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Nothing is more pivotal in Borderlands than that all-important moment when you pick your Vault Hunter. Few choices have as much impact on your experience, and it remains a highlight of the franchise even as we approach the fourth mainline instalment. Borderlands 4 is shaping up to be the most ambitious Borderlands game in all aspects – and especially in its class design. We sat down with Nick Thurston to talk about the most complex Vault Hunter in Borderlands in Amon the Forgeknight, as well as the evolution of skill trees and character progression in the upcoming looter-shooter.
PRESS START: VAULT HUNTERS ARE OFTEN CHARACTERISED AND DESIGNED AROUND A HIGH CONCEPT IDEA. CAN YOU GIVE US A RUNDOWN OF WHO AMON IS AND HOW HE PLAYS?
Nick Thurston: I like to think of all our Vault Hunters as flavors of ice cream and visualize what each role is, both from an aesthetic point of view and from a gameplay perspective. Amon’s through line when we were coming up with him was always for him to be an unmovable goliath or absolute brute.
We touched on that in previous entries with Brick and, to a lesser extent, Krieg, but we haven’t returned to that fantasy for a while, and we wanted to get back to it and give it a little bit of extra spice. That’s why we ended up going with the sci-fi Viking type vibe.
PRESS START: CAN YOU TALK ABOUT WHY AMON’S SKILL TREES AND OTHER SKILL TREES IN BORDERLANDS 4 ARE YOUR DEEPEST THUS FAR?
N.T: All of our skill trees in Borderlands 4 are the biggest and most flexible that they have ever been. That’s always been a drive for me. I play a lot of action RPGs myself, so I like to have a lot of build options. I’m the min-maxer who likes to do millions of billions of damage in every game that I play, and I like to do it in a bunch of different ways.
All of our skill trees for all characters have been set up in such a way that you can specialize in one thing or another and be successful in the endgame.
As far as Amon goes, he has a lot of unique things going for him. Every character has one mechanic for every skill tree. For Amon, he has his Vengeance tree, where he has a bunch of elemental affinities. He gets these stacking buffs that reward you for killing enemies with specific elemental types, and then you get a payoff where you can ground slam to create a massive fissure, or when you use an Action Skill, you can summon a bolt of lightning from the sky.
His Crucible tree lets him set up a bunch of spiritual weapons like a hammer, an axe, and a sword that all fly around to attack enemies, so you can kind of get your pet or summoner fantasy with him as well
Last is the Onslaught tree, which is all about debuffing your enemies and getting in their face. A lot of Amon’s specific complexity comes from the fact that no one else has his trait, which is called the Forge Skill. All three of the skill trees deal with the Forge Skill in some way, such as getting a temporary buff or doing a specific special action.
Forge Skills are activated where, instead of tapping the Action Skill to do one thing, you can press and hold to do another. When we talk about Amon being complex, it’s just that he has the most abilities of any Vault Hunter because he effectively has two Action Skills.
Most Vault Hunters only have one, so he has double the abilities of every other Vault Hunter in the game. There have been a few complex Vault Hunters in the past, and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands sort of had that with multi-classing, but never to the extent of what Amon has or can do.
PRESS START: WHERE DID THE CONCEPT AND IDEA FOR AMON COME FROM, AND HOW DID IT TURN INTO WHAT HE IS TODAY?
N.T: Every Vault Hunter goes through, I would say, three or four revisions over time to kind of see what’s working and what doesn’t. There are a lot of things that we threw out throughout the process, and Amon was constantly surprising me throughout his development.
We started with this idea that he had a rage meter, and that rage meter would charge as you dealt damage, leading to a big old payoff. But that ran into some gameplay issues, because we always want players to feel like now is the correct time to use your Action Skill. If you think it’s the right time to press the button, you should press the button. Having a separate meter on the screen that you had to wait to fill up to reach optimal efficiency – that never really worked out for us.
We always knew that Amon was going to make all these forge weapons to do things, and we thought there were so many weapons when you think about fantasy tropes: a mace, a spear, all of these cool things that we can pull from.
There were just more opportunities than we had space for in terms of button presses, so we thought it would be cool if we had a Vault Hunter that has an ultimate-like Action Skill that’s twice as strong with twice the cooldown. That would give us a lot more opportunities to mix and match all these different weapons with all these cool ideas. That’s what we ended up shipping.
PRESS START: THERE ARE SOME CLEAR SIMILARITIES IN AMON AND THE ABILITY TO MULTI-CLASS IN WONDERLANDS. DID YOU TAKE ANY LEARNINGS AWAY FROM CLASS DESIGN IN THAT GAME THAT YOU APPLIED TO AMON?
N.T: It’s funny because I read Reddit a lot, and someone called Amon a sequel to Wonderlands in a character. I worked a little bit on Borderlands 3, but it was mostly on post-game stuff. My first experience being a character designer was on Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. On that game, we had a character design lead, and we had two people creating most of the classes. I did four of the six classes, so a lot of the classes in Wonderlands were my ideas coming in with a fresh perspective because I was the new set of eyes at the time.
I pushed for a lot of things in Wonderlands, and I was super happy with it. I made sure to note the things that worked and the things that didn’t work. I was thinking about how I could take some of those ideas and make them better for the next game, because a lot of it was satisfying but were ultimately missing something.
Some people have already noticed that there’s a bit of a parallel between some of the things in Wonderlands and Borderlands 4. We tried to pay attention to what worked, what didn’t, and iterate on it – especially with Amon being the sci-fi viking that manifests melee weapons. Wonderlands already had a melee focus and we wanted to take it further in a traditional Borderlands framework.
PRESS START: BORDERLANDS ALREADY HAS SO MANY MOVING PARTS. I CAN IMAGINE AMON HAS POSED SOME DESIGN CHALLENGES. DID THE TEAM HAVE TO CHANGE THE WAY THEY APPROACH THINGS LIKE PROGRESSION AND DIFFICULTY?
N.T: Balance is a funny thing because there’s no correct answer. When you experience it, you kind of feel it. In Amon’s case, just because he has double abilities doesn’t mean he’s doing double the damage. Maybe his action skill does 80 percent of what another Vault Hunter normally does, and then his super move does double the damage, right? But it also has twice the cooldown.
It’s just a bunch of numbers and levers, but ultimately that’s what I love to do. Fiddle with things until things feel right, but Amon wasn’t any different than the other Vault Hunters in that respect.
PRESS START: HOW DID YOU BALANCE EACH OF AMON’S SKILL TREES DESPITE ALL OF THEM BEING SO UNIQUE?
N.T: In Wonderlands, we dabbled with the idea of Action Skills doing different damage types. The Berserker has Whirlwind that does melee damage. In Borderlands 4, we’ve upped our technology to be able to support multiple damage sources so that we could have Action Skills that do melee damage, ordinance damage, or even gun damage.
This ties back to your question because each of Amon’s trees focuses on a specific thing. For example, the Scourge tree is all about ordinance damage, so if you have a passive that increases your ordinance damage, it’s going to benefit that gear type, but it’s also going to benefit your Action Skill.
Every skill tree is hyper-focused on one thing. Here’s the ordinance tree, here’s the Action Skill tree, here’s the melee damage tree, and then you can kind of build on the nuance of that. You can make hybrid builds by combining, and you end up getting six builds per skill tree. When you have three skill trees, it gets exponential very quickly.
I don’t want to say it’s simplified, but things are more digestible when you say this is the ordinance tree, this is the action skill tree, this is the melee tree. You can kind of balance them against each other to make sure that each one is individually powerful, but at the same time, none are particularly more powerful than the others.
PRESS START: DOES THAT DEPTH AND COMPLEXITY WITH THE SKILL TREES EXTEND TO THE OTHER VAULT HUNTERS?
N.T: In general, I would say yes. With Vex, for example, it’s less about mechanics for her and more about how she leans into elements. With Rafa, the Exo-Soldier, he’s much more of a jack of all trades, where he can lean into all of the things all the time, but it’s how you mix and match them to create a unique game loop.
PRESS START: HOW WOULD YOU SAY SKILL TREES DIFFER FROM THOSE OF PRIOR ENTRIES INTO THE FRANCHISE?
N.T: The biggest thing here is that there’s way more gameplay-altering passives. Fewer static passives just buff stats or abilities. We lean more into skills that create dynamic gameplay loops. Maybe you pick a passive that says when you do gun damage, your next melee is altered, and then when you use melee, your gun damage changes. It creates a new gameplay loop. There are a lot more of those kinds of passives that create interesting opportunities that are going to entice the player to play different ways.
Beyond that, it’s also a quantity thing where this game will have the most viable builds of any Borderlands game, bar none. These skill trees have more passives than every other installment in the franchise combined. I think the minimum amount of skills that any individual Vault Hunter has is roughly 80. I think Amon has 87. That’s without Augments and the Capstones.
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Augments and Capstones themselves have different ways you can mix and match. There are a lot of hard choices to make, but that’s what leads to build diversity. That we’re trying to get right with Borderlands 4. Players can also respec at any time across the map; there are several of them, not just the one like in previous games.
PRESS START: SIRENS ARE A REAL MAINSTAY OF THE FRANCHISE AT THIS POINT. HOW DOES THE TEAM KEEP COMING UP WITH NEW IDEAS FOR THE SIREN IN EACH ENTRY, AND WHERE DID YOU START WITH VEX?
N.T: When we’re starting to make our cast of characters, we always have some idea of where we’re going to go. It wouldn’t be a Borderlands game without a siren, right? We know that we have to have a Siren, but the challenge is looking at what we have done before, what the fans are tired of, and what opportunities we have.
We’ve never had a Siren that focuses on the occult and spooky. That was always an interesting throughline for us. What would a Siren who was essentially a necromancer look like? We came up with many different Action Skills, and a bunch of them nearly made it to the finish line before we had to redo them and change them because they didn’t work out.
It’s a crazy and iterative process, but to answer your question, we get together in a room and we toss out ideas until something excites us. Sometimes we’ll ask the wider Gearbox team as a whole for ideas about the DLC Vault Hunters, which we won’t talk about today, but that’s what we did for them, and got something like 60 pitch ideas.
Some of them are good, and some of them are really not, and then some of them have interesting nuggets that we combine to land on an idea. It’s a very dynamic process; we always kind of try to think about not repeating ourselves and what can excite our fans and us.
PRESS START: BORDERLANDS 4 SEEMS MUCH MORE INCLINED TOWARDS BUILDCRAFTING. IS THAT BECAUSE THIS ENTRY HAS A STRONGER FOCUS ON ENDGAME, OR DO YOU WANT MORE PLAYERS TO HAVE MORE BUILDCRAFTING AND VARIETY IN GENERAL?
N.T: It’s both. We’ll probably talk about endgame more in the future, but it’s super important to all of us at Gearbox. We’ve been considering the endgame from the jump, and we made a lot of decisions based on that. I won’t get too into that, but we always think about it.
From a personal lens, I love to find the builds that break the game. For me, there’s nothing more boring than playing a party-based game where I can have four players and then all of us pick the same character, and we’re all doing the same thing. It was really important to me that if four friends get together and they all want to play Borderlands 4 together, and they all want to be Amon, I want them all to be able to have completely different builds from each other. All the Vault Hunters have that level of diversity. For me, that was the most important part, so that players can latch onto a mechanic or a piece of gear that they find in the world.
If every player is finding different pieces of gear and has different game style preferences, then hopefully they’ll all come out with different builds, and the game will feel fresh. It’s a longevity thing. The more build diversity you have in your game, the longer players will play your game.
PRESS START: DO YOU HAVE A FAVOURITE AMON BUILD YOU’VE BEEN USING IN DEVELOPMENT AND PLAYTESTING?
I think Crucible is probably my favorite of the Action Skills. I love them all dearly, but there’s something very satisfying about throwing an axe into an enemy and seeing them explode. I also really like pet and summoner classes, so I made sure Amon has a bunch of weapons that he could summon to make a gigantic army of digital weapons that can just flood the battlefield.
PRESS START: BORDERLANDS 4 IS QUITE STRUCTURALLY DIFFERENT IN COMPARISON TO OTHER ENTRIES. DID THE SEAMLESS WORLD APPROACH INFLUENCE THE WAY YOU DESIGNED CLASS PROGRESSION AND SKILL TREES?
N.T: The seamless world didn’t inform the design upfront, but once you start implementing things and you put them into the game and you start testing it out, you do start to make certain observations.
Borderlands 4 is in a world bigger than what we’d usually do, which generally means that a lot of our Action Skills that have historically been pretty small in terms of radius have had to get bigger as a result. Enemies can be more spread out and can come at you from all different angles, so there are a lot of things that influenced the design.
Borderlands 4 arrives on the PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC on 12th September 2025, followed by the Switch 2 launch on 3rd October 2025. The cheapest price is $99 with free shipping from Amazon.
