Watch the 'Welcome to Kairos' Beyond the Borderlands #2 for Borderlands 4, an upcoming installment in the first-person open-world looter shooter developed by Gearbox. Players can get the rundown on the new planet to explore with Kairos alongside the key factions, lore, history, and more straight from the narrative design team.
00:00Kairos is effectively a prison planet ruled over by a dictator called the Timekeeper.
00:16He thrives on control and order, and when things are thrown into those mechanisms to create chaos,
00:24he only knows how to clamp down and sort of institute martial law.
00:29The Timekeeper's primary method of control over the years has been a cybernetic implant called a bolt.
00:35A bolt is installed on the base of someone's neck and can be used to monitor their activities and shut them down completely.
00:46The Timekeeper is able to use it to see through people's eyes and monitor what's happening on Kairos at all times.
00:53Enter our Vault Hunters.
00:58People are now hungry, hungrier than they've ever been to get off of Kairos and to fight the oppression that they've been living under.
01:06The Vault Hunters end up enmeshed in this battle on the planet, and all roads lead to the Timekeeper.
01:14We call them the Outbounders because they, kind of like our Vault Hunters, crash-landed on Kairos and have not been able to leave because the planet is on lockdown.
01:28They are desperate to go back home. They are desperate to go back home. They are ripe for revolution.
01:36The Outbounders are led by a guy named Rush, who is very much this coach type character.
01:46And when the Vault Hunters shows up, helps them join the broader Crimson resistance, that's when things really ramp up for the Outbounders.
01:54Each zone is ruled over by a commander. In the Fade Fields, we have Idolator Sol.
02:02Idolator Sol once lived inside the city and really wants to be the Timekeeper's right-hand man.
02:11And when he is sent to the Fade Fields after Opus arrives, he sees that as his opportunity to prove his worth to the Timekeeper.
02:27The Augurs are a long-standing culture on Kairos. They are the descendants of the original mining teams
02:36sent there centuries ago by the Timekeeper in order to get resources like Ordonite and other minerals and ores
02:44out of the mountain range.
02:46So in the mountains, we have the faction leader Calder and he is part of the Augurs.
02:53He wants to take the flight to the Timekeeper and the other council members are scared and they live in fear.
03:01In Terminus range, we have Vile Lictor is our commander. Vile Lictor is an Augur.
03:09Since Alpus has arrived and brought Iridium to the planet, Vile Lictor has begun experimenting and
03:17doing things under the nose of the Timekeeper.
03:28We have the Electi faction and the leader is Levain, the gorgeous golden Levain.
03:35The Electi had previously lived in the city, an upper crust elite people that benefited from the Timekeeper.
03:46But when Alpus arrives, the Electi are left outside the city walls and the city goes on lockdown and they
03:56are not permitted back in the city. And so for the first time, they have to learn how the other side
04:02lives and how to survive outside the city walls. In Carcadia Burn, we have the Ripper Queen. When Alpus
04:10arrived, her perspective changed. She's realized that there's more to life than what she's been presented.
04:21And she rips her bolts as a means to be free of the Timekeeper's influence. When you rip your bolt out,
04:31there is a high potential for death and if not death, insanity. And so her army is largely made up of
04:43raving, mad humans with decreased brain capacity.
04:50She was able to convince a great number of her own soldiers to rip out their own bolts,
04:54and when they're not convinced, she does it for them.
05:10We also, of course, have the Timekeeper as our primary villain in Borderlands 4.
05:18And when we were approaching how to write the Timekeeper, we certainly looked back on all of our
05:26previous main villains and considered how we wanted to approach the Timekeeper differently,
05:32so that he would stand out from anything that we've done before.
05:36We wanted to go back to this sense of dread about the villain of our game. The Timekeeper
05:45can reach out and control people with unshielded bolts, and that's a threat that is always hanging
05:53over the player's actions in the game. As we unravel things for him, though, we start to see the cracks.
06:01We wanted a villain who was a new type of character in the franchise, who is ever-present and
06:13not overstaying his weapons.
06:15We brought back so much from previous titles that fans wanted to see again and that we wanted
06:23to put in the game again. The world is immense, and it's a new planet. You can come to Borderlands 4
06:33whether you've played the previous titles or not, and you can hop right in. It is a turning point in our
06:41universe, and how it connects back to our previous titles, but also at the end where it will point,
