Ahead of the game's official launch, it was revealed that Borderlands 4 would go live without a built-in photo mode, with the game's creative director promising that the feature would ship "in an update after the game launches." Now, nearly five months after the game's original launch, Gearbox has finally delivered on that promise , along with a slew of new content in what is being called the game's first major update. The photo mode feature allows players to reposition the camera, change the FoV and DoF, and add a variety of visual filters before taking their snapshot. Additionally, players can make tweaks to the scene itself, like changing the time of day, adding or removing player characters, summons, and NPCs, and a toggling damage numbers on or off to taste.

Photo mode isn't all that landed in the January 29 update, including a number of fixes to make quest and challenges track accurately and communicate progress more clearly. The major update also ushered in a sizeable rework to Harlowe's Zero-Point action skill and increased dedicated drop levels for Ultimate Vault Hunter mode. The changes made to Harlowe's Zero-Point action skill are in the name of making it "feel more satisfying and better balanced relative to Harlowe's other trees," and the change amounts to the base skill getting the benefits of the previous inertia augment and increasing the slam damage, status effect chance, and status effect damage from the Inertia augment. Amon and Vex also received small tweaks to make them deal slightly more damage in certain situations and behave more predictably overall.