The Borderlands franchise began life with a sense of humour that had a darker flavour, mixed with some crass jokes. But as the series went on, the darker elements were dropped in favour of toilet humour, pop-culture gags and “wacky” randomness. The result was that Borderlands 3 is considered by many as the weakest of the bunch in terms of storytelling and comedy, though its gameplay is pretty damn good. Despite that, I did end up ranking it as the second best of the franchise, purely for the gameplay.

If you’re one of the people who found Borderlands 3 a little too much, then I have some good news: Borderlands 4 is dialing back the toilet jokes.

That’s according to the game’s narrative director Sam Winkler.

Sam dropped a Tweet hyping up the game, describing as “our most ambitious game yet” and stating that he has gotten to work with some of the funniest writers he knows to develop the game’s humour.

Another user replied by asking if the game might be shifting to a darker tone based on the trailers.

Not at liberty to talk much about the content of BL4, but I remain firm in my criticism of BL3’s overabundance of toilet humor.

— Sam Winkler (@ThatSamWinkler) December 16, 2024

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“Not at liberty to talk much about the content of BL4, but I remain firm in my criticism of BL3’s overabundance of toilet humor.” replied Sam.

He goes on to say: “I’m not gonna say there’s no toilets but if the word skibidi ships in the game under my watch I’m gonna cry real tears. Paul Tassi joked that we were gonna have a gun called Hawk 2A and a fellow dev asked me if it was real and I wanted to put my hand down the sink grinder.”

Sam Winkler’s comments arrive just as a bunch of people on X are announcing that they were contract writers for Borderlands 4. Presumably some form of embargo or NDA has lifted, letting them talk about their work, or at least confirm they did work on the game.

As for Sam, his X page is full of many poop and cum jokes, so it’s kinda hard to judge what he deems an acceptable level of scat-based humour. It’s probably somewhere between no toilet jokes, and all the the toiler jokes.