I think we can all agree that an always-on minimap is bad. Like the TV in a bar, you find your eyes drawn to it even when there are other things you should be looking at. You stare at a corner of your monitor while ignoring the fancy grandeur of whatever expensive open world is taking up the other seven-eighths of your screen.
But the absence of navigational aids can be just as bad. I got lost more than once in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in areas where there was no map at all, and just had to loop around the place trying to find the one bit I was supposed to go to next. And in an FPS, you may not need to worry as much about getting lost, but you will need to worry about losing enemies when they duck behind cover.
When early footage of Borderlands 4 showed it lacking a minimap, some players were distraught. If you can hear psychos ranting but can’t tell exactly where they are, how will you figure out they’re actually on the other side of that hut in particular? Well, as Gearbox founder Randy Pitchford explained on the hatesite formerly known as Twitter, Borderlands 4 actually will have a combat radar in time for its September launch.
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Explaining in detail why Borderlands 4 was initially designed without a minimap, Pitcfhord said, “Borderlands 4 is much larger than ever before, and seamless. There are main missions and side quests (lots of them) that often have objectives, sometimes multiple objectives, further than the scope of a useful mini-map. So we invest *more* into the main, big map—make it more useful, faster, better. And we invest in other features for navigation, like the compass and the EchoBot AI drone companion.”
Those other features sound pretty great. The drone can paint a path for you, like you’re casting clairvoyance in Oblivion Remastered, and the compass highlights targets as well as destinations, and indicates their height at the same time—something minimaps are often bad at. However, when Gearbox showed off Borderlands 4 on a recent world tour of preview events (Tyler Wilde attended one for us, and came away pleased with its consistency and also the cool hoverbike), some players did bring up the combat-usefulness of a minimap.
“The people who stuck with their feelings about a combat radar had a point”, Pitchford said. “WE got good at the compass for combat, but combat is all *feel*. Should we require everyone to learn the compass for enemy situational awareness?”
And so, the creative director and UI team pulled together and whipped up a combat radar—though it’ll be off by default. It wasn’t ready in time for the Borderlands Fan Fest, but it will be ready in time for the game’s release on September 12, when Borderlands 4 will be available on Steam and the Epic Game Store.