Borderlands 4 features a seamless open world, but your journey seems to culminate in an assault on the Timekeeper’s stronghold city, Dominion. Though not much is known about the densest environment in Borderlands’ history, Gearbox gave me a guided tour of the city. While I can’t share everything I saw and heard, here is everything I can say about this late-game zone.
In contrast to much of the rest of Borderlands 4’s open world, you don’t get access to Dominion until later in the game when you are on your march to confront the Timekeeper. Using an event that occurs on Pandora’s moon, Elpis, which is now in the orbit of Kairos, the Vault Hunters can enter Dominion with the hopes of facing off against the Timekeeper.
Once inside the walls of Dominion, things aren’t as orderly as the Timekeeper’s obsession would lead you to believe. The various Borderlands 4 factions are at each other’s throats within the city limits, and, without spoiling anything, the city isn’t quite what I expected coming in; the Timekeeper values order at any cost, but the city in which he bases his operations feels oddly chaotic. As I watch creative director Graeme Timmins give me a tour, the Timekeeper taunts his Vault Hunter in their ear.
And despite the Vault Hunters knocking on the door, he’s keeping his composure. “Even though we’re breaking in, really trying to get to the Timekeeper, he’s still in his element,” senior project producer Anthony Nicholson says. “He’s still very calm and sure of his plan and what he has in store.”
But even if playing solo, the Vault Hunter storming Dominion won’t be alone. “Obviously, you make a lot of friends along your way, and they’re all going to help and contribute to your time here in the city,” Timmins says.
Throughout the game, players can see Dominion in the distance, similar to how Hyrule Castle is always visible to players in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It’s intentionally placed so that players are aware of the goal, and it remains front-of-mind. “As you’re starting your journey in Fadefields, you’ll see that tower in the distance,” global creative executive and former Game Informer editor-in-chief Andrew Reiner says. “That’s actually there. That’s not a skybox. It’s not in the background. [You] can fly out of here, back to the starting point of the game. That content is always there.”
Dominion serves as the home of Borderlands 4’s main antagonist, the Timekeeper
The design of Dominion appropriately feels like the culmination of the game, as each zone you visited in the rest of the game has a dedicated biome within the city limits. Additionally, the city is extremely dense and vertically oriented, with numerous places to climb and explore. “As you move throughout the missions and go through each of these different districts, you get more of the story that’s evolving and unfolding,” Nicholson says.
Timmins and Nicholson share additional details, both about Dominion and the Timekeeper, which I won’t disclose in the interest of maintaining surprises. However, Timmins is excited for players to explore this area. “There are a lot of important story moments that happen here in the city,” he says. “It is a whole ‘nother zone’s worth of content. It’s also the most content-packed. Being the city, we prioritized really making it feel like an urban sprawl. We slammed together lots of locations that are stacked on top of each other.”
The main story will give you a tour of the various districts within Dominion, which, like Borderlands 4’s open world, can be explored seamlessly. But players can go off the beaten path to experience additional content. “There’s tons more side-missions that are located here as well,” Timmins says. “Actually, some of my personal favorite side-missions happen to be in the city. And they’re pretty lengthy, too. Some of the side-missions in Dominion, in particular, have a lot of chained missions that you end up spending a lot of time with some of these NPCs, and some of the relationships you actually make in the side-missions in the city, in particular – or at least for me – stand out as some of the more interesting ones.”
There were plenty of more details to cover surrounding Dominion, but I withheld them from this story for the sake of avoiding spoilers. Suffice it to say, the environmental storytelling will shatter some of your preconceived notions you may have had coming into Dominion for the first time. If you’re itching to storm Dominion and take down the Timekeeper, you don’t have much longer to wait, as Borderlands 4 arrives on September 12.
For more on Borderlands 4, head to our magazine hub for the vast array of exclusive content.