless pits. They’re deathtrap-lined levels that are often fiendish but yet to become too frustrating thanks to the instant restarts and level design that’s fierce but ultimately fair.

Retracing my steps through Art of Vengeance’s stages to search for secrets has also highlighted some of its minor shortcomings, however. I don’t love the way that enemies seem to respawn instantly once their patrol points have disappeared off camera, drawing me into unnecessary additional fights as I doubleback in search of a specific spot. But what’s really annoying is the way the pause menu map doesn’t seem to indicate whether falling down a gap between platforms will mean you land safely on the ground below or instantly lose a chunk of health and respawn back on the platform above. It brings an unwanted element of trial and error to the otherwise obsessive hunt for secrets.

That said, I ultimately really admire how Lizardcube has structured Art of Vengeance, in the sense that it’s made its most challenging combat and platforming sections entirely optional for the most part. If you just want to focus on the story, you’ll find a 2D ninja platforming experience that’s challenging enough but a touch more approachable on its default difficulty setting than the comparatively trickier Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound. But if you do want to put your skills to the test, there are those optional Elite battles and rift challenges to dive into, along with Boss Rush and timer-based Arcade modes to unlock for the more serious speedrunners. (Conversely, there are a number of accessibility settings to make life even easier should you still find yourself struggling.)

Fans have always felt that Dragon Age: Origins’ mage class was more complete, perhaps even more dominant, than the game’s other two classes, the rogue and the warrior. But why was that? Former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah has said it’s mostly about second edition Dungeons & Dragons.

In a recently published video, Darrah explained why the mage in BioWare’s much-loved 2009 role-playing game ended up feeling so much better to play.

“It’s actually I would say more because the design space that Dragon Age: Origins was being built into was heavily influenced by second edition D&D,” Darrah, who worked at BioWare from 1997 to early 2021, said.

“So in that case, the reality is mages and rogues were less… they were thinner classes, they were simpler classes. And the mage was the stronger, more fully implemented, more fully considered class. Much more complicated, much more in terms of spells and such.”

Dragon Age: Origins was not designed to be played with Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition rules, but rather it was built on a custom system that was heavily influenced by the design principles of the 2nd edition era of D&D.

Darrah also said Origins’ more grounded tone affected the abilities of the warrior and the rogue, which in turn had more grounded abilities than in subsequent games in the fantasy franchise.

“Also, of all the Dragon Ages, Dragon Age: Origins is the most grounded. It’s the one that’s worrying the most about everything making perfect sense within the overall lore of the game. So, warriors and rogues in Origins basically don’t have talents, or they don’t have talents or skills that violate physics.

“Whereas, as we move into Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition and Veilgard, you get a lot more things that are not really possible for someone to physically do.”

There’s plenty of agreement with Darrah’s assessment from fans, particularly on his point about Origins’ more grounded setting and tone, but also on how important mages were to the game’s story. Morrigan, a mage party member, ended up one of the most popular in Origins. That was in part because she was powerful, but there were also… other considerations.

Of course, this unbalance was rectified for subsequent Dragon Age games, as Darrah points out. But following the failure of Veilguard and the layoffs that followed, fans often point to Origins as the kind of Dragon Age they would love to see BioWare return to one day.

Will that day come? It seems unlikely any time soon, given BioWare is focused squarely on Mass Effect 5. Darrah, meanwhile, via his YouTube channel, has been running through his time at the studio, explaining everything from why there has never been a Dragon Age: Origins remaster to what went wrong with Anthem.

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.

With Borderlands 3 and its divisive story in the rearview mirror, developer Gearbox Software is driving full speed ahead to Borderlands 4 and the totalitarian planet of Kairos.

The long road to the launch of a fourth mainline Borderlands game had a bumpy start. While plenty fell in love with Borderlands 3 and its improvements to the looter-shooter series’ gunplay, others still struggle with its joke-fueled story and reliance on toilet humor. It will have been almost exactly six years since its launch when Borderlands 4’s September 12, 2025 release date arrives. Now, fans are on the edge of their seats, waiting to see how Gearbox spent its time.

We caught up with Gearbox narrative director Sam Winkler, lead writer Taylor Clark, and managing director of narrative properties Lin Joyce to learn more about why the team decided to create a more grounded story for Borderlands 4. Along the way, we found out how the elusive Timekeeper can stand toe-to-toe with Handsome Jack, how controversial characters like Ava could still have a future in the series, and we even learned how the upcoming DLC will fit in with Borderlands 4’s main campaign.

IGN: Gearbox has been very clear that Borderlands 4 will feature a more grounded story and tone. How did the conversations to shift the tone begin, and is this the direction the team has followed from the beginning of development?

Sam Winkler: Those conversations started as early as the conversations of, ‘Hey, what the hell does Borderlands 4 look like?’ Even before Borderlands 3 was shipped and out the door. Something I like to remind people is that the devs are often the first fans of a game and also the first critics. I think that we had some own internal critiques about the tone and the level of humor present in Borderlands 3.

[It’s] something that we already were starting to address in the DLCs for Borderlands 3, but we wanted to really make that a central point of Borderlands 4. So, as we had these very large conversations of, in world context, ‘Where is this? What does it mean? Why are we doing this next big, monolithic game with a 4 in its title?’ [we said], ‘How are we also going to evolve the storytelling, the humor, and the characters, and what we want to do with them?’

Taylor Clark: I came aboard a lot later than Sam. I’ve been on the game for a couple of years, and it was definitely something from the moment that I came on board, when I was talking to Sam, the grounded tone was a priority. Grounding the humor in the world, he made it very clear that if I tried to put a meme in the game, he would come to my house with a baseball bat [laughs]. So, it was definitely in the brief from the beginning to make the tone fit the world.

Winkler: I don’t want to swing the needle too hard on that front. I am not anti-meme. In fact, hey, exclusive: There’s a specific meme in this game, and I feel justified putting it in because I accidentally created it. Yes, I didn’t mean for it to become a meme, but it became a meme, and it’s in the video game. That is all I’m going to say.

IGN: We can’t know what meme it is?

Winkler: Look, I have a couple of Know Your Meme pages that credit me, and I will let you do any journalistic dirty work that you need to.

Clark: It does not involve a Skibidi Toilet.

Winkler: It does not. Yeah, there are toilets in our game. I’ll say that.

Clark: Where else would you get ammunition?

Winkler: Exactly. In Borderlands, only toilets and washing machines.

IGN: No Skibidi Toilets, though.

Clark: No. No.

Winkler: None.

IGN: I think some people are going to be really happy to hear that. I’m wondering if you can compare the tone in Borderlands 4 to some of the previous games. It seems like the team definitely wanted to have a more grounded tone than 3, for sure. So, how would you compare the tone or joke frequency to something like 1, 2, or even spinoffs like Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands?

Clark: The way that I’ve always talked about it, personally, was that, in Borderlands 1, 2, and 3, we were on Pandora, right? Pandora was a wild west. It was a place where corporations were stabbing each other in the back for supremacy. So, there was a lot of antic energy in that place, and with those villains that we were dealing with, it made a lot of sense to have more zany, like, gun-slinging jokes, you know? Hip-firing jokes tone.

Kairos is a different place. Kairos is a totalitarian planet ruled over by this dictatorial figure known as the Timekeeper, who sits far above it all. In this context of global oppression, the Whac-A-Mole joke style didn’t make as much sense. So, a lot of it had to do with making sure that the tone fit the stakes of the world, and that the humor was rising organically out of situations, out of character moments, rather than the wild west feel of the first games.

Lin Joyce: I will let Sam talk to the contrast, too, in the mandate between 3 and 4, but I will double tap too, that what we were looking for is that the humor in Borderlands 4 works at the level of Kairos and the characters. We weren’t making jokes that would only land for the player.

It was a gut check, ‘Is this as funny to the characters and their lived experience as it is to the player? Can we do both?’ That situational comedy and context helped us also keep the tone grounded, and the comedy then has purpose. But Sam can talk about the frequency between Borderlands 3 and 4.

Winkler: I mean… I went back and played every single Borderlands game. 1, 2, Pre-Sequel, [Tales from the Borderlands], everything like that. Just to observe, not just the tone of humor, but also the vectors of humor, right? I think people talk a lot about our humor from the perspective of people chatting in your ear. But I was really struck by, for example, in Borderlands 1, most of the NPCs didn’t have a ton of actual audio to say.

It was pretty sparse on that front, and a lot of the humor came out of situations. Comedic, usually darkly comedic, circumstances, but also the way things were named, the text in the mission accept, that sort of thing. I think that contributed a lot to players’ perception of Borderlands 1 as having a more dark, grounded tone, is it is a quieter game, and a lot of the humor stems situationally and organically.

So, that was something that we tried to work with the design team, the mission design team, and everything like that, to say, ‘Hey, we can have heavy moments. We can have grounded moments, but we can also have wacky circumstances that arise out of the players’ actions and the NPCs that come at them.’ We wanted to make sure that humor wasn’t just some sticker that we’re slapping on something, you know what I mean? The other thing is that, with design shifts, our mentality to humor had to shift as well. With Borderlands 4 going into this seamless, explore-to-your-own-tastes gameplay experience, we could not control where the player was going to go next.

We couldn’t always script people’s open-world exploration, [and] that allowed that space to just be naturally filled. Whether it’s through combat dialog or player characters, or just silence and soundtrack and ambience and mood. It just inherently changed our approach to it.

IGN: One of my other questions is, ‘Why should players who have been with the series for 16 years not be worried about this shift?’ But I think that kind of answers it. It still feels and sounds like it’s very Borderlands.

Clark: For sure. It is unmistakably Borderlands, but we’re constantly tweaking the dials of certain factors to make the tone match the game that we want to create, and to respond to our internal and external feedback.

Joyce: At no point did we say, ‘Let’s stop being funny in Borderlands. Let’s not do that anymore.’ It is still a Borderlands game made by a Borderlands team, many who have been here since 1.

Clark: We’re not making an arthouse Borderlands game [laughs].

Winkler: But, also, it’s a big game, right? It is not a monolith. There are areas of our game that are more serious. There are areas of our game that are more humor-filled. There are characters that don’t take things as seriously, in a diegetic way. For the players who have been long-time franchise fans, I think they’re going to find flavors that they’re looking for all across Kairos. If they play one side mission or interact with one character that doesn’t quite vibe with them, there’s probably another one not too far off that they will vibe with.

IGN: For the sake of comparison, are there any other stories from across movies, books, TV, or games that the team feels are similar to the tone that you guys are going for? Are there any particular inspirations that you can point to?

Joyce: There have to be so many. We’re constantly throwing around, ‘Have you seen…? It’s a little like that.’ But now that you’re asking it directly, I’m like, ‘Which one…’

Winkler: I don’t want to use it as a straight comp, but a show that I’ve been really inspired by has been Star Trek: Lower Decks, which is very, very much a comedic show. It has wacky energy to it, but it works, and it works really well — it just won a Hugo Award — because it takes its characters seriously. It takes its circumstances seriously, and if something is wacky, there’s usually someone there to point out, like, ‘This is wacky and super unsafe, and it shouldn’t work that way.’

It is a project that is clearly made out of love for Star Trek and the characters in the story, rather than some sort of parody of it. I think that on Borderlands 3, in our worst hours, it sometimes felt like parody, and that is where we edged into a red line, I think, for a lot of fans and for myself, personally. So, we wanted to look towards other media that could balance that. [That] could balance both humor, levity, and authentic character storytelling that takes itself seriously.

IGN: One character I did want to ask about from Borderlands 3 that I didn’t particularly mind at all but others had a problem with is Ava. She’s a character that a lot of fans associate their dissatisfaction with Borderlands 3’s story with. With so many other memorable faces back for Borderlands 4, can fans expect to see her show up, too? If not, is there any room for her to return in the future?

Winkler: I don’t think we’re going to answer any questions about characters that we haven’t shown off yet. I think the only thing that I will say is, I am not a huge fan of removing or killing off characters off-screen unless it absolutely has to happen. We don’t forget about characters, and we want to make sure that storylines are completed. That’s it.

I hear all the complaints about Ava. I had some issues with how we were able to portray her. We were unable to show some of, I think, her more heartfelt moments in the base game of BL3. We used the Director’s Cut to show off what Maya’s funeral could have been and what the relationship between Ava and Lilith could have been. We didn’t have that opportunity in Borderlands 3, but it’s the kind of thing that I still believe in and that I would love to address again some other time.

IGN: In typical Borderlands fashion, Gearbox has free and paid post-launch DLC in the works. A lot of it, by the sounds of it. We don’t have to get too into specifics; I know a lot of that stuff is still very much in development. But will that same grounded tone carry over to the DLC? Will the team take the opportunity to show us some of the less grounded corners of Kairos?

Clark: Just like the last question, I think we are limited in what we can say about the post-launch content that we’re working on. I think it’s safe to say that the plan is for the tone to be consistent between the products.

Winkler: I’ll say this: the best thing about Borderlands extra content, like full campaign DLCs, or some of the live events that we’ve done — we did the holidays and stuff like that in previous games — is it allows us to explore different tones and different corners of the Borderlands world and do different genres and everything like that. So, I would expect that same level of creativity and exploration from where we go in the future.

Joyce: I would extend it to be… I would look at the DLC content and call it complementary, right? It complements the base game. It is going to be different, but complementary. Or, if you prefer a different metaphor, the pieces of attire will be coordinated to make a nice outfit, really. You pick which metaphor you like better there.

Clark: It’s tough to talk about in vague terms. We’d love to talk about it more.

Winkler: Especially because some of it we don’t know yet. It is in active development. Borderlands 4 is getting stamped onto DVDs somewhere and… actually [laughs] I think it’s Blu-rays. But in the meantime, we are cooking on that next group of content, and we know a whole bunch of it. We’re actively working on it, but some of it is still in development.

IGN: How long do you think it will take to complete Borderlands 4’s main campaign, and then how long will it take to complete the main campaign plus all of the side content?

Clark: This came up some in prior interviews. The answer that I and Chris Brock, our lead producer, gave on this was to point out that, while we can’t say a specific number, we can say that, when we got together to do a playthrough together — Sam, me, Lin, a bunch of others, our creative director, Graeme [Timmins], Randy Pitchford — when we were doing work, doing play throughs of this stuff, and to evaluate how it was going, playing through the entire main campaign took us days and days. It took a long time. It is a meaty piece of content.

Winkler: And that was a straight line. That was doing basically no side content.

Clark: That was scaling damage to 10,000% and just mowing through stuff.

Joyce: The other anecdote I could probably give there, safely, is, I meet every week with Andrew Reiner, our global creative executive officer. Last week he said, ‘I’ve started, I’m going to say, the million-teenth run of the game.’ He’s like, ‘This time, the goal is 100% it.’ I was like, ‘How long have you been playing?’ All week. ‘How far have you gotten?’ Still in the first zone [laughs].

Winkler: That’s a very good factor, and going back to what I said, the seamless world allows players to have a little bit more choice about the order in which they take on the story. We have seen play testers want to go through the mainline, so they’re bouncing around between the different zones and seeing all sorts of the game.

We’ve also seen testers who are just like, ‘I’m going to go into this zone. I’m going to see everything I can possibly see. I’m going to scrape the barrel, and then I’m going over to the next zone.’ One player’s first 15, 20 hours could look very, very different from another player’s.

IGN: It’s a big Borderlands game.

Winkler: It do be big.

IGN: For so many people, Borderlands villains are the reason a lot of folks show up for this series. Obviously, Handsome Jack is one of the all-time great video game villains. I’m wondering, because there are so many theories about the Timekeeper, specifically, and I don’t want to know what it is, but does this character have any identity past that Timekeeper name? Is there some mystery, some intrigue you want to build up with him?

Joyce: You ask great questions [laughs]. To what degree can we answer them is a tough one.

Winkler: The Timekeeper is like an onion. He has layers… No one’s used that before, right?

Clark: I think the answer is yes. Is there a mystery to him? Yes [laughs].

Joyce: We could talk about, certainly, how we approached crafting him and writing him. That’s another angle into answering your question. The timekeeper, one of the things that makes him different and keeps an air of intentional mystery around him, is that he is not in your face at all times. He sits in his high tower with a view of the entire planet, and his prerogative is to keep the entire planet under order.

So, when we first show up, the Vault Hunter is mildly of interest, but he’s got many other things to do. So, we also have to, as players, over time, gain his attention more and more. That was a very different way to approach writing a villain into a Borderlands game than we had done before. And I’ll let Sam and Taylor run from there.

Clark: I think we, as creative people, are always challenging ourselves to not repeat ourselves, to have characters who are appreciably different, who have different kinds of stories and have different kinds of things to say in each entry. The Timekeeper is appreciably different from the prior villains in the Borderlands series. He is a new frontier, I think, as a character.