Sam Winkler is the narrative director for Borderlands 4, and he prefers to run things kinetically. Or at least, that's what the game's lead writer implied in an interview, offering a statement that's at least half a joke. It'll be up to you to tell which half is the joke.
Put simply, Winkler does not want the humor of Borderlands 3 to reflect the content of Borderlands 4. Purge the toilet humor, purge the memes. They want to keep things grounded and avoid self-parody.
The desire for more grounded humor came from the top, and it's been in since the game's early development days.
"I've been on the game for a couple of years." said Taylor Clark, the lead writer in question. "It was definitely something from the moment that I came on board, when I was talking to Sam, the grounded tone was a priority."
Clark continued, "Grounding the humor in the world, he made it very clear that if I tried to put a meme in the game, he would come to my house with a baseball bat."
Winkler offered the IGN interviewer some words of his own: "Something I like to remind people is that the...
