Borderlands 4 director says use dialogue skip mod at your peril—it might turbo-brick your missions

Sick of Borderlands 4's chatty characters? Just want to press ahead and get to the shooting? Wish you could hammer a button to speed through their dialogue like you can in most other games? Good news! A courageous modder has created a dialogue-skip mod.

Whatever you do, don't ever use it.

That's not me telling you that, it's Graeme Timmins, Gearbox bigwig and creative director on Borderlands 4. Okay, to be fair, Timmins wasn't quite as foreboding as that, but he did caution players against using this (or any other) dialogue skipping mod when they brought it to his attention. Not because he's precious about you hearing his game's lovely words, but because "skipping dialog could lead to broken mission states that might not be recoverable."

Turns out all that nattering is holding something up, and that something is important. While other games might have dialogue-skip functions with hardly a problem, the way BL4 works means that "This request is way more involved and riskier that it appears on the surface with how dialog is integrated within our mission system".

In other words, not triggering some key bit of mission info in dialogue might leave you in mission limbo forevermore. "Don't ask me how I know" concludes Timmins, forebodingly.

Not having any marketable talent beyond writing, sometimes amusingly, about videogames, I don't have the technological know-how to tell you how much sense this makes. It strikes me as very weird that BL4 should take such an issue with a feature that's so basic in many other games, but perhaps there's a good reason for it. Or maybe Timmins really just does want you to hear that Claptrap dialogue and this is a cunning ploy.

It does add a new frisson to speedruns using dialogue skippers, though. Sure, you're shaving however many minutes off your completion time, but every circumvented line rolls the dice on your whole game going kablooey.