Gearbox’s Promise About Borderlands 4’s New Villain Isn’t as Bold as It Sounds

After much speculation and waiting, Gearbox has finally announced Borderlands 4 is releasing next year. The fourth installment of the studio’s premier looter-shooter series was announced at Gamescom with an ominous, cryptic teaser trailer, wherein a mysterious robotic hand reaches down and lifts one of the now-iconic psycho masks. Further details on the title are presently unclear, though Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford took to X, formerly Twitter, to dispel fan speculation that the game would see the return of Handsome Jack.

Pitchford promised fans that the next game’s antagonist would be something “far more powerful and sinister” than Jack. While these comments cleared the air on Jack’s possible return to the series, they didn’t do much else to clue fans in on who exactly the big bad of Borderlands 4 might be. Even though Pitchford asserted the new villain is an even bigger threat than Jack ever was, that may not be saying as much as one would think.

Borderlands 4’s Villain is Bigger and Badder than Handsome Jack

Was Handsome Jack All That Powerful or Sinister?

Pitchford’s choice of words here was pretty telling: “More powerful and more sinister.” Handsome Jack is, and at this rate probably always will be, one of the greatest video game antagonists of all time. His characterization as an unrelentingly sarcastic, callously violent psychopath encapsulates the tone of the series perfectly and remains a massive hit with fans. Jack is a lot of things, but powerful and sinister may not be the best words to describe him.

Jack is powerful in the abstract sense. As CEO of Borderlands 2‘s Hyperion, he has the full force of one of the major corporations at his back and that’s nothing to sneeze at. But Jack himself is just a guy. His boss fight at the end of the story can be trivially easy for many Vault Hunters, and at the end of the game, he dies as unceremoniously as any other bandit gunned down during the previous hours of gameplay.

And as far as sinister goes, that isn’t exactly a good description of Jack either. He for sure gets darker toward the end of the game after Angel dies, but one would be hard-pressed to think the guy who coined the name Butt Stallion as sinister. His early-game comedy prevents him from truly earning that title.

Who Could the Villain of Borderlands 4 Be?

Given that “more powerful and more sinister” than Jack seems not as high a bar to clear, it’s fair to wonder what type of villain the series might be getting in its fifth installment. It’s safe to say that the series is finally moving away from corporate antagonists, as has been the case with most of the games in the series thus far. And that hand in the teaser trailer was not human, which rules out any possible sirens or Eridian-enhanced humans.

Borderlands 4’s villain may be someone fans have already encountered. The enigmatic Watcher from Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel has been a hanging plot thread for far too long. After saving Athena from execution, it heralded an impending war that would require all the Vault Hunters to fight. Much like the Watcher itself, this Vault Hunter war has not yet materialized, but Borderlands 4 might finally get around to it.

The Watcher itself may or may not be the antagonist, but it seems very likely at this point that the villain is some flavor of Eridian. It would check the boxes Pitchford laid out: Eridians at base level are already much stronger than humans, never mind an Eridan heading up some sort of invasion force. And whatever alien menace is threatening the Vault Hunters in Borderlands 4, it probably has much farther-reaching and darker ambitions than Jack ever had.