Borderlands 4 will have combat radar at launch, Gearbox confirms

It's official: Borderlands 4 will have a radar at launch.

2

When Gearbox revealed Borderlands 4, one of the biggest complaints was the lack of an on-screen radar that showed enemy locations. The other Borderlands games had a radar, so why not this one? Radars have slowly disappeared from the public eye over the years, but they're important tools for FPS games, and Borderlands fans apparently like the mechanic.

The studio is listening and decided to add radars back into Borderlands 4. Gearbox's Randy Pitchford revealed the news today in a lengthy Twitter thread while also discussing why radars weren't in the game to start. The feature will be off by default and gamers will have to toggle combat radar within the settings menu.

"The feature will be *off* by default at launch. And, it didn't come on-line early enough to make it into our branch for the build we're bringing to the Borderlands Fan Fest this weekend. But it is now officially in the game!

"This happened because of the best elements of our community. I'm talking about the real fans who sincerely want the best for the game and gave constructive notes and made reasonable arguments."

In the thread, Pitchford highlighted a candid look at games development as it relates to first-person shooters and radars in general. It turns out these things can be demanding and take up resources from other parts of the game that may be more important.

Pitchford explains:

"There are three big costs to the mini-map (and a bunch of other costs). These costs are real and force developers to make trade-offs with other features. They include development time, screen real-estate coverage, and the use of CPU and memory.

"The dev time for the mini-map is non-trivial. It's not just a simple matter of making a small version of the big map (beyond the scope of this thread to explain). It's an entirely new system requiring significant dev time that could be spent on other features and content.

"The screen real-estate impact is non-trivial and while we could make it an option, we would have to still design the game to function well with it on or off with respect to the rest of the screen space for HUD and world view.

"The CPU and memory cost of a mini-map is quite huge. For a game like this, it just isn't worth the trade off. High perf and memory for other visual feedback elements and player data is much more important, especially given the evolution of the game design for Borderlands 4."