Battleborn bids farewell with its final update

Pity poor Battleborn, a good game that did some interesting things with the hero shooter genre, that got stomped into the ground for its troubles. Gearbox hung in with it for as long as it could, but not even the move to free-to-play was enough to save it. The studio announced last month that development would be halted following the release of the fall update, an unhappy event that took place just ahead of the weekend.

The fall update includes new skins, taunts, and finishers, plus some bug fixes and a change to "skill damage growth formulas" that bases their scaling on percentages. "Prior to these changes, low damage skills became relatively more powerful as players leveled up when compared to high damage skills and attacks. These changes are intended to normalize those relationships so that as players level up, strength relationships are preserved," Gearbox explained in the patch notes.

"This should eliminate some esoteric power dynamics as players level and allow augments and mutations to be the source of power spikes as well as early/mid/late-game differences in character strength. This effort also resulted in a number of bug fixes for skills that scaled incorrectly."

As final farewells go, it's an understated affair, certainly nothing like the end of a long-running MMO, where fans come together for a final day of celebration and mourning. But it's also not exactly the end of Battleborn, which will continue to run "for the foreseeable future." That day may not be too far off, though: It's average concurrent player count over the past 30 days is just 54.5.

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Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.