UPDATE: Gearbox confirmed after this interview was published that an optional combat radar will be available at launch for Borderlands 4.
Some of the most heated conversations around modern game design tend to come from the smallest features, especially when they disappear. The minimap, once a staple in nearly every open-world or mission-based game, has become a point of contention in recent years. For some, it’s a necessary tool, but for others, it’s a distraction that pulls attention away from the game’s world.Borderlands 4steps into that debate by removing its own minimap, but not without a clear purpose that serves theworld and explorationrather than subtracting from it.
Game Rant speaks withBorderlands 4senior project producer Anthony Nicholson about why the team made that decision and what the game brings to the table in its place. Rather than cutting a feature without anything to fill the gap, Gearbox reimagined what guidance could look like in a world that is meant to be looked at.
Why Borderland 4’s Minimap Was Removed
If history has proven anything about the existence of minimaps in a game, it’s that there’s generally a sizable crowd that cries out when they’re removed. As such,Borderlands 4’s removal of its own minimap was a risky move on paper, but rather than being a mere subtraction of what’s there, it’s more of a refinement. In removing theminimap fromBorderlands 4, Gearbox wasn’t removing a feature so much as it was replacing it with something more immersive, more intentional, and better suited to the game’s seamless world of Kairos. In a sense, Echo-4 helps make up for that by shifting player attention away from UI overlays and toward the world itself.
When asked explicitly about why the minimap was removed, Nicholson replied:
“It was more about how the world is presented to the player. As we’re moving through, we want to make sure that enemies, we want to make sure that points of interest, obviously direction, are things that you can see, the compass accomplishes that. But also, we’ve added Echo-4 inBorderlands 4. Echo-4 helps you to be able to navigate.”
Clearly, this is all aboutBorderlands 4’s larger goal of offering players a world that is seamless and largely uninterrupted. On theplanet of Kairos inBorderlands 4, there are no loading screens separating zones, no hard borders that pull players out of the moment. With Echo-4, players don’t need to stare at a corner of the screen to figure out where they’re going or what’s around them. Instead, the environment itself becomes the interface, figuratively speaking.
Echo-4 was designed to act like a guide without turning into a distraction. It draws paths directly onto the terrain, similarly toAssassin’s Creed Shadows' Pathfinder. The main difference here is that it doesn’t just show players the route to their objective but also reveals nearby traversal options and points of interest within the world. Instead of pulling up the map and potentially getting lost in icons, players can simply read the space around them. Ultimately, that allows players to be more present, more in the moment, while theyexplore Kairos inBorderlands 4. Nicholson elaborated:
“The line will draw on the ground depending on the mission that you’ve chosen or if you’ve placed a waypoint on the map, but it also highlights things that are nearby, like the vending machines or the points of interest — the silos, the safe houses, the bunkers, the mines, and all these different things. And then finally, it also highlights the traversal, so you may see the climbing walls or the grapple points and stuff like that. So with all of those tools together, we felt like that was a stronger combination for the type of game that we’re building in this seamless world on Kairos.”
All of this said, it’s not really evenBorderlands 4’s Echo-4that replaces the minimap, but the world itself. The guidance system is still in place, but it serves the world by being an extension of it rather than a tool that players are required to shift their eyes toward and even squint to see. In doing so,Borderlands 4reinforces one of its biggest promises about its world: that everything is happening right in front of the player, not behind a layer of icons or UI.
