Following the events of Borderlands 3, Pandora’s moon, Elpis, smashed into a previously veiled planet called Kairos. There, the population exists under the oppressive rule of a dictator known as the Timekeeper, who assumes the role of the primary antagonist in Borderlands 4. During my time at Gearbox’s Frisco, Texas headquarters for our Borderlands 4 cover story, my time interacting with the Timekeeper was extremely limited, only hearing his voice from time to time, but his menacing demeanor and obsession with preserving order at all costs led me to seek more information from several members of the Borderlands 4 development team.
Since the release of Borderlands 2 in 2012, Handsome Jack has been the high-water mark for villains in the Borderlands franchise. In the eyes of many, the franchise has struggled to find a villain as charismatic and hateable as Jack. Nobody – players nor developers – wants to have a cheap imitation of Handsome Jack as the protagonist in a Borderlands game, so the team took a different approach with the likes of the Calypso Twins in Borderlands 3.
When Elpis crashed into Kairos, it shattered the order the Timekeeper craves and set the events of Borderlands 4 in motion
“We’re very proud of all the stories and all of the antagonists that we’ve had before,” senior project producer Anthony Nicholson says. “We try to improve and diversify the way that they are, so when we go maniacal crazy, maybe we don’t do that for the next one, because there are a lot of stories that we can tell.”
However, while Borderlands 3 featured twin cult leaders bent on the destruction of Pandora, Borderlands 4 seems to be revisiting the dictator antagonist concept with the Timekeeper, a man who has been on Kairos, the new planet on which Borderlands 4 takes place, for thousands of years. The team at Gearbox arrived at the Timekeeper as the main antagonist very early in the development of Borderlands 4, as they wanted to explore themes surrounding a character like him.
Playing with themes of order and chaos as opposing ideas, and discovering what happens if you go too far in one direction or the other, served as a guiding principle for the team as they began work on Borderlands 4. “We knew very early on that we wanted this to be a story about order and chaos and the spots in between where the players would operate,” narrative director Sam Winkler says. “It started as sort of a logical endpoint of, ‘When you take order too far, what kind of person does that create? What kind of person has to thrive in that space? And then, how does that person react when the system starts to collapse and the chaos starts to be injected?’ And a lot of the railroad tracks just kind of fell into place at that point in terms of the dialogue.”
Building off that initial idea, the narrative team got to work on a villain that could exemplify one of those extreme edge cases. The result was a dictator who craved control and order so much that he would stop at nothing to preserve it. “If you take either of them to their extreme, it can get weird and dark,” Gearbox president and co-founder Randy Pitchford says. “If you take the organized, professional, mature side of things… the buttoned-up side of things, and take that to its extreme, you end up with this kind of rigid, almost totalitarian, kind of fascist, like, ‘This is the way,’ measured to the micron. Everything’s precise, and there’s no room for creativity or deviation. You take the other side to the extreme, and it’s anarchy and chaos, and a lot of bad s— happens because we’re not looking after things. That’s an interesting spectrum.”
The Timekeeper’s stronghold city, Dominion
In his efforts to preserve his perfect vision of order, the Timekeeper cloaked the planet to prevent the outside universe from finding them and installed Command Bolts to control the population. “His demeanor is very calm,” Nicholson says. “He likes things very neat, he likes things very orderly. He’s unrattled. You won’t get him flying off the handle because he’s very confident in why he’s doing what he’s doing. As Vault Hunters, we need to discover what that is and, ultimately, push back against it because we can see the chaos that this order is bringing in every region on the planet.”
The narrative team worked to ensure the Timekeeper’s mission had a degree of believability and understanding for why he would want the goal he’s hoping to achieve. Still, at the end of the day, players should easily conclude that his approach is far too extreme. “He’s a control freak,” Winkler says. “He is literally and metaphorically getting his hands dirty in the world of Kairos in a way that has made everyone unsettled and is preventing them all from having peace. And I think he knows it. He knows that he has this effect. He signs off a lot of conversations with ‘I’ll be watching,’ and people around the world are looking over their shoulder. I wanted this character to be someone who knows the effect that he has on people. But he’s also, at the same time, a bit victim to his own system. The bounds on him are very rigid, because he wants it that way; he wants everything to be rigid. And as we start chipping away at those boundaries, I really liked showing off how he responds to that and how it becomes a very personal thing for him.”
Though he’s clearly unhinged in his approach to achieving order, he’s far from the kind of over-the-top personality that past villains in the series have presented. During my hands-on experience, I had the opportunity to hear him a few times, and he remained true to how Nicholson describes him: cool, calm, and calculated. “Borderlands has definitely become known for the character that calls you up and tells you you’re an assh—, and we wanted to try a character that was a little bit more reactive and a little bit more ominous,” Winkler says. “He’s very present, but a lot of his presence is soft touch. And he reaches out and screws with you very directly. We wanted to make sure that he wasn’t just talking the talk, he was walking the walk, so the player is frustrated at this guy and wants to kick his ass.”
And though Handsome Jack evoked similar feelings, he did so in a completely different manner. “We really wanted to have someone really be a bad guy and embrace the vibe of a bad guy in a different way,” creative director Graeme Timmins says. “Whereas Handsome Jack was a bit of a smartass and he had a sense of humor, we wanted to approach this guy with a little more like, ‘No, he’s just a badass.’ He’s really about control. He doesn’t have that kind of warm personality that you could kind of buddy up to. He’s just a bad guy. And it feels good to kill bad guys, so that was a big deal. So, we just wanted to make sure it was like, right to the point, this is a bad guy. When you start the game, you’ll see why he’s a bad guy, and you’ll be on the ride for the rest of the game.”
Though the Timekeeper has kept his thumb on Kairos and its inhabitants for an extended stretch, the illusion started to fade following the events of Borderlands 3 when Lilith teleported Pandora’s moon, Elpis, into the space occupied by Kairos while the Timekeeper cloaked it. This resulted in the cloak being destroyed and Psycho masks raining down, giving birth to a new faction of Kairos denizens who ripped out their Command Bolts to regain their free will at the cost of mutilating their bodies and minds.
Though the Timekeeper has clearly lost any kind of moral standing with the people of Kairos, we’ll learn more about his backstory through gameplay. “We are entering in media res for the Timekeeper’s story,” managing director of narrative Lin Joyce says. “He’s been around in this position, so thinking about, ‘Who is he right now for the player?’ but also for us, ‘How did he get there? What was his journey up to that point? Why is he this way? Why does he hold onto order so tightly?’ Then, only in answering those questions are we able to challenge and help crack this perfect façade that he’s built. But that’s all spoilers, so I’m not going to tell you!”
I didn’t have too many interactions with the Timekeeper, but I did take on one of his followers, whom Winkler calls the Timekeeper’s “number-one fanboy” in Idolator Sol. That battle was prolonged and frantic, and it set a high bar for the escalation that is sure to occur with the Timekeeper’s other followers and, eventually, the Timekeeper himself. I am already looking forward to smashing through the Timekeeper’s order and injecting more than a little chaos when Borderlands 4 arrives on September 12.