In true looter shooter fashion, Borderlands 4 never stops throwing guns, shields, grenades, and weapon enhancements in my face. Loadout experimentation has always been the name of the game, which means regular pit stops to rifle through my backpack and decide what’ll get added to my arsenal and what’ll fund my future respawns.
For a game that is so reliant on routine inventory management, Borderlands 4 has somehow managed to massively cock it up. To the point I’m confused how we’re several games deep and yet this is easily Gearbox’s worst attempt to date.
This is coming from someone who isn’t even massively fussy when it comes to clean inventory management. I just want two things: make it quick, and make it easy. Borderlands 4 does neither. Opening up the backpack greets me with a muddled array of items, which the game defaults to sorting by manufacturer. Naturally. Who doesn’t want to organise their inventory by manufacturer? Organising by recently picked up, item value, or level? Psh, who would ever need such pointless options?
If I do dare to veer off the game’s default selection, it only lasts until I tab over to a different screen. If I accidentally turn to a different page in the menu—marking an item as junk is ‘X’ while navigating to a different tab is on ‘Z’ and ‘C’, ripe for fat finger moments—returning to the backpack resets my sorting order and filters. Cool! I’m totally okay with this!
It’s a small time waste that massively adds up. I have the benefit of playing with a keyboard and mouse which makes menu navigation less tedious, but I imagine it’s an even bigger frustration for those who are trying to fandangle this entire thing on a controller. Five extra seconds in the menu is five seconds I’m not spending blasting the Timekeeper’s cronies’ heads.
The backpack also, for whatever reason, lets my unequipped and equipped items mingle together in scattershot fashion. They’re not grouped up at the top or excluded from my inventory entirely, which means I’m also having to spend extra time double checking which items have a teeny-weeny checkmark in the corner.
It’s even more difficult to look for when it’s among a sea of similarly-coloured icons that display over new items. It’s the gaming equivalent of chucking clean and dirty laundry into a single basket. I shouldn’t have to sniff every sock to see if it’s been worn.
Comparing items to each other also feels far more tedious than it should. The fact that equipped stuff is all over the shop certainly doesn’t help, and I’m wasting far more time than I should be hunting around for the two specific items I want to weigh up against each other.
I actually ended up popping back onto Borderlands 2 to compare how the entire inventory management felt, and while that game certainly doesn’t get it perfect—scrolling through a long list is a bigger pain than having it all on one screen, sure—it feels like a much more cohesive experience.
Here are some other little nitpicky gripes I have with Borderlands 4’s inventory UI:
- Dropping items being keybinded to a long press. Add the ability to drop into the right-click menu, I beg of you.
- Currency being hidden behind a hover-over icon rather than in plain sight. I literally had to hunt for how much money I had. I shouldn’t have to hunt!
- Weapon cards are tiny. You’ve dedicated the entire screen to inventory in this game, you can make the weapon cards a little bigger to compensate.
- I kind of don’t like how filtering items just darkens all the items that don’t fit the criteria. I’d much rather they disappear entirely.
Some of these are just personal preference, but the overarching issue of all this is how much of my time it unnecessarily wastes. The inventory is finicky, time-consuming, and confusing, which is a cardinal sin in a looter shooter. It’s actively curbing my desire to try stuff out, and I’m often mindlessly marking things as junk as I grab it just so I don’t have to deal with the inventory screen.
It’s a bizarre regression, especially for one of the most important elements of Borderlands’ entire gameplay loop. It should be quickly ushering me in and out with a new loot pool to go wild with, but instead I’m wading through its swampy interface, slowly hovering over each item to figure out just what the hell is going on.
It’s stuff that can mostly be fixed with a few patches, something I sincerely hope Gearbox does as a priority. Because if you’re going to de-juice your vibe by swapping out the series’ iconic use of diegetic UI for something I’ve seen in every other videogame, at least make that choice worth it.
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