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007: Nightfire review (2003)

Chuck Osborn — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:10:00 +0000

Special commentary on this classic PC Gamer review provided by:

007: Nightfire review - PC Gamer issue #107 (US, February 2003)

From the archives: The review below appears as originally written, with only minor changes in formatting and newly taken screenshots. By Chuck Osborn

(Image credit: EA)

It’s an irony that only a master criminal being devoured alive by his own bionic piranha could savor—that No One Lives Forever and its sequel, jaunty pokes-in-the-eye at the Bond movie franchise, are far better games than one starring the venerable superspy himself.

In Nightfire, you’re James Bond, Britain’s MI6 playboy secret agent. Sophisticated, suave, cocksure—in this first-person shooter, you’re none of these things. You see, I discovered the game’s secret—you’re not Bond, you’re M’s gun valet: a stunt double who shoots the bad guys while the Pierce Brosnan–modeled 007 (who sounds more like George Lazenby) has all the fun during the game’s tortured cinematic cutscenes.

On Her Majesty's secret 007th circle of hell is forever

Before launching the game, you’re treated to one of the title’s high points—an introductory sequence modeled on the opening vignettes from the Bond films, complete with sexy power ballad. The intent, of course—from the appearance of the MGM lion to the blazing female figures somersaulting across your monitor screen—is to relay the message that Nightfire’s original storyline is a thrilling cinematic adventure so tantalizing that it could be splashed on the big screen.

But the game’s nine missions are actually a skeleton strung together by disjointed clichés. True, these are the clichés we’ve come to know and love—guns, girls, and gadgets—but they’re presented with a perfunctory half-hearted yawn rather than silver-screen sizzle.

The head of Britain’s secret service, M (obviously not voiced by Dame Judi Dench), has entreated you to investigate Rafael Drake, a slick industrialist and utterly forgettable evil super-genius who heads the Phoenix International Corporation. He’s acquired some nuclear missiles and… well, frankly, he could be using them as giant pointy paperweights for all I know: Nightfire isn’t big on coherent storytelling. What I do know is that you have to stop him by attending a fancy dress party, infiltrate his secret underwater lair, and eventually blast off into outer space.

Now wait—that sounds a lot cooler than it actually plays. Nightfire is loaded with such sloppy bugs and rotten AI that I honestly believe Rafael Drake’s first act of villainy was to eliminate the EA play-testing department.

(Image credit: EA)

From the first level, my attempt to crash a party with spy-chic stealth went pear-shaped: Merely touching the side of a truck bound for Drake’s Austrian mountaintop castle bounced me back like a rubber Bond, sending me careening off a cliff to my death. And even though I’d blasted numerous guards with deafening automatic-weapons fire, and done so unmasked, I was welcomed into the soiree with open arms.

Next, M commands me to discretely photograph the slinky sex kittens in attendance (not her words) with my Q-issued cigarette lighter-slash-minicamera. (You wield a variety of gadgets throughout the game, such as pen-darts, a laser-watch, and very cool X-ray specs.) Here, another bug: multiple camera shots were required before the mission objective would register as completed.

Keep in mind that each of these irksome glitches occurred within the first 30 minutes of gameplay. Individually, they’re annoying; in sequence like this, they’re downright frustrating.

The spy who bored me

Including his trusty Wolfram P2K pistol (with optional silencer), Bond can carry up to four firearms at one time—machine guns, sniper rifles, missile launchers, and a massive shoulder cannon among them. (It’s surprising you don’t jingle like a charm bracelet while sneaking around.)

You can also load up on frag and flashbang grenades, tripmines, and body armor. You’ll find the latter lying on desks or in stairwells, and sometimes inside padlocked chests and lockers that can be broken into using your laser watch.

(Image credit: EA)

Objectives are relayed to you by M or by lovely allies like the alluring Alura McCall and secret agent Zoe Nightshade, a holdover from Agent Under Fire, a console game that never made its way to the PC. Unfortunately, these goals—blowing up a computer, setting charges on the base of a bridge, and so on—seem pretty straightforward and arbitrary. You have a license to kill, but little license to exercise creative problem-solving à la the forthcoming Splinter Cell.

The appeal of a James Bond game, Bond being Bond, is in the rendered cinematics: trading double-entendres with the ladies, parachuting out of danger, and driving your Q-rigged Aston Martin. Unfortunately, a driving mode was jettisoned from Nightfire’s PC version, though it remains in the console iterations.

For your AI only

From the archives

(Image credit: Future)

This review was originally published in PC Gamer #107 (US, February 2003).

You can still subscribe to PC Gamer to get new issues of the magazine (in print!) every month.

Nightfire has some of the worst AI I’ve ever seen in a big-budget game release. Guards are idiot savants—incapable of hearing a firefight in the next room or noticing that a nearby co-worker just had his head blown off, yet able to zero in on you immediately as soon as you enter their radius of fire (in one case, even while Bond was hidden inside an air vent).

The bipolar AI makes certain levels particularly grating, especially the forced-stealth “alert the guards and fail” missions. And though the manual suggests you should “shoot out overhead lights to remain hidden in the shadows,” a whopping none of the lights I shot ever broke.

That’s okay, because all the enemies are apparently laminated in bulletproof shielding. The damage model is dodgy, contrarily letting you get off a one-shot kill to the head using your sniper rifle while five pistol rounds to the face will barely make a bad guy flinch. Boss battles are likewise uninspired. There are four bosses—a ninja, a lasergun-toting underwater henchman, two ninjas, and then Drake himself, wielding the same lasergun but now out in space. Running away and shooting is the method for beating each one.

Views to a kill

So what is there to like about Nightfire? Well, if it was a movie, the set design would win an Oscar. Missions take place in a variety of minutely detailed environments, from a countryside paper-walled Japanese estate to cluttered rocket-ship hangars to Drake’s opulent chandeliered inner sanctum.

A few sequences showed promise, such as one part where you’re trapped inside a dangling elevator and have to snipe enemies before they can shoot through the cable that’s holding you up. Infiltrating Drake’s island facility was fun, too, mainly because, unlike in some other levels, I was given more latitude in choosing stealth versus brute force. (Though I would’ve liked the ability to knock out a jump-suited goon and steal his clothing.)

The multiplayer game is merely okay, offering deathmatch, team deathmatch, and CTF modes. Some classic Bond villains (Jaws, Oddjob) and girls (Christmas Jones) are selectable skins, but the likenesses are hit-and-miss. Scaramunga, for example, looks as much like Christopher Lee as I do.

For a rollicking good spy caper, Cate Archer’s NOLF 2 definitely holds the upper hand this round. Nightfire’s Bond is just bland. James Bland.

Randy Pitchford says Gearbox has a firm no-AI policy after posting an AI-generated image of an AI working at Gearbox

andy.chalk@pcgamer.com (Andy Chalk) — Mon, 04 May 2026 23:25:31 +0000

Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford is making friends and influencing people on social media, which is to say that he's repeatedly insisting the studio does not use generative AI in a professional capacity (and occasionally calling people names) after a gen AI image he posted over the weekend drew a pretty negative reaction from followers.

The whole thing started on May 3: "I asked my primary AI tool to generate a selfie that indicates how they feel based on how I interact with it and this is what it generated (note: background words were not prompted and have zero relationship to anything real)," he wrote on X.

(Image credit: Randy Pitchford (Twitter))

Boy, that's a ratio.

In a reply to a follower who said a real photo of Pitchford in his office "would have been much better received," he wrote," The point was to make the AI make a picture of how it saw itself to put a lens on the absurdity of the idea of AI having an identity. In what universe does what you suggest have anything to do with the point?"

But it was all downhill from there: Other followers expressed concern about the use of generative AI in Borderlands games, or disapproval in general; Pitchford insisted several times that the intent was merely to be "silly," and that Gearbox's policy "is that we do not use AI for anything in any professional capacity that any customer could ever see."

(Image credit: Randy Pitchford (Twitter))

The pump for this particular backlash may have been primed by recent Borderlands 4 patch notes, which some players suspected were written or modified by AI. Pitchford insisted that's not the case, however, saying in response to one such accusation that "errors in patch notes are human error."

Eventually, Pitchford posted a longer statement saying he was inspired by friends who were "goofing around with making [AI] try to make pictures of itself."

"My friends I was with for lunch earlier produced some funny things with similar prompts for themselves and I wanted to see what bullshit it would generate as an idea of a self identity because the idea of an AI even having an identity is nonsense," Pitchford wrote. "The result was somehow more embarrassingly hilarious than I expected and I wanted to share that.

"ChatGPT has no information from me about anything from my work because I don’t use AI for work and our policy is no AI in any work that could ever be seen by any customer. I’m using my personal phone and not my work computer (which is isolated from personal systems). It got whatever it generated from whatever public knowledge of Gearbox it has access to (hence my very clear disclaimer) and the timing or content of this has exactly zero to do with whatever feelings you’ve spun yourself up about with patch notes."

He then urged followers to "maybe relax a little and have some fun?"

I use ChatGPT essentially as a search engine. I recently started fooling around with the image generation as some friends were goofing around with making it try to make pictures of itself. Prompt was: “Make a picture of yourself as if you worked at my company, Gearbox… https://t.co/tXHDeS3yDrMay 4, 2026

That's probably not a bad idea, generally speaking, and honestly I don't doubt that Pitchford was just "goofing around," as he put it. At the same time, I feel like a little contrition would've gone a long way here. As we've seen many times in the past, the use of generative AI in game development is a very touchy topic, and I don't think it's at all surprising that a high-profile game industry executive posting gen AI images bearing the Gearbox logo and various other game dev trappings would elicit a strong reaction, and not necessary of the positive sort. Games industry executives, and more importantly the money guys, may be eager to embrace it, but people who actually make and play games? Not so much.

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A year after Gearbox released Risk of Rain 2 DLC so broken the developer admitted it put the game 'in a really bad place,' it's finally got a win: the new DLC's 96% positive reviews have blasted it up Steam's top sellers chart

wesley@pcgamer.com (Wes Fenlon) — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 21:29:50 +0000

Risk of Rain 2: Alloyed Collective, a new DLC for the ultimate numbers-go-up roguelike, launched on Steam yesterday to something new for Gearbox since it took over the game: Player acclaim.

After taking over development duties from original indie developer Hopoo Games last year, Gearbox stepped in it pretty hard, releasing DLC so bad that it broke the game even for players who hadn't purchased it. The fact that it cost $15 didn't help, and most players at the time were mourning Hopoo's exit and what they saw as a naked attempt to cash in. Things are going a bit better this time.

While also costing $15—nearly two-thirds the price of the base game—Alloyed Collective adds a whole lot to the game, including two new characters, seven stages with new music tracks, and a new final boss. More importantly, it doesn't seem to be breaking fundamental game systems like physics and how damage is calculated. The reviews are overwhelmingly positive, at least among folks who've bought the DLC.

The Risk of Rain 2 Steam forums have not been so generous, with reactions like "Gearbox slop" and complaints that the DLC isn't free all over the place. That's apparently hater central, while the subreddit, surprisingly, is loving it.

If there's any whisper of controversy with Alloyed Collective, it's a change to Risk of Rain 2's drones, which are little repairable bots you can find scattered around stages that will follow you and lend some firepower. The DLC adds seven new drone types, while a patch to the base game is simultaneously reworking drone AI to make them smarter while nerfing an item that once made drones far more powerful.

"Spare Drone Parts (SDP) was initially balanced around the fact that drones used to be pretty ineffective combat allies—even so SDP was considered to be one of the strongest items in the game," Gearbox says in the patch notes. "With the new drones, increased drone acquisition and new drone AI in DLC3, SDP would essentially play the game for you and almost always guarantee a (pretty boring) win, so we have decided to reduce its effectiveness by 50%."

It sounds like a pretty reasonable change, but it's a bit awkward that players who don't buy the DLC will experience the rebalancing without access to those seven new (and presumably more powerful than the base game's) drone variants. Gearbox knows the tweak might be a bit controversial, though, noting that it will "keep a close eye on community feedback and sentiment regarding this change."

One other tweak to drones sounds quite cool for everyone, though: a new "remote operation" feature that allows any player who's died in a multiplayer session to take control of a drone until their friends have finished the level. I love to feel like I'm helping, even when I'm not!

As the Steam forums' sourest pusses have pointed out, there's no launch discount for Alloyed Collective, but it's an easy add to my wishlist for a future Steam sale. I just hope my Risk of Rain 2 Goku mod gets updated to support the latest build.

(Image credit: Gearbox)

Borderlands 4 has a 'very stupid' glitch that lets you unlock a character's most powerful abilities before refunding all your skill points, but don't expect it to be around long as Gearbox says 'we're on it'

Rick Lane — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 14:08:47 +0000

Borderlands 4 players have already discovered some ridiculous glitches and exploits, like its overpowered crit knives that were subsequently nerfed, and a bugged interaction that caused "total existence failure" for endgame bosses. But the latest glitch discovered in Gearbox's looter shooter might just take the cake, allowing players to unlock a character's most powerful abilities and then refund nearly all of their skill points.

Discovered by a player who opted to remain anonymous, the glitch was brought to light by Borderlands 4 YouTuber JoltzDude139 (via GamesRadar). The creator described it as "the most insane glitch in Borderlands" on X, adding that it will "change the build meta for every build."

JoltzDude139 followed up on his initial post with a video detailing how the "very stupid" and "broken" glitch works. First, you need to input sufficient skill points into the tree to reach your ability of choice, with only one skill point remaining, while ensuring that all abilities you put points into remain two points below being maxed out.

Once you've unlocked the skill you want, you must go back to an earlier skill and press the button to "dump" all your remaining skill points into the ability, then click the "undo" button to reverse the process. Instead of reimbursing one skill point, the undo function should reimburse two.

"What we're doing here is tricking the game into thinking we dumped more than one [point]," JoltzDude139 explains. What's more, repeating this process of dumping and then reimbursing your skill points will return even more points from the skill. The glitch doesn't work if you max out a particular skill when dumping the points, however, so you need to spread regained points through the skill tree as you buy them back.

As JoltzDude139 notes, achieving this is a "tedious process", while you'll need to have acquired a decent number of skill points before the trick becomes useful. Nonetheless, the exploit means players can gain the best abilities across a particular character's multiple skill trees without having to max out all the prerequisite abilities in the tree—letting you create combinations not previously possible.

It's a wild exploit, and it doesn't look like it'll be around for long. Responding to JoltzDude193's thread, Borderlands 4's creative director Graeme Timmins simply said "We're on it"—suggesting an update will be coming to BL4 soon that will wipe the glitch out. Consequently, if you want to see what wild skill combinations you can create without any limits, you'd be wise to hop onto Borderlands 4 soon.

This meta-breaking glitch is far from the biggest technical issue Borderlands 4 has encountered. The game's Steam Rating currently sits at 'Mixed', largely but not entirely due to ongoing complaints about performance. Gearbox has tried to remedy the shooter's technical woes in subsequent patches. But the issue has resulted in "softer" than expected sales, according to publisher Take-Two Interactive's boss.

Borderlands 4 Shift codes: The new key connection.
Borderlands 4 Black Market location: New legendaries, no grind.
Borderlands 4 Harlowe builds: The amped-up Gravitar.
Borderlands 4 Rafa builds: The speed-demon Exo-Soldier.
Borderlands 4 Vex builds: The spooky Siren.
Borderlands 4 Amon builds: The fierce Forgeknight.

Magical Randy Pitchford summons the ghost of games discourse past, says games 'Haven't even had our Citizen Kane yet'

Joshua Wolens — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 12:14:22 +0000

Randy Pitchford, Gearbox CEO, chronic tweeter, and known warlock, has performed his greatest magic trick yet. The magician has resurrected the dead—summoning the spirit of the most tedious videogame discourse of 2010 in a new documentary from Shacknews called 24 'Til Launch: The Making Of Borderlands 4.

"I love that we're just getting started," says Pitchford, right as the documentary wraps up. "When I say we, I'm talking about the whole industry together." Then he says it. He says the dread phrase that I truly thought we'd heard the last unironic use of at least a full decade ago. "We haven't even had our Citizen Kane yet, let alone, you know, Jurassic Park or Star Wars."

It's disturbingly possible that some people reading this might be too young to remember the videogame discourse of the late 2000s, but it was a time when the industry as a whole—and especially a lot of game players themselves—were seized by a kind of paralysing inferiority complex.

Were games legitimate, like novels and films were? Were they art? What did we even mean by 'art'? Lots of people, it turns out, did not really know what they meant by art, outside of some vague conception of 'a thing people older than me can't look down on me for enjoying.'

Anyway, during this period, the notion of the 'Citizen Kane of gaming' was bandied about incessantly. What was the one game that proved, beyond a shadow of doubt, that games were truly art and that we were actually very cool and cultured for liking them? More often than not, this label was applied to BioShock, because it was about ideas, you see. Gotta be art if you're about ideas. QED.

(Image credit: Gearbox)

It all seems very quaint now. Elements of that discourse still rumble from time to time, but for the most part the demographics of people that play games have gotten old enough that we're a bit less desperate for approval from mum and dad.

Which is why it feels like Randy Pitchford has just arrived in the Shacknews documentary through a portal from 2007 when he suddenly says games "haven't even had our Citizen Kane yet," when he suggests that the medium has yet to be legitimised by a single breakthrough success.

I am even more confused by Pitchford's reference to Jurassic Park and Star Wars. The money and special effects tech sloshing around the games industry—which is what I associate those two franchises with—puts the movie industry to shame. What would it take, in Pitchford's mind, for a game to attain 'Star Wars' status? I guess literally being a Star Wars game isn't enough. There have been a few of those.

Anyway, Pitchford seems to be enjoying himself, at least. "We're just figuring this shit out," he grins. "But it's fun." To be fair, 2007 was a pretty fun year.

Turns out, that horny Borderlands 4 shield wasn't actually supposed to be so horny—or at least, not so horny so often: 'Voice lines now trigger at the intended frequency'

Harvey Randall — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 15:42:39 +0000

Among the many other wins and stumbles of the recent Borderlands 4 patch is a revelation that actually has me shocked. You know that one shield, the one that was super horny? Well, turns out it wasn't meant to be that way.

Alright, context: In Borderlands 4, The Cindershelly is one of those gag items that tends to make its way into every entrant. Given each game has 87 bazillion guns (give or take a bazillion), shields and mods to loot, Gearbox likes to sneak in a few dashes of joke sauce to its equipment soup.

The bit this time? The shield doms you. You take damage or do anything, and the Cindershelly will let you know that you're subhuman scum. Here are a couple of sample lines, courtesy of our poor put-upon guides writer, Rory Norris, who had some things to say about it last month:

"Touch that barrel and scream for me"
"Did you let go without asking first?"
"Don't stop till I allow it"
"Worship me"
"Show me how close you can get, worm"
"What an obedient worm you are"

As Rory explained, the shield was very chatty. Too chatty, in fact, as the problem "only gets worse in combat, where these voice lines trigger even more often, like if you take damage or kill enemies. In some cases, you could even get cursed with two horny outbursts back-to-back."

Welp, turns out that was a bug. As the patch notes explain, "Order Legendary Shield Cindershelly combat voice lines now trigger at the intended frequency, less often to be less distracting."

So there you have it; if the Cindershelly was making you uncomfortable, it'll… well, it'll still do that. Just less often, more selectively. After all, it's not the frequency of the shield voice lines whispering coquettishly in your ear, it's the motion of the ocean. Or so they say. Now I just need a submissive submachine gun to pair with it—you could call it the Quickshot. I'll give you that one for free, Gearbox.

New Borderlands 4 patch stumbles by making the nerfed crit knife an actual DPS loss on some builds, plus a Halloween event that's 'like getting a dead rat in a box for Christmas'

Harvey Randall — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 14:54:40 +0000

Borderlands 4 dropped a pretty hefty patch today, and before I tell you how Gearbox has screwed the pooch, I do want to be fair and at least highlight the positives while I roll my sleeves up:

Sort filters for your inventory now persist instead of auto-setting to "by manufacturer"; Your discovered locations persist when going from multiplayer to singleplayer; The combat radar now highlights legendary loot (well, it will. It's bugged right now); The "toggle junk" bug is fixed, and a bunch of performance tweaks and fixes have been applied. Including one where the "Ocean could occasionally fail to load." You can read the full list of changes in our Borderlands 4 weekly update.

These are all genuinely solid quality-of-life improvements, and I'm glad they're in the game; at least two of those made my laundry list of complaints in my Borderlands 4 review, and it's nice to see a game I otherwise really liked striking them out. Alas, we've also got to talk about the bad, because boy howdy is there some bad.

Firstly, Gearbox has kinda messed up the whole crit knife thing. In case you weren't aware, BL4 had a rather infamous knife that could insta-gib endgame bosses. Or, well, close enough not to matter—with certain builds, like Vex's bleed, you could trigger an infinitely stacking damage loop that would see them melt, like hucking a bucket of acid at a block of styrofoam.

As the patch notes read, Gearbox has "Reduced critical chance on Jakobs crit knife to 30%. Dev Note: It had to happen, you knew it was going to happen!" What players didn't know was that the knife would become an active DPS loss for some builds. Per Borderlands YouTuber Moxsy on X, who has done some testing, "The new crit knife sets your crit chance to a target at 30%, it DOES NOT ADD 30% Crit Chance."

So—let's say you have enough points in the relevant skills to ramp your crit chance up to, say, 70%. You throw a knife with the Penetrator Augment at someone. Your crit chance is now 30%. Your knife is sticking out of an enemy, and they are now somehow less vulnerable to your bullets. I guess because the handle of the knife is blocking them, or something?

In fairness to Gearbox, this is the most literal interpretation of the Penetrator Augment imaginable. It says your crit chance is 30% when you hit something with it, and that's exactly what it does. But it's also incredibly counter-intuitive—applying a debuff shouldn't reduce your damage. I've got no qualms with this thing if it doesn't stack, but that's just… silly.

Then there's the Halloween event, Horrors of Kairos. My fellow BL4 enjoyer and guides writer, Rory Norris, has plenty to say on this, but for now, let me sum up what the event does: You go to a specific world boss. A spooky orange filter floods your screen. You can get some so-so legendaries. That's it.

Given how comprehensive Halloween events have been in past titles, players aren't happy. So much so that the Borderlands 4 subreddit has had to quarantine complaints into their own megathread, which I've assembled some of here for your viewing pleasure:

"I would rather have had no event honestly, this is like getting a dead rat in a box for Christmas," writes one player. "BL3 gave us a new map, new boss, new music, new weapons that worked, new anoints, and a legit Halloween vibe. BL4 we get a red overlay on normal vanilla random boss fights if we can find them and two items that are garbage," adds another.

Even Moxsy's none too pleased: "Gonna be brutally honest this Halloween 'Event' is not it. Very underwhelmed. I know it's just a mini event but compared to what we had in BL3 it's a huge step down."

As a minor asterisk, also: Zed's machine doesn't reset your cooldowns anymore, which has been confirmed to be a bug, but it's another unfortunate wrinkle in a patch that should've been an easy slam-dunk for Gearbox and does, to the studio's credit, have some bright spots amidst the stumbles.

Borderlands 4 smashes sales in the US, says analyst—it was the top dog in September, the fastest-selling entry in the series, and is already the 3rd most-bought game this year

Harvey Randall — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 16:07:54 +0000

Borderlands 4 hasn't done terribly for itself—some terrible UI design choices and stuttery framerates weren't enough to stop it from landing a solid critical reception (including from yours truly in my Borderlands 4 review). That's been reflected in the sales it's gathered in the US.

Per analyst firm Circana (via Gamesindustry.biz), Borderlands 4 has Gearbox counting stacks for the foreseeable future: It was the number one US best-seller for the month of September (August 31 to October 3, to be specific). Not just that, but it's sold 30% more than Borderlands 3's debut, and stands as the fastest-selling game in the franchise's history.

Exactly how many stacks is a different ballgame. Borderlands 4, according to Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, had more than twice the budget of Borderlands 3 (assuming he wasn't just being hyperbolic, which is always possible). Whether or not these nippy sales are enough to categorise it as an unmitigated success for Pitchford are entirely dependent on what his studio's goals are.

Also raising eyebrows are the fact that Borderlands 4 went on sale earlier this month. Past the cutoff point for Circana's data, mind, but given Pitchford's past words warning players it'd take way longer for BL4 to get discounts, it's enough to cast some doubt. Not to mention, hey—these are just the US markets.

I wouldn't say Borderlands 4 is a game that's gonna drop off, though. Just anecdotally, I've seen plenty of prospective players saying they'll be waiting for later sales and DLCs before hopping in with their mates—and this is a series known for hefty DLCs. Heck, they added so many to Borderlands 3 that I unironically recommend playing through 'em, even if you weren't a fan of the main story. This is a series with a historically long tail, and Gearbox already has a roadmap cooked up.

Either way, that's none too shabby, and I think the folks at Gearbox do deserve a collective 87 bazillion pats on the back, especially given I've rather enjoyed my time romping around Kairos. Even if I agree with our fellow looter-shooter and guides writer Rory Norris that the thing's endgame could use a little work.

The Borderlands 4 update that's going to take away your infinite-bleed god-knife is delayed until next week

andy.chalk@pcgamer.com (Andy Chalk) — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 20:56:43 +0000

The Borderlands 4 update that will usher in a range of balance fixes and performance improvements is taking a little longer than expected, and so will not roll out this week as planned but will instead arrive "early next week."

"Quick update that our Day 30 Update, which includes balance adjustments, performance and stability improvements, and some new quality-of-life features, will be hitting early next week!" Gearbox said on Steam. "We took a few extra days to help ensure a great experience for you."

Patch delays are generally not a big deal, but this one is notable for its potential impact on the game. Borderlands 4 creative director Graeme Timmins provided an ominous-sounding "seven days notice" last week that this would be a "larger" patch, making changes "to specific gear and those unintended interactions." Foremost among those interactions is a throwing knife that, when combined with a particular passive, becomes what PC Gamer's Harvey Randall called an "infinite bleed god-knife" capable of killing the hell out of pretty much anything.

The knife was no secret: Timmins said in September that "we’ve seen the discourse about builds that use unintended interactions and/or the knife," but added that developers were going to focus on buffs rather than nerfs in initial patches. The patch notes in the October 9 update revealed that those no-nerf days were drawing to a close, however:

Looking forward to next week, we are planning another round of adjustments that will focus on Class Mods, Repkits, Shields, and Firmware being tuned to provide greater viability for melee builds, and account for deficiencies in other specific Vault Hunter builds. We will also address unintended interactions in certain Vault Hunter skills, and make adjustments to overperforming gear. Importantly, next week's update will include a host of improvements to stability, performance, and some highly requested quality-of-life changes!

This may be the rare case where a delay is welcome: The pushback means players can have one more weekend of fun with their insta-kill shivs before they're taken away forever. Enjoy it while you can.

Despite past posting, Randy Pitchford is actually 'happy to live in that world' where Borderlands 4 complaints aren't about 'how we f*cked up the story', after all

Harvey Randall — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 13:06:58 +0000

Borderlands 4 has had some time to brew in the public consciousness, and the general consensus—one I agree with—is that the story is just… fine. If anything, it's a little too middle-of-the-road, but given my key enjoyment of the game has a lot to do with the shooting and very little to do with the dialogue, I was happy to let inoffensive text warble in the background.

Given what we've had before in Borderlands 3, it was still a big improvement, and I even found myself charmed by one or two character moments. Not a terrible swerve from the outdated-on-launch memes, all told.

The folks at Gearbox are happy with the feedback, too—Sam Winkler, the game's narrative lead, comments at a dev panel in Pax Australia 2025 (thanks, GamesRadar+): "It's been great! It's been really good—I'll be honest, I'm really happy with it." And hey, you know what, Winkler isn't wrong to feel that way.

Even when I'm at my most critical of videogame stories, I try to appreciate that game development is an utter nightmare—with the constant changing of hands, direction, and narrative most studios endure, it's more of a miracle that we have any good stories in the first place.

Then Randy Pitchford hops in and I get a little more cynical: "Isn't it weird to ship a game where the biggest complaint isn't how we fucked up the story?"

Not to drag out Gearbox's history, but Aliens: Colonial Marines was a thing. Even recently, PCG contributor Rick Lane described it as "one of the most infamous misfires of gaming history". Filled with bugs and terrible AI, a disaster so big that Gearbox was part of a lawsuit over it which, to be fair, Gearbox was later dropped from.

I'm absolutely nitpicking here, and this foible was from over a decade ago, but I'm also not sure I'd say something like this were I the CEO in charge of one of the most infamous videogame flubs of the medium's history.

Pitchford continues: "We're wondering, like—what is going [on?] Everyone's like nah, story's awesome, character's awesome, we love it, gameplay's great. And we're like ok, we'll get technical. Cool, that's cool. I'm happy to live in that world … You and the team just crushed it on the storytelling, Sam."

This happiness is likely a new development, given Pitchford spent a considerable amount of time after BL4's launch… well, let me just drum up a few direct quotes from the guy:

"Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers. Just as Borderlands 4 cannot run on a PlayStation 4, it cannot be expected to run on too-old PC hardware."
"I know a lot of you are dead set on playing at 4K with ultra max settings and using two or three-year-old hardware"—I was actually playing on low and still getting major stutters, and even players with high-end PCs (including our own hardware writers) were struggling.
"Less than one percent of one percent (0.01%) of customers [are] using CS tickets for valid performance issues." In defense of said performance issues.

This is less about frames, but Pitchford also recently said that the inventory system—which I devote an entire segment of my Borderlands 4 review complaining about, because it's by far the game's worst flaw—is "a gratifying loop. It’s a gratifying decision. Our brains need to do it, and our brains like doing it. And we’re better off when we do it." Mm.

Mind, this was also in a very long ramble about "what separates our species from a lot of others, and how we developed language and how we developed all kinds of high levels of consciousness and cognition that allow us to analyse the"—I'm just going to stop here, it goes on like this for a while, and if you want to read the full thing you can read the article linked above.

Point being, I would not have described Pitchford's behaviour post-launch as being "happy to live in that world." Though to be fair, earlier in the panel, he does seem to've changed his tune on performance specifically:

"I come from a time where we cared about fidelity, and we cared about resolution, and I also came from a time where we kinda had to learn—I was a programmer, we're all programmers—but you know what? Not everybody is gonna tinker with all the settings, doesn't matter that we give all the settings.

"And if you buy a really high-end video card or if you have a system that performs, some people really want high framerate, and so performance is a priority for us and it's a priority for customers."

I mean, hey. At least he's found a way to get there. And I don't doubt for a second that Gearbox (the studio) has been working hard to get things sorted, even as Pitchford tweeted over them. I've already noticed improvements, and there's likely more to come.

Randy Pitchford says sifting through the loot in Borderlands 4 is tickling a fundamental part of you: 'Our brains need to do it, and our brains like doing it, and we’re better off when we do it'

Rich Stanton — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 15:46:37 +0000

Borderlands 4 is here, it's a hit, and… oh. On PC it continues to be plagued by performance issues, is currently sitting at "Mixed" reviews on Steam, and Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford still has access to his X account and is still giving out bad advice.

Pitchford can't help himself, but he comes across way better in an actual conversation than his social media persona might suggest. He recently did an interview with the BBC to discuss Borderlands 4, and Gearbox's history more generally, in which he basically humblebrags about what Borderlands gets right, during which I think he claims it basically encapsulates the human experience?

"[Gearbox's] mission is to entertain the world," said Pitchford. "Which means we suck! Because there are billions of people in the world. We got a lot of work to do. Borderlands, with 4, we’re gonna cross probably 100 million units sold, with Borderlands 4, of the franchise. That’s awesome compared to a lot of things. But it kinda sucks if your goal is to entertain the world. So I feel like we’re just getting started."

The world population is estimated at just over eight billion people. Just think about how many of us on Earth are yet to get angry at a Randy Pitchford tweet. But it's when Pitchford gets on to the whole design of looter-shooters, and why they appeal, that we firmly leave terra firma behind.

"That decision, that choice about 'do I keep what I have or do I try the new thing?' That is a very compelling, fundamental, both need and skill that our brains have, to make choices like that," said Pitchford. "We’ve reduced it down to this simple moment with this interface in this system. It’s a gratifying loop. It’s a gratifying decision. Our brains need to do it, and our brains like doing it. And we’re better off when we do it."

Looter-shooters are good for you! You heard it here first. But our man's just getting warmed up.

"The more we exercise that muscle, not just in the video game but literally in life—this is what separates our species from a lot of others, and how we developed language and how we developed all kinds of high levels of consciousness and cognition that allow us to analyse the world. Most of what our prefrontal cortex is for—why that adaptation exists and what it’s used for—is that skill, or versions of it. We’ve reduced it down into this design.

"And yes—is the thing I’m looking at better than the thing I’ve got, and managing the cognition between the objective, almost scientific analysis of that choice, versus the emotional impact on that choice, and having those at odds with each other frequently, is very interesting, and dare I say it addictive."

Pitchford seems to realise he's maybe gone a bit far here, and said something that might return to haunt him in other contexts. Time for a reverse-ferret! "We don’t do it because it’s addictive," clarifies Pitchford. "We do it because it’s stimulating and because we kind of need that. Part of why games exist are to… yeah. we can live a fantasy that we might not be able to have in the real world, and we can explore themes and ideas in a safe place that we can’t explore in the real world, but we also can, because it’s an interactive simulation, we can test our thinking and our decision making and put our brain to work in really interesting ways that we kind of need and want."

I should say that, while I think Pitchford may be getting a little high-falutin' about what exactly Borderlands is doing, there's no denying he's fundamentally right about the appeal of games generally. Gaming is an active pastime, something where your brain needs to be engaged constantly. The first thing you do in any new game is start testing what you can do, where the boundaries are, what if I do X near Y. They tickle the part of our brain that delights in play.

(Image credit: Leon Bennett/Getty Images)

Pitchford reckons that this is why Borderlands hasn't had much in the way of competition. There are loads of other shooters of course, and you could argue that something like Destiny 2 is a very successful example of another kind of looter-shooter, but given Borderlands' commercial success it's odd that Gearbox is on the fourth mainline entry and it doesn't really have a direct rival.

"If other game designers that were trying to get in on the action understood that, we’d have more competitors, or we’d have good competitors,” said Pitchford. "But we haven’t so far. It’s weird. The kinds of people that just want to go after it, they’re not thinking about it on that level. They’re just putting into motion something because of market analysis. It’s not a designer’s or creator’s drive that’s doing it. It’s either a business drive or a wishing to be something that you’re not kind of drive.

"It’s so weird. I fully expected after the first game came out that everyone would be hip to exactly what you mentioned, and we’d immediately see lots of other games imitating and aping, and we’d be dead, because we can’t compete with a lot of other folks, especially back then. We were the scrappy underdogs."

They're certainly not now. Pitchford ends with the vaguest of vague teases that basically amounts to yes, Borderlands will return.

"I’ve been working on Borderlands for over 20 years now. And it feels like we’re starting to get pretty good at it. It feels like we’re starting to figure it out. I feel like we’ve probed a lot of the end points. But I don’t think we’re anywhere near the end of a journey."

2025 games: This year's upcoming releases
Best PC games: Our all-time favorites
Free PC games: Freebie fest
Best FPS games: Finest gunplay
Best RPGs: Grand adventures
Best co-op games: Better together

Kick ass and chew brains in Duke Nukem: Horror Castle, a spooky mod where you blast skeletons and chow down on the gooey insides of their skulls

Rick Lane — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 13:00:00 +0000

If you're a die-hard Duke Nukem 3D fan feeling starved for Hallowe'en themed action, that's an oddly specific scenario in 2025. But I have something for you nonetheless. Duke Nukem: Horror Castle takes the bubblegum-starved FPS titan and plonks him into an all-new episode, swapping out the original's sci-fi shenanigans for a spookier theme.

Created by modder WilliamGee, Horror Castle is a sizeable affair. Its nine-level campaign sees Duke explore not one but several gothic fortresses, offering between 3-5 hours of additional FPS fun. It isn't just a level pack either. Horror Castle introduces 24 new enemies including wandering skeletons, vampire bats, and Nosferatu-like bloodsuckers, as well as four minibosses from D3D with the added bonus of being able to shrink them and stomp them to death.

Horror Castle also equips Duke with four additional weapons. Duke can toss enormous spiders to attack enemies, then blast them with skeletal shrapnel using the Bone Crusher, a weapon reminiscent of the Ravager from Doom: The Dark Ages. And rather than replenishing health using medkits, Duke can boost his vitality by cracking open discarded skulls and feasting on the soft and squishy sponge within. Yum.

Duke Nukem: Horror Castle originally released back in May, but WilliamGee recently released an updated version that garlands the mod with a more specific Hallowe'en theme. This includes several newly added Hallowe'en items, like a pumpkin and a ghost, plus a new secret level that features even more bespoke enemies.

You can download Duke Nukem: Horror Castle over on ModDB. While the chances of seeing a proper new Duke game anytime soon (or, for that matter, ever) are slim, the Duke modding scene has been livelier than usual lately. Only last week, the creator of Voxel Doom revealed he's making Voxel Duke Nukem 3D, with a release due soon. There's also a chance we might see a Duke Nukem TV series from the producer of the Devil May Cry and Castlevania Netflix shows, with Adi Shankar saying he acquired the rights from Gearbox earlier this year.

Borderlands 4 post-launch roadmap includes seasonal event, paid DLC, and its first raid boss

Jody Macgregor — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 20:09:59 +0000

Members of the Gearbox team came to PAX Australia so Randy Pitchford could do some magic tricks we'll gloss over, and to reveal more about the post-launch plans for Borderlands 4. First up is a Halloween-themed "seasonal mini-event" called Horrors of Kairos that will run from October 23 to November 6, adding "blood rain" to world bosses, new legendary loot, and a pumpkin-head cosmetic for everyone available via Shift code.

While that'll be a free addition, a paid add-on will follow with the first Bounty Pack: How Rush Saved Mercenary Day. Like the Headhunter Packs from Borderlands 2, the Bounty Packs will be small additions, with a chain of missions and a boss fight as well as a bunch of themed cosmetics and legendary gear. The story of this one has Rush, the buff lad who runs the Outlanders, trying to keep holiday traditions alive despite the Timekeeper's Minister of Culture, Screw, explicitly restricting seasonal jolliness and cheer. That'll be out on November 20.

In December, a free update will add a new difficulty level for Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode and an endgame challenge boss, harking back to Crawmerax the Invincible, the raid boss from the first game's Secret Armory of General Knoxx DLC. The new boss is called Bloomreaper the Invincible, and of course there will be a chance to earn bespoke legendary loot from killing whatever Bloomreaper turns out to be.

While that's it for this year, the first quarter of 2026 will bring a second Bounty Pack and the first Story Pack, a more narratively significant DLC called Mad Ellie and the Vault of the Damned, which will also bundle in the new Vault Hunter, a robot named C4SH. Beyond that expect two more Bounty Packs, one more Story Pack, additional raid bosses, "and more."

The bold and futile attempt to fix the disastrous Aliens: Colonial Marines

Rick Lane — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 16:00:00 +0000

Weird Weekend

Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.

Aliens: Colonial Marines is one of the most infamous misfires of gaming history, a disaster of a scale that's relatively rare in the upper echelons of game development. Virtually everyone who played it at the time acknowledged that it was a buggy, broken, unfinished mess, and there were rumblings that Gearbox outsourced large portions of the game's development while it focused on building Borderlands 2.

There's been little inclination to reappraise Colonial Marines since, and I'm not really interested in this either. The base game is simply too compromised to attempt some contrived reinterpretation of it as some misunderstood classic. That said, I have occasionally wondered whether Gearbox's ill-fated shooter is wholly beyond redemption, or whether it might find absolution in the collective confession box that is the PC's modding community.

(Image credit: Gearbox/Templar GFX Modding)

It certainly wouldn't be the first time this has happened. Numerous games forsaken by rushed developers or impatient publishers have found reprieve in the hands of enthusiast amateurs. The most notable example is Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines, with others including Knights of the Old Republic 2 and Gothic 3.

Like those games, Aliens: Colonial Marines has its own guardian angel—Templar GFX Modding—which spent years tinkering with Gearbox's neglected runt through TemplarGFX's Aliens: Colonial Marines Overhaul. The mod reworks numerous elements of Colonial Marines, with the goal of elevating it from an outright catastrophe into something at least tolerable.

Indeed, it's worth emphasising that TemplarGFX does not claim to completely transform Colonial Marines, and the modders are unambiguous in setting out expectations for the overhaul. "ACMO is not a miracle patch that turns the game into what was promised and teased back in the day," the creators write in ACMO's ModDB overview. "There are still many bugs and issues that remain that cannot be fixed with a hex editor."

(Image credit: Gearbox/Templar GFX Modding)

That said, Templar GFX states "there is a decent game to be found" under the pile of acid-burned rubble that is vanilla Colonial Marines, and that the resulting experience played with the mod installed is "much more enjoyable". Since making Colonial Marines enjoyable at all would be a heck of an achievement, it's worth delving in to see how the game fares with the overhaul installed.

Chiefly, the changes ACMO makes are mechanical, rather than visual or structural. While the mod does make some minor graphical tweaks, its primary adjustments are a complete rebalance of all difficulty levels, a weapon rework to make the game's arsenal more fun and tactically satisfying, and most crucially of all, an overhaul of ACM's terrible alien AI, which was the fatal blow to the vanilla game's aspirations above anything else.

In play, it takes a beat before any of these deeper changes reveal themselves. But there are a couple of noticeable improvements before any xenos appear on screen. For starters, the mod lowers the position of the player's weapon toward the bottom-right corner of the picture, freeing up considerable screen-space so that your vision isn't half obscured by your own gun. It also substantially increases the contrast between your flashlight and darkened areas, making it feel more like it's punching through the darkness and less like you've accidentally nudged a dimmer switch with your elbow.

(Image credit: Gearbox/Templar GFX Modding)

For the most part though, Colonial Marines' environments and general atmosphere remain unchanged, which is fine. Some dodgy character models aside, visually it holds up well enough for a game released at the tail end of the Xbox 360 era. Far more of an issue was Colonial Marines' pacing, which sadly (if inevitably) the overhaul does little to address.

Your character still moves through environments as if his squadmates are physically restraining him, while Colonial Marines still constantly interrupts its own flow for first-person cutscenes, static dialogue sequences, and your companions taking pissing ages to open every other door. Fixing this stuff would require a much deeper rework than the overhaul offers, but it's nonetheless a harsh reminder that Colonial Marines' problems are not just mechanical, but structural and the consequence of poor game design.

The overhaul doesn't really show its most significant changes until the xenomorphs appear and combat begins in earnest. As a straightforward shooter, ACM is definitely improved by the overhaul. Alongside the better-defined roles for weapons provided by the rebalancing, the mod also ups the visual responsiveness of combat. Improved acid splashes, blood spatter, and bullet effects all help make combat more visually exciting. One of the smartest touches is how broken armour chestplates and backplates visibly drop from your character's body, acting as both a dramatic visual flourish and a clear indicator of when you're exposed to health damage.

(Image credit: Gearbox/Templar GFX Modding)

In short, blasting xenos is way more satisfying than it used to be. Sadly, the AI rework is nowhere near as successful, but there are some clear improvements. The aliens seem more aggressive, are certainly more adept at climbing on walls and ceilings, and will attack you once in range more often than not. They're even capable of occasionally getting the drop on you. While fighting through Hadley's Hope in mission 4, I died numerous times due to aliens springing from the sides or dropping from the ceiling behind me.

The problem is these successful attacks still feel largely random, rather than the machinations of a coordinated hivemind. Xenos will run toward you on a wall and then abruptly turn back the way they came. They'll spring from wall to floor and back again in clumsy, overly-elaborate animations that make them ridiculously easy to shoot. They'll aimlessly crisscross the floor in front of you and climb over and under gantries. It's like fighting a group of cats that are constantly being distracted by a laser pointer.

Compounding the problem are those lingering AI glitches. Even if a xenomorph manages to wend its way toward you, there's every chance it'll stop dead in front of you and stand there as if waiting for a hug. They'll also converge on exactly the same positions, resulting in some wild glitches like overlapping xenos suddenly vanishing from existence.

(Image credit: Gearbox/Templar GFX Modding)

TemplarGFX openly admits that the AI "can still get stuck, and sometimes they still bug out and just stand". But I would say these issues occur far more often than "sometimes". While the combat is technically more challenging and provides superior audiovisual feedback, it still fundamentally lacks intent, and as such fighting the aliens rarely feels satisfying.

None of this, I should stress, can be laid at the feet of TemplarGFX. Fixing Aliens: Colonial Marines was always going to be a colossal task, and I respect the modders' attempts to polish Gearbox's steaming, corrosive turd. Nonetheless, I must respectfully disagree with the claim that there is a decent game hidden beneath Colonial Marines. ACMO may be better than the base game, but it is still deeply unpleasant to play, and truly redeeming Colonial Marines would require a level of effort better spent making something new.

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

Joshua Wolens — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 15:54:16 +0000

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.

(Image credit: Gearbox)

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.

After telling Borderlands 4 player to 'game that sht', Randy Pitchford finds out that you cannot, in fact, game that sht—says 'well, sh*t', confirms it's a bug and that it'll be fixed 'within the next two weeks'

Harvey Randall — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 10:48:35 +0000

Randy Pitchford is sometimes known for posting through it—most recently, trying to justify massive performance problems in Borderlands 4, a game I otherwise really like. He's since quietened down considerably, though he did hop in briefly to play CEO tech support, ran face-first into a bug and—to his credit—didn't try to tell anybody it's a premium game made for premium gamers or anything.

For context: In the Borderlands 4 post-game, there's a vendor called Maurice's Black Market, a vending machine that changes location every week and sells a number of legendaries that are rolled on a per-player basis. However, a recent patch introduced a bug that meant players in co-op games couldn't interact with the Maurice machines in their friends' worlds.

It's a so-so system—it can be disappointing to rush to your own personal Maurice box, only to find out that none of the rolls are useful—but Pitchford does make a solid argument that this system lets communities band together to share their rolls and pick a buddy to skim good legendary weapons off. But, like, in gamer vernacular.

"Bro", Pitchford writes, "Get in a group of people who post their rolls every week and jump into each other’s games to get the gear you want. Game that shit!" When X user Gothalion points out that they cannot, in fact, "Game that shit!" Pitchford replies "Well, shit".

And hey, if we're giving kudos where kudos are due, that's character development. No jabs at justification, no comparing Gearbox to the Beatles, just throwing one's hands up and going—well, crap, I didn't know that.

There's good news, though. A day later, after seemingly conferring with the devs at Gearbox, Pitchford confirmed that it was a "Confirmed known bug. Fixed and will be in an upcoming patch within the next two weeks" with nary a bro in sight.

I'm personally not too wrapped up in getting the perfect gun myself—well, I have been grinding a little—but I can see the arguments for and against the way the black market in Borderlands 4 works. It's kinda neat to have incentive to play co-op with your mates by checking in with their rolls, and it'll be good to see this bug fixed so you can actually, uh, do that again.

Borderlands 4: Everything you need to know.
Borderlands 4 Shift codes: The new key connection.
Borderlands 4 Black Market location: New legendaries, no grind.
Borderlands 4 characters: Meet your new Vault Hunters and find out who's strongest.
Borderlands 4 Harlowe builds: The amped-up Gravitar.
Borderlands 4 Rafa builds: The speed-demon Exo-Soldier.
Borderlands 4 Vex builds: The spooky Siren.
Borderlands 4 Amon builds: The fierce Forgeknight.

Borderlands 4's Thursday patch will buff the game's cast, but UI improvements are coming later

Harvey Randall — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 12:42:57 +0000

Borderlands 4's next patch, as described by a dev last week, will be focusing on buffs to the cast's Vault Hunters. This was reconfirmed on the game's X account, which says that "the Vault Hunter buffs in our Thursday update gonna have you like [pinching emoji, starry-eyed emoji, pinching emoji]". If you need a visual guide for what that pose looks like, they animated Vex doing it.

the Vault Hunter buffs in our Thursday update gonna have you like 🫰🤩🫰 pic.twitter.com/rRmuWYXrABSeptember 30, 2025

In quote-replies to the post, Creative Director Graeme Timmins explained that a suite of UI improvements and fixes, many of which I gnawed on during my Borderlands 4 review, have fixes either upcoming in subsequent patches or solidly in the pipeline.

First up, the 'mark as trash' bug, in which the game mistakenly marks items as trash that are a few rows above the thing you're clicking on, is "fixed in a future patch," Timmins says, but it "didn't make this week's update unfortunately."

Secondly, the backpack won't be auto-sorting your loot to "by manufacturer" for some baffling reason, though Timmins double-confirms that the fix will be "coming in a future patch."

Lastly, Timmins states that a UI bugbear I've been recently wrangling with in the endgame—where Firmware is more important—will be addressed. Firmware bonuses are like tier sets in MMORPGs. You can find them on gear, and they add bonuses to them based on how many Firmware of the same type you have.

You can also transfer Firmware from one piece of loot to another. Because of this, you're incentivised to hoard items with Firmware in your bank. However, when you're visiting your bank screen to inspect what Firmware you might want to put on your gear, there's a problem. Unlike in your inventory, inspecting the firmware and then hitting escape kicks you out of the bank screen entirely. No, I don't know why.

Timmins states that a fix for this UI buffoonery is "already on our list, the same thing happens in the Firmware Transfer machine, no ETA but we will address that in a future patch."

All in all, I'm happy to see most of my major complaints being addressed. Borderlands 4's confusingly-built UI is one of my only real problems with the game. Well, that and its performance woes, and while Gearbox is clearly trying to address both, the path to improvement isn't always straightforward.

Borderlands 4 dev clears up the difference between Skill Damage and Action Skill damage, and I feel like a combat log is in order so I didn't have to find this out on a Reddit thread

Harvey Randall — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 12:47:51 +0000

Borderlands 4 has a ton of possible builds to choose from—it's one of the strengths I highlighted in my Borderlands 4 review—but I do have one teensy-tiny complaint, and it's that I would like some of the tooltips to be a smidge more straightforward about what is what.

This feeling has returned full-force after seeing a developer kindly explaining the difference between Skill Damage and Action Skill damage on the game's subreddit (thanks, TheGamer), which probably isn't the place you should have to go for this sort of clarification.

Turns out, it's a rectangles/squares situation. Except this is Borderlands, so lead character designer Nicholas Thurston uses guns and shotguns as the metaphor: "Skill Damage and Action Skill Damage is like Gun Damage and Shotgun Damage. All Skills are skills, but only some are Action Skills. Same as all Guns are Guns, but only some are Shotguns." Simple, then.

Thurston then explains that Skill Damage impacts basically everything involving the word "Skill", including passive skills and traits and, you guessed it, Action Skills. However, Action Skill damage only boosts whatever's on the Action Skill itself.

Other modifiers, like Melee Damage and Minion Damage, can apply to an Action Skill if it also does those things. For example: "Amon's 'Onslaughter' does Melee Damage with his fist, this would get Skill Damage, Action Skill Damage, and Melee Damage … Forgedrones (as an example) only benefit from Skill Damage, as they come from Passive Skills, as well as Melee Damage."

In a separate comment, Thurston also explains that there's no real difference between "status chance" and "status application chance", and that all instances of the former should be the latter: "if something doesn't, that's a goof on our part that we'll need to investigate and correct."

And hey, props to Thurston for coming in and clearing some of this up, but it does beg the question whether or not the series needs a little more transparency on just how everything works.

Most ARPGs, a genre which Borderlands shares most of its DNA with, have combat logs that let you mouse over your damage and get a peek at the math going on underneath the hood, allowing you to test whether all those floating modifiers are actually being fed into the machine properly.

And while BL4 does have training dummies, not having any proper mouseovers for its various tooltips—or a way to check on your damage after the fact—does hamper the otherwise stellar buildcraft somewhat. I probably shouldn't be having to do napkin math to figure out why a non-legendary gun is causing Total Existence Failure.

There's a sidequest in Borderlands 4 based on a meme making fun of Soulsborne games and it's great

Jody Macgregor — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 03:25:23 +0000

Borderlands 4 is in a tough place when it comes to tone. The over-reliance on literal toilet humor in Borderlands 3 was so universally disliked that a follow-up was always going to pare it back a bit. Which Borderlands 3 does, though sometimes too much. The villains in particular end up feeling like personality-free zones, some of them not even having enough going on to fill the empty space on their introductory title cards. They're just names and hit points.

The sidequests squeeze in some of the personality the main questline leaves out, and even (whisper it) reference the occasional meme. My favorite so far is Forgive Me, a quest based on a viral joke about the storytelling in Soulsborne games—a joke tweeted by Borderlands 4 head writer Sam Winkler back in 2022.

(Image credit: Sam Winkler)

Because the internet is the way it is, Winkler ended up having to explain in the replies that he actually likes FromSoftware games, saying, "I am begging anyone who thinks I'm dunking on fromsoft to learn how to make fun of the things you love". And if you needed further evidence, the Forgive Me quest in Borderlands 4 is an extended gag about Soulsborne storytelling that clearly comes from a place of deep knowledge and appreciation.

Forgive Me isn't marked on your map. It begins in a cave in the Cuspid Climb area of the Terminus Ranges, with a waterfall pouring out of a giant skull at the entrance. Near a sword embedded in a fire a badass psycho attacks you, dropping a Desecrated Bolt as he dies. When you pick it up you hear the words "Zanzibart… forgive me" and begin an unmarked quest that instructs you to "Find Zanzibart's resting place", though it doesn't add a marker for it.

You'll need to find another cave in the Terminus Ranges, this one in Stoneblood Forest to the north and accessible by grappling point. There you'll face the Cursed Myrmidon of the Cruel Dawn in combat and be left wondering if you can possibly have a crumb of context.

(Image credit: Gearbox)

At which point Vycarias, the Lore-Singer, a character who is a cross between a fantasy sage and a YouTuber who reads out flavor text will emerge from out of nowhere to monologue at you for nine minutes straight about the Shatterglass Plain, the Nevergreen, the Red Requiem, and a bunch of other proper nouns you've never heard before. It's like reading a dense wiki entry for a game you haven't played, and I applaud the voice actor who plays Vycarias for nailing the tone. It's the kind of commitment to the bit that I enjoy about Borderlands, and I hope I keep finding it in Borderlands 4's sidequests and inevitable DLC.

The first DLC vault hunter in Borderlands 4 will be a robot cowboy gambler named C4SH who throws playing cards

Jody Macgregor — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 03:44:19 +0000

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford took to the stage at this year's Tokyo Game Show to reveal a new Vault Hunter for Borderlands 4, who will be coming out as paid DLC in early 2026. Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel both added additional Vault Hunters as DLC, but Borderlands 3 didn't add any, so announcing a DLC character this early suggests Gearbox is confident in Borderlands 4 having some longevity. Or at least, more than the third one did.

The new character is a robot who used to work as a dealer at a casino. Disillusioned by the horror of working in a customer-facing service position, C4SH becomes a Vault Hunter with powers based on random chance. Which sounds a bit like Claptrap in the Pre-Sequel, whose action skill could load in a different ability each time you used it.

C4SH also has an ability that involves throwing playing cards, maybe like Gambit from the X-Men? On the Tokyo Game Show stage Pitchford explained that his own close-up magic skills were used as reference for this, with videos of him palming and throwing cards used by the animators. I could maybe have done with more info about how C4SH plays and less demonstration of Pitchford's magic skills, but I guess it wouldn't be a Gearbox presentation without them.

The DLC containing C4SH will also contain some "new story content", maybe to explain how those mind-control bolts in Borderlands 4 work on a robot. He's part of the Borderlands 4 Vault Hunter Pack, which is included in the Super Deluxe Edition.

Borderlands 4's latest patch triggers a flurry of performance complaints, but Gearbox says new stuttering problems 'should resolve over time as the shaders continue to compile'

andy.chalk@pcgamer.com (Andy Chalk) — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 19:25:37 +0000

A new Borderlands 4 patch has gone live with an array of fixes, gameplay tweaks, and the big one, promises of improved performance and stability—sorely needed for a game that, despite its popularity, holds a "mixed" rating on Steam, largely because of sub-par performance. (For the record, our reviewer liked it quite a bit.) The update has sparked a new round of performance complaints, though, as quite a few players are reporting that instead of being improved, their in-game performance is worse than ever.

One of the less-great things about PC gaming is that the nigh-infinite number of potential hardware configurations means that somebody, somewhere, is always going to have problems with a new game launch or update. In this case, though, the problems seem fairly widespread, with reports of diminished frame rates and increased stuttering coming in on Steam, Reddit, and X alike.

Some users do say they've seen an improvement in frame rates, or at least that things are more or less the same. But, at least at this point, they seem easily outnumbered by players who say they've encountered the opposite effect. A few players have said clearing the shader cache might help clear up the problems, but it's not clear whether that's related to this new patch or just a catch-up to a known issue we talked about last week.

Gearbox acknowledged the complaints a couple hours after the patch went live but indicated that there might not actually be any problems. "Stuttering issues should resolve over time as the shaders continue to compile in the background while playing," the studio wrote on X. Compiling shaders is, you'll recall, the bane of gamers everywhere. "If you're still experiencing issues after 15 minutes of continuous play, you can also clear your shader cache via your video card manufacturer's approved method."

(Image credit: Gearbox Software (Twitter))

Fingers crossed, then, but we'll keep you posted if the problems turn out to be more serious than that. For now, you can check out the full patch notes below.

Change List:

Weekly Activities:

Weekly Big Encore Boss has switched to a tougher variant of a different existing boss with an even more rewarding loot pool for those that take it on.
The Weekly Wildcard Mission has changed. These Missions feature a guaranteed Legendary drop that you can repeatedly earn to get your ideal roll.
Maurice’s Black Market Vending Machine has moved to another location and changed its offerings. Remember, while the location is the same, your vending machine items are different from other players, so ask around to see if someone has the item you’re looking for!

Stability & Performance

Improvements to stability and performance.
- Addressed various instances of hitching, low FPS, and crashes.
- We are continuing to investigate and will make further improvements to stability and performance.
Updated character animations for performance improvements.
Graphics Preset could be set to High or Very High when using Run Auto-Detect in Visual Menu.
Addressed rare issues of infinite loading screens during crossplay.
Improved loading of characters in menus to reduce visible delays when entering character select.

Rewards & Progression

Addressed a reported issue where players could lose or be rewarded unintended extra Skill Points in multiplayer.
Addressed an issue that could prevent Contract target enemies from consistently spawning.
Updated Repkit lifesteal challenge to track lifesteal from any source.
Prevented region discovery achievements from unlocking before discovering all areas.
Prevented instances of unowned DLC content appearing in chests or in menus.
Improved clarity of DLC-related warnings and reward availability.
Addressed a reported issue where the Reward Center could stop working after claiming the Gilded Glory Pack rewards.
Rewards Center popup now correctly excludes already-claimed cosmetics.
Reduced sell prices on Gilded Glory Pack gear in Vending Machines.
Updated the Break Free Pack reward bundle to redeem properly in all instances.
Challenge timing has been updated so players can properly progress from Ultimate Vault Hunter (UVH) 4 to UVH 5 after completing the required Wildcard Mission.
- When ranking up in multiplayer, players that are not the host will not see the change to their UVH level, but will be able to switch to the higher level. This will be addressed in an upcoming update.
Updated Class Mods to prevent them from dropping with incorrect skill points.
Removed the ECHO log "Maurice's Log" as a requirement for the challenge ”Kairos Speaks“.
- Note: For those not seeing the reward after this change, we will be addressing that in a future patch.

Vault Hunter Changes

Harlowe the Gravitar

Gravitar Ground State Capstone has been corrected to remove inaccurate verbiage about enemies taking reduced damage when they do not.
Gravitar Flux Generator no longer heals enemies with Potential Transference Capstone.
Updated Gravitar Accretion passive to consistently grant Lifesteal to allies.
Addressed various reported issues with Gravitar Unstable Energy Pocket created from CHROMA Accelerator Action Skill.
- Includes instances where it would not disappear properly, convert to Cryo Damage, or split as intended with certain skill tree combinations. Skills that saw updates: Special Purpose Magnets Augment, The Shattering Light Capstone, QED passive, Break the Ice passive, Containment Breach Augment, and Eureka! Passive.

Amon the Forgeknight

Forgeknight Primal Surge passive now properly restores Shield and Ammo.
Forgeknight Firewall Action Skill has been adjusted so Vengeance cannot be stored by Firewall before Scourge is active, as intended.
Forgeknight Onslaughter Rocket Punch now connects more reliably with shielded enemies.
Addressed a reported issue with Forgeknight Forgeaxe not consistently seeking nearby enemies.

Vex the Siren

Addressed a reported issue with Siren Grave Harvest Augment being triggered while Incarnate is not active.
Addressed a reported issue where Siren Blight Attunement passive could occasionally fail to damage the Timekeeper.
Damage caused by Siren Spirit Bomb passive now counts properly as Companion Damage and changes its color to match attuned element.

Rafa the Exo-Soldier

Addressed a reported issue preventing Exo-Soldier Blowout passive from stacking properly when repeating Action Skills.

Gameplay

Addressed a reported issue in the “Overwriting a Wrong” Side Mission where nodes would not spawn consistently.
Addressed a reported issue in the “Talk to Zadra” Mission where the objective could fail if players exited and relaunched mid-dialogue.
Updated beam hit detection, as it was causing beams to not be blocked properly. Eg: Forgeknight Forgeshield.
Repkits now consistently consume the correct amount of charges after activating Forgeknight Scourge action skill.
Prevented Forgeknight from sliding at the end of Molten Slam.
Addressed various reported instances of enemies getting stuck.
- Impacted Missions: during “Kill Order Forces” in the Fadefields, “His Vile Sanctum” Mission, and “A Lot to Process” Mission.
Addressed reported desync issues observed with Lightweight Armature enemy movement in multiplayer.
Updated Zadra’s Lab Fast Travel unlock to after discovery.

Gear

Vladof Atling Gun Heavy Weapon Ordnance now properly targets Primordial Guardian Inceptus.
Queen’s Rest Pistols with Daedalus Ammoswitcher licensed underbarrel now shoot the correct projectiles.
Gear with the Short Circuit Augment now traces properly toward enemies instead of random directions.
Addressed reported edge cases where interrupting reload could cause ammo desyncs that would prevent ammo from firing.
Hellwalker: now always spawns with Fire element.
Tediore weapons: +10% Damage and +10% magazine size.
Order Pistol Lucky Clover (Rocket Reload): increased fire rate.
Order Sniper Rifle Fisheye: increased Damage.

UI & UX

Updated gear thumbnails in cases where they did not display properly, and ensured stand-in thumbnails load properly.
Updated various UI visuals for alignment, consistency, and clarity.
Adjusted inventory dropdown menus to prevent unintended selected changes.
Added D-pad navigation support to the Reward Center and improved handling of the Inventory Overflow message.
Prevented Matchmaking Menu hint bar from displaying incorrect prompts when joining another player’s game.
Addressed compass occasionally displaying incorrect location name after teleporting.
Updated localization and various text descriptions across the game.
Added various improvements to compass, custom waypoint placement, and ECHO location.

Visuals

Addressed carryable objects disappearing or appearing in the wrong location after being picked up; includes cases in Ready to Blow, Lost Capsules, and Hangover Helper Missions.
Improved triggering of Armor Segment breaks VFX when Shield Capacity effects expire.
Updated NPC and enemy pathing.
Addressed VFX concerns with various weapons, vehicles, and elemental states.
Various animation updates.
Various visual updates and improvements.
Adjusted rift portal effect to corrected visuals.
Updated ECHO-4 to have correct positioning when viewing various menus, and to prevent clipping.
Ambient critters have a more natural spawn behavior.

Audio

DJs in Carcadia Burn and Fadefields now play their VO when starting or completing Contracts.
Adjusted radio music mix for improved audibility.
Added missing audio for multiple weapon types, customization, and menu navigation.
Reduced instances of voiceover cutting out during Missions.
Updated startup movies to have correct audio.

Misc

Addressed reported instances of incorrect or deleted characters appearing in Menu or Lobbies.
Enabled Tab key in SHiFT UI.
Added haptic feedback for controllers to Exo-Soldier Unmissable Missiles Augment.
Updated Credits listing.

NOTE: We've received reports that some players are experiencing reduced stability after downloading this update.

SOLUTION: Stuttering issues should resolve over time as the shaders continue to compile in the background while playing. If you're still experiencing issues after 15 minutes of continuous play, you can also clear your shader cache via your video card manufacturer's approved method.

Mod maker brings Skibidi Toilet to Borderlands 4 for one simple reason: To spite the narrative director who said he'd 'cry real tears' if the game shipped with it

andy.chalk@pcgamer.com (Andy Chalk) — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 23:22:48 +0000

One of the best things about PC gaming is mods. They let people do things with their games that developers, for whatever reason, couldn't, didn't, and/or really wish you wouldn't. Sometimes they're practical things, like the recently-released Dying Light: the Beast mod that reduces annoying zombie grabs—and sometimes, well, they're not.

A good example of a mod that was not created to solve a practical problem is Epic's Skibidi Toilet, which creator EpicNNG said was made specifically "to spite Samuel Winkleclank." That would be Borderlands 4 narrative director Sam Winkler, who apparently brought this upon himself by saying Borderlands 4 would cut back on the "toilet humor" of Borderlands 3.

"If the word 'skibidi' ships in the game under my watch I'm gonna cry real tears," Winkler proclaimed fatefully.

Careful what you wish for, or vocally wish not to happen as the case may be, because yes, it is real.

Holy shit, skibidi toilet in Borderlands 4 pic.twitter.com/DB7qeYMs27September 23, 2025

Winkler, to his credit, seems to be taking it well.

(Image credit: Sam Winkler (Twitter))

His torment isn't likely over, though. In the same post in which Winkler said he wouldn't allow Skibidi Toilet in Borderlands 4, he also wrote, "Paul Tassi joked that we were gonna have a gun called Hawk 2A and a fellow dev asked me if it was real and I wanted to put my hand down the sink grinder."

Well:

(Image credit: EpicNNG (Twitter))

For the record, it's not all disturbing toilets and sex puns: EpicNNG also creates mods that solves practical problems, including one that will remove or reduce VFX in Borderlands 4 to improve accessibility.

Borderlands 4 player finds bugged interaction that can cause 'Total Existence Failure' damage to endgame bosses without a proper build—and no legendary items or crit knives to be seen

Harvey Randall — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 14:36:49 +0000

Borderlands 4's fresh out the gun factory—which means busted interactions abound. Like, for example, the dreaded Crit Knife, which has been the terror of endgame bosses the world over. And while Gearbox isn't planning on nerfing these right now, it uh, might want to take just a tinsey winsey look at this one.

As discovered by YouTuber NickTew (thanks, IGN), it turns out you can obliterate most bosses in BL4 with a measly 25 out of the 49 skill points specced into gun damage. And even then, that's not strictly necessary.

In the video above, they demonstrate this by rocking up with a character on Ultimate Vault Hunter 5 difficulty and clapping Primordial Guardian Inceptus until its health bar reads a big fat "Oof!"

"My damage was so high that I, for the first time ever, saw the damage proc 'Total Existence Failure'," NickTew explains. "But in that clip I was kind of min-maxing my damage." Ergo, using the crit knife "that everybody hates."

However, "you basically don't need anything for this to work other than a gun" and a bit of bonus gun damage. Playing Vex, NickTew explains that he only has around 25 of the 49 skill points the game gives you for some spare gun damage.

The reason this works is because of a bugged interaction on weapons with the "Torgue - Licensed Sticky Magazine" attachment and the taser alt fire. Ordinarily, these weapons pump enemies full of a bunch of sticky rounds that explode when you reload or switch modes.

However, for some bizarre reason, if you switch to your underbarrel taser and shoot it, the explosion damage for each shot goes from a piddly average of around 5,000-10,000 damage to a whopping 300,000 average per explosion.

This scales with mag size (more bullets before reload means more explosions)—and you do need a big enough mag to give you the precious seconds to swap over and then fire the taser, given the stickies start exploding when you start switching. In other words, you need to have enough stickies leftover by the time you fire the taser to get the bang for your buck.

Best guess I have is that the explosives start using the taser's damage modifier instead of the SMG's base damage the moment NickTew swaps over. Out of curiosity, I did some quick napkin math, and it lines up:

The sticky explosions do around 5,000-9,777 damage, or just roughly under/over 100% of the gun's base bullet damage of 944. There's some variation/RNG involved due to skills or talents, but it's roughly in line with the gun's base hurt-per-bullet.
With the taser fired, the sticky explosions do something in the ballpark of 300,000 damage a pop. The taser on his gun deals 2,575 damage a second, which would only be 25,570 with a 100% modifier.
But given the taser runs for a long time (I counted 10 seconds on NickTew's screen), that's more like 25,750 base damage over the taser's entire duration...
... Which would shake out to 250,750 with that modifier applied. Add in the Sticky magazine's escalating damage and other skills, and you get within that 300,000+ damage ballpark.

That's a bunch of assumptions made, but the numbers are within close enough striking distance of each other that I'm pretty confident the explosives are adopting the taser's base damage (over the entire 10-second duration) the moment it's fired—regardless of whether it hits the target or not. NickTew also fires it into the air, and it does the same thing.

Anyway, I figure this might be one of the interactions Gearbox does patch out. There's a difference between a cool, busted build and an entire gun obliterating endgame bosses with a mere pittance of skill points: Still, I think Mr. Torgue himself would approve. I can only imagine how overkill this would be using an infinite ammo Peacebreaker Rafa build, which already obliterates health bars with Torgue stickies.

Borderlands 4 is focusing on buffs, not nerfs—opting to 'start with underperforming gear/skills first' rather than its infinite-bleed god-knife

Harvey Randall — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 10:26:55 +0000

Borderlands 4 is an FPS, sure, but first and foremost it's an ARPG—with all the intersecting build shenanigans you'd come to expect. Players have already started uncovering a few of these—for instance, if you get the right knife, you can basically instagib anything.

See, throwing knives can have the "Penetrator Augment" rolled on them, which causes all damage to be critical damage for a few seconds. Vex, in particular, can combine this with her Contamination skill, with critical hits causing 100% status chance, stacked on top of her crits already being able to cause bleeds. You bleed someone, the bleed is now critically hitting, causing more bleeds, which themselves cause more bleeds, which then—you get the idea.

With such an overpowered build on the table, you might think Gearbox would be winding up to take a swing for the kneecaps with the nerf bat, but you'd be wrong. Per creative director Graeme Timmins on X, the studio will be going buffs first, nerfs later:

"We've seen the discourse about builds that use unintended interactions and/or the knife," Timmins writes. "We're not going to act on those immediately, instead, we're looking at our first round of buffs. Those will get addressed but we're going to start with underperforming gear/skills first."

Honestly, that's all sensible to me. Busted builds like this might be more of an issue in a sweaty live-service game with season passes—but the juice in most Borderlands games is just in pure buildcraft. You come up with an idea, you grind the gear for it, and you sit back, satisfied as you turn bandits to paste.

Not to say "the knife" (as Timmins ominously dubs it) shouldn't be nerfed at all; There's a difference between something that's merely strong and something that's so much more powerful than all the other options it kinda makes the game boring.

But the real holes to patch are indeed the underperformers. Variety is vital to a game like this—and there's nothing more disappointing than chasing down a cool interaction only to discover it basically doesn't work. I don't need a knife, anyway—I'm content with the Rainbow-melt Rafa build I've devised.

I am so terribly glad I've learned you can easily reset all your cooldowns in Borderlands 4 before starting my shotgun grind

Harvey Randall — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 13:18:45 +0000

I am now initiating myself into the hallowed halls of 'people who farm in Borderlands 4'—I've never quite taken to the series' post-games prior, but something about the way this game handles its open world has me hankering to see just how effective I can make my Rainbow Vomit Shotgun Rafa.

And let me tell you, I am so, so terribly glad to have found out that you can reset all of your cooldowns easily before I did—see, if you're targeting a specific weapon, you might be making use of Moxxi's Encores to merk the same boss over and over again until you're drowning in a sea of purps (and, naturally, not the goddamn weapon/shield you came there for).

Once you get a rhythm going, this loot loop can get pretty efficient, all but for one thing: Your cooldowns don't reset, and depending on your build, that might slow down your progress significantly.

Even my current build, which makes use of a Repkit with cooldown reduction to keep my Peacebreaker Cannons (now horrifying elemental lasers) bumped up into this. When you're grinding hard, those few seconds add up to minutes—and I'm a busy person.

Zed's got your back, though. All due credit to user Zohirflame on the game's subreddit for bringing this to my attention: Visiting Dr. Zed's machine resets all of your cooldowns. Your ordances, your repkit, your action skill—you name it, Zed resets it.

Surely not, I said to myself, I've been playing this goddamn thing for over 50 hours for our very own Borderlands 4 review. I couldn't have missed that.

I did. I did miss that. I will be stopping by Zed's from now on. I may not be the most observant person on Kairos—but at least now I know, and you do, too. Happy farming!

Borderlands 4 performance patch out now with PC 'our top priority'

Rich Stanton — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 17:10:24 +0000

Gearbox has announced a Borderlands 4 patch out now that takes particular aim at the game's rather chaotic PC performance issues. This follows a weekend patch that didn't seem to do anything to improve things, players jury-rigging various solutions to stop the stuttering, and Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford wading into any and all arguments he can find.

Borderlands 4 is currently sitting at a "Mixed" rating on Steam, and a quick glance shows that nearly every negative review is about performance issues (with some adding "don't blame the consumer" for Pitchford's benefit). PCG's Nick Evanson notes that "every major Borderlands game has run like a bag of frogs juggling bowling balls on release" and this time is no exception.

"We're reading every piece of feedback you share," says the Gearbox statement, which makes you feel a little bad for the poor staffer charged with that duty. "We know some PC players are running into bugs and crashes. We hear you. Updates to improve stability and performance already started rolling out over the weekend and another is coming [today]. This is our top priority."

It adds that a FOV slider option is coming for consoles, and references the Break Free pack of goodies released for all players. The patch notes read:

Stability

Addressed crashes tied to animation states, audio, and collision checks
Addressed various GPU-related crashes

Gameplay & Progression

Resolved an issue where the Reward Center could stop working after claiming the Gilded Glory Pack rewards
Addressed a progression blocker in the mission “Talk to Zadra,” where the objective could fail if players exited and relaunched mid-dialogue
Corrected “Doesn’t own DLC” warnings incorrectly showing up on non-DLC gear

Loot & Items

Updated loot pools so Gilded Glory Pack guns no longer appear in standard chests

(Image credit: Gearbox)

One more note for PC players: "Any time you change any of your graphics settings, your shaders will need to recompile. Please keep playing for at least 15 minutes to see how your PC's performance has changed."

The patch has just gone live, and we'll be testing it out at PCG towers. Probably the most unhelpful thing for Gearbox right now is its own boss. Randy Pitchford is one of those chronically online types, and swiftly moved from challenging players to break the servers onto saying Borderlands 4 is "a premium game for premium gamers" and suggesting problems were probably down to low spec hardware. He wasn't done there though, and blithely insisted the internet was overblowing things as the user reviews tanked.

Borderlands 4 review

Harvey Randall — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:00:43 +0000

Borderlands 4 might just be the best game in the whole 16-year-old series, trapped in a prison of terrible choices—choices that didn't stop me from losing 47 hours of my life to a blissfully loot-driven blur. Which leads me to two conclusions: Either my brain is truly broken, or the core loop in BL4's clunky heart is seriously that strong.

Need to know

What is it?: The latest looter-shooter by Gearbox Software, where you run, gun, and grind your way across the prison planet Kairos.
Expect to pay: $69.99 / £59.99
Developer: Gearbox
Publisher: 2k Games
Reviewed on: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, AMD Ryzen 7 5800 8-Core Processor, 16GB RAM, Force MP600 SSD.
Multiplayer?: Up to 4-player co-op.
Link: Official site

This is not a series that innovates, and I don't think Gearbox has reinvented the wheel here, either. What the studio has done is make the perfect wheel, then presumably gone "crap, we spent all our budget on wheel" and put it on a clunky used car with steering that keeps locking up.

I make this assumption because the game's most glaring issues are such blunders that I simply cannot fathom how they happened—they are legitimately baffling. And yet, I've never felt so utterly absorbed by a game I have so many nitpicks with. Nitpicks that are solvable, but still routinely jab you in the side when you're trying to enjoy the feast set before you. But before I air my 87 bazillion grievances, let's get onto the good.

Got my tempo

The ARPG loop at the core of Borderlands 4 has cast a spell on me—it's downright trancelike. The game's new open-world structure marries so well with the shoot, loot, repeat treadmill that I'm shocked it's taken Gearbox so long to do it. It's an objective improvement in almost every way.

(Image credit: Gearbox Software, 2k Games)

I wasn't sure about it at first, mind—opening the big map of Kairos immediately struck me with Ubisoft fatigue. No-one likes looking at a to-do list, and Borderlands 4 has one of gaming's longest: You've got your safehouses, you've got your mini-dungeons, two different kinds of journal entries, fancy loot boxes that you know are special because they have a map pin dedicated to them, world bosses, scavenger hunts, you name it.

But the more I played, the more I realised that Gearbox has been spending five whole games kinda wasting its time. The more traditional ARPG levels of the series' past—rooms and corridors with the occasional open ground to drive a terribly-handling vehicle over—were shackles weighing the whole thing down.

As it turns out, the soft, comforting haze of "shooting psychos and watching them explode into numbers" also shares a lot in common with the infamous Ubisoft formula of "run around and get little gubbins for untold hours".

I spent my early game with Borderlands 4 getting completely sidelined. I'd keep telling myself I'd do the main storyline. 'I'll just do this one objective,' I'd say, veering off the straight and narrow. Then three hours later I'd wake up, three sidequests, six objectives, and two levels deep into distraction.

It's one of the strongest dopamine treadmills I've experienced. The pure, distilled essence of "number go up".

Keeping tempo under all of that is what makes games like Diablo and Path of Exile so gripping. You turn hordes of enemies into paste, pick up an armory of loot, head back to base to sell most of it, rinse, and repeat until your eyes are bleary and you realise you haven't drunk water in five hours.

These two halves are a perfect marriage. I'm a little tired of loot-driven action RPGs, and I'm a little tired of vast open worlds with hundreds of objectives, but if you put them together? It's one of the strongest dopamine treadmills I've experienced. The pure, distilled essence of "number go up".

This is helped by the fact the story mostly gets out of the way of the shooting. I won't dwell on it because there's not much to dwell on—it's incredibly serviceable with a couple of bright moments and fun character work, and the new cutscenes (while a mandatory 30 FPS, I cannot tell you why) are nicely-animated and help breathe life into its cast.

If anything, it takes itself a bit too seriously sometimes, but that's vastly preferable to outdated memes and mandatory melodramatic speeches, and the parts that are overdramatic are at least competently put-together, if trying a smidge too hard. The post-Borderlands 3 course correction has, in fact, fixed its heading. Pats on the back for everyone.

As for the rest of the game's design, it's either incredibly solid, or a complete and utter shambling mess.

Ain't no frames for the wicked

Borderlands 4 isn't a game that runs well, no matter what Randy Pitchford says. My first hours of the game were marred with constant stuttering and slow-downs—at one point, the game struggled so much to stream in its textures it ground to a literal halt.

(Image credit: Gearbox Software, 2k Games)

Some of this has been alleviated—Gearbox released a patch on the game's first weekend that helped considerably, and setting my Nvidia card's shader cache to 100GB (on the advice of our hardware writer Andy Edser) nixed the problem entirely. Even then, I cannot say the game ran smoothly.

Granted, I am below the recommended specs: I have an RTX 3060, not a 3080. I have 16 gigs of RAM, not 32—but I believe our hardware team, other players, and most of the people begging Pitchford to please stop posting through it when they say that the game runs like garbage on a range of machines from low to high.

As for bugs, I encountered a couple. One issue appeared with the game's level scaling—sometimes, it'll just hurl over levelled enemies at you, as it did for me in its final act, randomly pitting me against level 42 foes when I was a measly level 38. I managed to overcome this by simply pushing ahead, and when I got to the next instanced area, everything was scaled to my actual level again.

But my real problems aren't to do with the frames or scaling issues—I can deal with choppy waters if the boat's nice—they're to do with the UI, which is so poorly-conceived it has to be some kind of practical joke.

BL4's backpack screen, for instance, is basically useless. Take deep breath with me, now:

Equipped items aren't listed first, and are marked by a tiny tick that's easy to miss. You have to press a separate button to compare your loot. Everything's organised in an unassailable grid, and there's a ton of robust filters some developers clearly worked very hard on—none of which matter, because for some madcap reason it auto-sets your sorting to "by manufacturer", perhaps the least important filter.

(Image credit: Gearbox Software, 2k Games)

You can send things to your bank directly, which is nice, but that requires right-clicking, marking as 'bank', and then holding down a button press, instead of just having a 'send to bank' button when you right-click. Oh, and also sometimes when you mark something as trash, the game panics and marks an item two to three rows above the thing you're clicking on.

But it doesn't stop there, no no no. The widget for class mods is functionally useless—see, class mods give you free points in a handful of skills, but the UI only shows their icons. Inspect the class mod, and you only get their names. You need to equip the class mod, then go over to the skill tree, and then hunt to see which skills they impact. Why?

Gearbox Software, 2k Games

The Lost Loot machine, which sends you guns you didn't pick up, also sucks—there's a button to trash an item, but no button to sell an item. So if you want to get money from the guns the Lost Loot machine gives you, you need to pull them off it, open your backpack, arduously mark them as trash (which is hard for the reasons mentioned above) and then sell them.

The crime of this is that inventory management in a game where you get heaps of loot absolutely has to be good—because you're going to be doing it a lot—and it's a complete trash heap here.

I spent my playthrough sorting most of my loot via the equipment screen rather than the backpack, since it let me compare my guns easily, organised my loot by type, and auto-filtered my equipped gear. And if that isn't an indictment of your inventory system I don't know what is.

Luckily, the actual RPG underpinning said loot fatigue was enough to keep me hooked, and the deeper I went, the more enamoured I became.

On the hunt

What gives Borderlands 4 the real juice are its vault hunters, and these are some of the best we've seen out of the series yet when it comes to variety.

Each character has a core passive, three skill trees, a choice of three action skills, and two modifiers to said action skills. Except within those skill trees, you also have three branches at the end which all play incredibly differently.

(Image credit: Gearbox Software, 2k Games)

I spent my playthrough as Rafa using the Peacebreaker Cannons, constructing a build around maintaining my bonuses from Overdrive (which kicks in whenever he whips his cannons out) and movement speed. However, within his Peacebreaker Cannons tree, Rafa has two other branches: One that buffs his cannons with elemental damage, and another that lets him stack all sorts of bonuses into his indirect damage, making said cannons the star of the show.

In the post-game, I got a legendary shotgun with three elemental damage types—and I decided to swap over to that elemental tree, adding a passive modifier that turned my trusty rocket launchers into lasers and stripped me of my movement speed bonuses in exchange for raw status spread and face-melting DPS.

I'm already itching to try out other hunters just so see which of their (minimum) nine builds I wanna play.

It felt completely different, and it suddenly dawned on me that this was simply a change in which branch of a single skill tree I was in. After 47 hours, I had experienced roughly two out of nine ways I could've played my character.

And that's just in the skill trees—add in legendary equipment modifiers, the new Firmware system, and the post-campaign specialisations tree, and Gearbox has given players a vast playground to muck around in. It's the most fleshed-out the series has ever been, and I'm already itching to try out other hunters just so see which of their (minimum) nine builds I wanna play.

The only complaint I have is that it takes a minute to get there. As is the case with most Borderlands games, the opening hours are a smidge slow, since you only get one skill point per level—but when characters come online at around level 15, that all melts away. And once you've beaten the campaign, you can start your alts at level 30, so it's a one-time slog.

Let me love you

For all my complaints—and I do have quite a few of them—I still find myself itching to play more Borderlands 4. It speaks to the strength of the damn thing that one of the most terribly-conceived UIs in recent memory somehow didn't ruin it for me. Even though you have to use said UI routinely and often. I adore Borderlands 4, warts and all (and boy, does it have some warts).

(Image credit: Gearbox Software, 2k Games)

I want to muck around with builds, I want to play co-op with my friends, and, most importantly, I'm somehow not bored of shooting people and watching them explode into an utterly illegible amount of numbers.

Borderlands 4 may well be the strongest game in the series—and while it flails in a sea of backwards choices, it doesn't quite drown. I've been loving my time with it, somehow, in spite of all of my problems with its clunky, terrible frame.

I simply cannot ignore the almost eldritch grip this thing has had on me. If you've ever had a serotonin spike from seeing a big number, if you've ever felt that blissful open world checklist haze, if you've ever enjoyed buildcrafting in an ARPG, then I heartily recommend you give Gearbox's latest a go. If you can run it—or stomach some bad inventory management—there's looter-shooter bliss on the other side of that trash heap.

In the 16 years I've played this series, Borderlands 4 is the first entry that's made me want to do post-game grinding—Gearbox just needs to fix its dang Wildcard Missions first

Harvey Randall — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 16:04:23 +0000

Harvey Randall, Staff Writer

(Image credit: Future)

Last week I was: Trying not to lose it over that one boss in Silksong. The guy with the maggots. You know who I'm talking about.

This week I've been: Playing around 47 hours of Borderlands 4. Send help, I'm trapped in the loot dimension.

I've been playing the Borderlands series since its inception, but I have something terrible to confess—I have never, not once, been tempted to engage in the endgame. The closest I've ever got was when I rinsed through Borderlands 3's DLCs (many of which were shockingly good), and even then, that was more coincidental.

I'd simply run out of levels, so I was technically in the postgame. But I've never tried to get a build going, farm that all-important legendary, or so much as sneezed at a raid boss. I'm here to play 30 hours of a shooty RPG and then do something else.

Borderlands 4, though? Now I've chewed through the campaign, I'm severely tempted to get stuck back in. I would be, were it not for my professional obligation to actually write videogame words for this videogame website, so I'll settle for nattering at you about wanting to play more BL4 instead.

It's a partially conflicted feeling, mind. I've still got tons to do on Kairos because you should actually wait until after you've beaten the campaign to do most of those side quests: However, I also have to recognise the clever trick Gearbox has pulled off here.

While past Borderlands' post-games would see you churning through the same stuff you'd likely just spent 50-odd levels gnawing at, BL4 makes the game the postgame, so you can do endgame while you game-game. Am I making sense? I've been shooting very loud psychos for 47 hours and I can hear Claptrap in my walls.

Let me put it another, less loot-addled way: All of the stuff you'd otherwise be doing in an open-world RPG also happens to be the best way to get your Specialisation levels—a post-campaign progression system fed by EXP—and legendary loot. The postgame is just playing an open-world RPG, mopping up sidequests and snagging collectables. In other words, exactly what I like.

Two other factors also help. Firstly, the game has co-op level scaling, so if I want to hop in with a mate and grind out some of those delicious progression points, I can do that by tagging along with a buddy, even if they've not completed their campaign yet or are a much lower level than me.

Secondly, you can now start a new character at level 30 if you've beat the main campaign. While this has given our illustrious guides writer Rory Norris cause for concern, I'm almost the opposite: I rarely try out other classes in these games, because that often-tedious starting grind is enough to put me to sleep. But now I can get stuck right in with the tinkering. There is, however, one obstacle: The Wildcard missions system.

A bad hand

Wildcard missions are cool in theory. Every week, you can up your world's difficulty (and loot) by playing through a story mission with enemy modifiers slapped onto the mooks you're shooting. Also, sometimes you get a Rainbow Vomit shotgun.

(Image credit: Gearbox)

In practice, however, things are less peachy. My first Wildcard mission was the one in Carcadia where you need to re-route the water system—forcing me to spend the first 10 minutes flipping switches and listening to a long spiel I'd already heard before. Which, for Borderlands, is a criminal amount of time to spend not shooting somebody.

My second Wildcard mission I had to repeat two goddamn times. See, these story missions can last upwards of 40 minutes, often taking you between several locations—and while you can die on them without having to start over, if you quit out of the game, it bugs, or you crash? Then you're screwed, bucko.

I experienced my second-ever crash in 47 hours playing this Wildcard mission. On my second attempt, an enemy got stuck in a wall (also the first time that had happened) making it impossible for me to kill it before moving on.

In a game this pockmarked with bugs—bugs that typically haven't ruined my enjoyment until now—you simply cannot have a 40-minute time investment that requires you to start over if it breaks. It sucks all the momentum out of the game's otherwise unerring loot, shoot, repeat momentum.

The monologue problem rears its ugly head again here, too. I just so happened to be doing the mission that introduces you to the trio of main villains in the game—and so I had to listen to Zadra describe who the Timekeeper's lieutenants were for almost two straight minutes at the tail-end of the mission. Zadra, I like you, but I just spent like 30 hours finding and killing the Timekeeper's dastardly rogue's gallery. Me and the business end of my gun are intimately familiar.

Both seem like relatively straightforward, if time-consuming, things Gearbox could fix in future updates. Letting players pick up their Wildcard missions from where they left off if they crash, seems the less involved of the two—but it also wouldn't hurt to do a quick dialogue-snipping pass, too. If Gearbox sorts that, then me and BL4's endgame are golden.

Gearbox breaks out some free loot because Borderlands players have already looted over 750 million items, half a million of which were from trash cans

Rich Stanton — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 13:12:52 +0000

The big theme in the first week of Borderlands 4? Whether you're talking about technical issues or character builds: it's busted. There are so many broken builds it's untrue, and players are running around with "infinite damage" builds that nuke bosses in under 10 seconds… which is either great or terrible, depending on your mood.

But it's probably why, in the first week of release, players have fought bosses 63 million times and defeated 55 million of them. Pretty good hit rate, and the numbers come from developer Gearbox itself, which has released a loot package for all players to celebrate… erm, all the looting.

The rewards come in the form of a Shift code, Gearbox's little data-hoovering service that it uses because it can, and is called the Break Free Pack. It includes a vault hunter skin, a legendary ripper shield that scales to your level, and two ECHO-4 drone skins: the code is JS63J-JSCWJ-CFTBW-3TJ3J-WJS5R.

More interesting were the stats Gearbox released alongside the code, which include the enlightening fact that four-and-a-half million players have managed to kill themselves with grenades so far, while around two million of you shot exploding barrels while just being a tiny bit too close.

More to the point, in the archetypal looter-shooter players have now, excluding items of common quality, looted precisely 764,733,586 items. Presumably that statistic was rendered irrelevant the second it was issued, but until Gearbox starts a live tracker we'll go with it. It also offers a rather granular breakdown of where some loot has been obtained:

(Image credit: Gearbox)

Items looted from Outhouses–1,530,794
Items looted from a grill, beer cooler, or boombox–1,811,970
Items looted from Trash Cans–487,585
Items looted from Red Chests–14,814,296

Okay, who's been rooting through the bins. There are some less interesting stats about miles driven etcetera I'll spare you, beyond the fact over 16 million vehicles have been blown up.

The rewards in question are available now, and initially I thought you had until the end of the year to claim them. It turns out that the cutoff for redemption is actually December 31, 2030, so there's really no excuse. I've just told Google to remind me to do a reminder post in five years: hey, surely someone will still be rustling around in the trash.

Don't get stuck grinding in Borderlands 4's version of the Hinterlands—in fact, you're screwing yourself out of EXP if you try to do every sidequest before beating the main campaign

Harvey Randall — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 09:24:59 +0000

Borderlands 4 is great, but it doesn't quite make the best first impression. There's nothing necessarily wrong with its first zone, The Fadefields, but it's definitely the most dull place to quest in Kairos. You could be Mad Max-ing it with Zane and Moxxi in the Burn, after all.

The problem with the Fadefields is it's big, fairly visually nondescript, drenched in sidequests, and—oh god, it's the Hinterlands. We've done a Hinterlands again.

In case you're unfamiliar, the Hinterlands is an infamous zone in Dragon Age: Inquisition, known for being both stonking massive and, pardon the pun, taking a dragon's age to get through. It's a major drop-off point for the RPG, and I get the feeling that the Fadefields is the same.

I've had to blitz through the campaign after doing a few sidequests for the review, and I can say with certainty that doing so is the correct on-ramp to Borderlands 4. Not just for the vibes (variety is the spice of life), but there's also a mechanical reason you might want to bank most of those sidequests for later, too.

Borderlands 4's postgame progression system, specialisation points, don't unlock until you've beaten the campaign—no matter your current level. Beat the campaign at level 30? You get specialisation points. Beat it at 40, like I did? Specialisation points.

Think of this system as an additional, Vault Hunter-agnostic skill tree layered on top of your usual ones, providing powerful extra bonuses to your character.

Gearbox Software

The kicker is that specialisation points take EXP alongside your regular levels, meaning if you spend 80-100 hours doing every single sidequest and map activity before you finish the campaign, you're screwing yourself out of a lot of EXP you could've earned by doing the exact same thing in a slightly different order.

You can replay missions for the EXP instead, mind—but that's adding even more of a grind to an already grindy game, and if you're spending 100 hours getting a 100% completion in BL4, you might as well spend those first 30 hours doing the Campaign, and the next 70 getting specialisation EXP.

So squash those inner exploration demons. By all means, do a sidequest or two if the mood takes you, but otherwise? Make a beeline for the straight and narrow main mission, then start mopping up your side-gigs later. You'll be better for it.

Nothing is safe from Borderlands 4's 'infinite damage' build that wipes out bosses in less than 10 seconds

Tyler Colp — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 20:44:35 +0000

Borderlands 4 players weren't going to let the Diablo players have all the fun with builds that deal so much damage the game can't keep up. It's been less than a week since the co-op FPS came out and we already have a build that goes infinite.

The build, which I discovered through YouTuber NickTew, involves using a particular throwing knife in combination with a passive skill for Vex to overload enemies with critical hits, and if you want to try it, you should probably try it now, as it seems like the kind of thing that's too broken not to be patched out eventually.

The entire build revolves around throwing knives that cause your normal damage to become critical damage. You can find the "Penetrator Augment - Damage" stat on any Vampiric Vivisecting Throwing Knife in the game and it'll work regardless of the item's level. NickTew's character is level 50 and his level 35 knife works because the stat is the same no matter what.

Vex has a passive skill called Bloodletter that gives your guns a chance to apply a bleed damage over time effect. That bleed will deal critical hits when combined with the throwing knife, which is a lot of damage on its own. But where this goes infinite is with Vex's Contamination passive skill.

Contamination causes critical hits to increase your status effect application chance up to 100%, guaranteeing that every individual tick of damage from your bleed will start up more bleeds on the enemy. All you do is throw the knife, pump one shot into the boss, and watch its health drain away in seconds.

NickTew says the throwing knife can be quite rare to drop, but that there are places to farm for it. A Reddit user made a thread about it and recommended heading to Splashzone in the southern part of the map. I found a pretty helpful guide for getting there by YouTuber Ki11er Six.

Once you get one, it won't matter how much health a boss has as long as you can live long enough to watch it die. NickTew's video goes into more details on how you can build around it, like putting points into Vex's In The Zone passive, and he warns co-op players that the knife doesn't seem to work if more than one person uses it.

While I know part of the fun of Borderlands is finding hilariously busted builds like this, I'm not sure this one is going to dodge a nerf. Gearbox has plans to add a lot of endgame bosses to the game that I'm sure it would like you to actually shoot at more than once, so abuse it while you can.

Borderlands 4: Everything we know
Borderlands 4 Shift codes: The new key connection
Borderlands 4 Harlowe builds: The amped-up Gravitar
Borderlands 4 Rafa builds: The speed-demon Exo-Soldier
Borderlands 4 Vex builds: The spooky Siren
Borderlands 4 Amon builds: The fierce Forgeknight

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford's chronic tweeting syndrome strikes again, says 'less than 1% of 1%' of players are filing tickets about performance so clearly the internet's overblowing it

Joshua Wolens — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 14:17:07 +0000

To what I assume is the eternal dismay of the Gearbox PR department, studio CEO Randy Pitchford has once again been tweeting. What's he up to now? Well, he's applying the ol' scientific method to people's Borderlands 4 performance complaints, pointing out that—if this game is really as stutter-prone as you horrible lot have been making it sound like—how come "less than one percent of one percent" of players are filing customer service tickets about performance woes?

Pitchford's maths minute goes as follows: "Customer Service reports for Borderlands 4 at roughly 1% or so of installs." That is to say, if 1,000,000 people had installed the game, a mere 10,000 of them would have filed tickets.

Pitchford does a little legerdemain here—classic magician behaviour—and transitions to talking about the tickets as a percentage of the game's overall customers (everyone who has it installed). So, rather than saying that 55% of customer service tickets are about people's SHiFT accounts, he says 0.55% of customers are having problems, and so on. Bearing that in mind, Pitchford goes on to say that "0.04% of customers [tickets] are PC performance related."

The number gets smaller. Of that 0.04% of customers, Gearbox customer service has flagged a mere 0.009% as "valid," and a fair chunk have been led to the sunlit uplands of good performance with "education" (settings coaching).

"That is less than one percent of one percent (0.01%) of customers using CS tickets for valid performance issues," says Pitchford.

Fun facts: Customer Service reports for Borderlands 4 at roughly 1% or so of installs. Using that simple, rounded ratio…More than half of the tickets (~0.55% of customers) are users reporting difficulty with their SHiFT accounts (lost e-mails/access, etc). The next highest…September 14, 2025

The conclusion? "This reality is dramatically different than what you would expect if your only sources of information were, say, certain internet threads."

But let's be honest, when was the last time you filed a customer service ticket with a studio over bad performance in a game? For me, the answer is an easy 'never,' and I suspect it's the same for a lot of others, too. If a game runs badly, I'll curse and wait for a patch, and maybe leave a review warning others.

You know, exactly what so many players have already done in the game's Steam user reviews, where the game launched to Mostly Negative reviews and has since settled at 65% Mixed.

So trying to point at customer service tickets as evidence the performance complaints are overblown feels just a tad bizarre, and besides, what exactly does Pitchford expect to happen? I'm not sure anyone running into performance errors with the game is going to see this ticket breakdown and decide that there must have been no problem after all. It's only going to further agitate players who want their game to run well.

The good news is that, so far as I can tell, Gearbox has been putting out patches for Borderlands 4's performance issues and they are making a difference. So with any luck we'll all soon live in a world where the game runs much better out of the box. Still, I can't help but think the studio would be well-served if it hired a guy specifically to follow Pitchford around and stop him from tweeting. At least that way he wouldn't be out there calling Borderlands 4 "a premium game for premium players."

Randy Pitchford challenged players to break the Borderlands 4 servers over the weekend, offering free DLC for anyone who takes part

Jody Macgregor — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 22:58:16 +0000

Borderlands 4 is currently the top-selling game on Steam, and peaked at 288,130 concurrent players today. This in spite of the fact that it's a bit of a stuffer-fest. But while the framerate may be nothing to write home about, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford is so confident in the stability of the Borderlands 4 servers that he's encouraging players to log on and try to break them.

"I'm telling you that it's going to be VERY unlikely you guys can be enough people to break the backend and take our game down", Pitchford wrote on the hatesite formerly known as Twitter. "I know there have been some high profile backend on-line systems failing around big AAA game launches, but not this one."

Pitchford is so convinced the servers will be able to take whatever gets thrown at them that he said, "I'll find a way somehow to reward everyone and to make it up to everyone for showing me that it can break." And even if they don't break, players who jump in this weekend will get access to the Break Free cosmetics pack.

Free stuff is nice, and so is hearing the hard-working folks behind the servers get a shout-out. As Pitchford said, "our on-line team rules." But boasting about a game's online stability when it doesn't run great even if you're playing solo seems kind of like pointing out how nice the curtains are while your living room is catching fire.

Borderlands 4 takes a shot at Embracer Group by naming a town filled with trash and an AI talking toilet after it

Rich Stanton — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 15:03:56 +0000

Borderlands 4 is finally here and the reaction is… well, mixed. Players mainly seem irked by a slew of performance issues on PC, though stuff like 2K's overbearing terms of service haven't helped either. But it's easy to get too negative: the patches will flow, Gearbox will improve the performance, and we'll be left with another Borderlands game. Which means a billion guns, gorgeous looks, and some questionable humor. Kotaku has already noticed one joke, however, that seems like a straight-up dig at Embracer Group, former owners of Gearbox.

One early game location is called "Embracer's Bluff", a run-down place crammed with garbage and containing two rather pointed side quests. The first involves a murderous vending machine that kills a would-be customer, while the second is centred on a talking AI-powered toilet that everyone hates. The cherry on top is the ruler of Embracer's Bluff, who seemingly lives in a hot tub surrounded by dildos.

This would be a clear enough dig at Embracer Group, but Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford basically said in the runup to release that Borderlands 4's story was in some ways inspired by the company's acquisition by the Embracer Group, and subsequent re-sale to Take-Two after everything went wrong for Embracer.

"There’s this cultural and emotional shift in me, personally, and at the studio," said Pitchford. "What does it mean to trade some autonomy for organization? What does it feel like to move up and down the scale between autonomy and being organized or even being controlled?"

(Image credit: Gearbox Software)

Whoa there Randy. The necessary context for all of this is that Embracer Group is a company that gorged itself on venture capital and swallowed endless established studios and franchises, including Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Dead Island, and The Lord of the Rings among others. Then it all went wrong and Embracer embarked on an utterly brutal round of mass layoffs and studio closures.

Gearbox was part of this: it was acquired by Embracer Group in 2021 for $1.3 billion, before being sold back to 2K after three years for… drum roll please… $460 million. Now that's how to waste a shitload of money.

Hence the name of this Borderlands 4 location. Embracer's Bluff seems a straightforward reference to the fact that Embracer's massive acquisition spree was based on bluffing, throwing vast sums of cash around and promising jam tomorrow: which all worked until a mysterious $2 billion deal fell through and the wheels came off. In the centre of Embracer's Bluff sits a large pile of trash that people sift through. Say what you will about Borderlands: the humor is always on-the-nose.

Gearbox responds to worries about Borderlands 4's terms of service: 'Take-Two does not use spyware in its games'

andy.chalk@pcgamer.com (Andy Chalk) — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 21:55:40 +0000

Borderlands 4 got off to a rough start on Steam today, mostly because of performance and crash problems—you can read more about that in Nick Evanson's heroic launch-day performance report. As I write this, there's been no official response from Gearbox about the game's technical issues, but it has put out a statement on another complaint that's cropped up, much more rarely but still visible here and there in negative user reviews: Borderlands 4's terms of service.

You may recall that previous Borderlands games on Steam were review-bombed earlier this year because of changes in their EULAs. There were also claims that Take-Two, the parent of Borderlands developer Gearbox, had made the changes because it intended to implement kernel-level anti-cheat in Borderlands 4, which it would then use to gain personal information from its players.

It was all a bit (or a lot) overblown, as PC Gamer's Tyler Colp pointed out: "a misleading YouTube video prompting fans to play a game of telephone about the changes to the EULA over Reddit and forum threads, and a bout of short-lived Steam review bombing that hasn't accomplished much of anything."

Those review bombings did indeed have little impact, in part because games like Borderlands 2 and 3 have thousands of pre-existing positive reviews, which makes it tough to move the overall needle. Borderlands 4 doesn't have that buffer, though, and perhaps anticipating trouble, Gearbox has put out a statement addressing concerns about the Borderlands 4 TOS.

"Take-Two does not use spyware in its games," Gearbox wrote in no uncertain terms. "Take-Two’s Privacy Policy applies to all labels, studios, games, and services across all media and platform types such as console, PC, mobile app, and website. The Privacy Policy identifies the data activities that may be collected but this does not mean that every example is collected in each game or service."

Gearbox said Take-Two lists this stuff in its TOS "to provide transparency to players and comply with its legal obligations," and that it collects the information "to deliver its services to players, including to protect the game environment and player experience." That includes things like ensuring compatibility and offering personalization options, such as username displays.

The statement also addresses worries that the updated TOS will give Take-Two the right to crack down on modders, saying that it prohibits "abusive mods" but "does not seek to take action against mods that are single-player only, non-commercial, and respect the intellectual property (IP) rights of its labels and third parties."

The statement is virtually identical to one posted in the discussion forums for older Borderlands games (Borderlands 3, for instance) in June, which is fair enough because there's really nothing to change.

And while Tyler correctly noted in his May report that we really should pay attention to what we're agreeing to when we click the button so we can get on with playing, in this case it seems there really is very little to worry about: If you've signed up for a Shift account so you can redeem Borderlands codes—or, really, engaged in virtually any other transaction on the internet—you've already handed over all the information anyway. Maybe that's not great, but it's the world we've built.

Borderlands 4 launches to 'mostly negative' reviews on Steam thanks to widespread performance problems and crashes

andy.chalk@pcgamer.com (Andy Chalk) — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 19:16:12 +0000

Borderlands 4 is out today, and it's been very well received critically, at least by those sites who received pre-release code—a list that does not include PC Gamer. It's a different situation over on Steam, however, where a whole lot of people are playing Borderlands 4, but the overall user rating is an ugly "mostly negative."

The problem, going by hundreds of user reviews that have already been posted, is almost entirely related to Borderlands 4's performance. Multiple Steam users report low frame rates and persistent stuttering, even at reduced graphical settings and on powerful hardware, and complaints about frequent crashes are also common.

"Terrible, terrible performance. Worst I've ever seen," Etikoo wrote in one negative review. "Turned it down to Low graphics presents and couldn't hit 60 FPS, even with FSR upscaling on my RX 6900 XT."

"30fps at native medium to high settings on 1440p with a 3080 TI," pirate135246 concurred. "It also looks worse than BL3 tbh. Idk how it runs this bad."

Some sites that reviewed the PC version cited performance issues as well: Windows Central's Michael Hoglund says Borderlands 4's fun gunplay was frequently undermined by "intermittent zone loading" and framerate drops.

Our hardware tester, Nick Evanson, has experienced similar problems in his initial testing today, although he noted that a 2.7GB post-launch patch helped reduce the frequency of crashes. That was presumably the day one patch Randy Pitchford confirmed a few days ago, though it seemingly didn't appear until after the game went live: There's no indication on the Borderlands 4 Steam page of a separate hotfix being rolled out.

Even some positive reviews are down on the game's performance: One such thumbs-up assessment states, "Game is good but the performance is not, frame gen + DLSS is almost mandatory if you do not have RTX 5090."

(Image credit: Steam)

We got a whiff of possible concerns about Borderlands 4's performance earlier this week, when Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford said gamers should have "realistic" expectations about how the game will run, especially on older hardware: "This is a big, open AAA game and lower-end and older hardware may not perform as well as higher-end, modern PCs," Pitchford said at the time.

That's good advice in general, but it also felt—to me, anyway—a bit like we were being prepared for the worst: And, well, here we are, not in a catastrophic state, but pretty far from ideal, too.

There's been no reaction yet from Gearbox about the problems, or indication of what it intends to do about it, but I would expect we'll see something on that front soon enough. It is very early, after all—Borderlands 4 only launched a few hours ago—and it takes time to react, even when things go south so quickly.

And while the user rating sure isn't great, the concurrent player counts are: SteamDB says Borderlands 4 is currently sitting at more than 192,000 players, far surpassing the previous games in the series (remembering that Borderlands 3 launched as an Epic Games Store exclusive) and likely to go up even higher over the weekend.

Borderlands 4 review round-up: 'The best Borderlands game I've ever played—but with a small hitch'

Joshua Wolens — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 13:11:09 +0000

It's an enormous day for the games industry, folks. I've just discovered that there are, apparently, other videogames websites than PC Gamer. Seems weird to me, but I guess that's just the crazy, mixed-up world we live in.

What's more, some of those videogames websites have been playing Borderlands 4 and now they have thoughts about it. As for our thoughts, well, you'll have to wait a little longer for those. But to hear the other guys tell it, Gearbox seems to have (mostly) learnt the right lessons from the doldrums of Borderlands 3, turning out a looter-shooter with a great deal of satisfying looting and shooting, and relatively little tedious, meme-heavy humour.

Here's what the rest of the world is saying about Borderlands 4.

"Every millisecond of a good scrap bursts with texture"

GamesRadar+: 4/5

Our comrades at GR seem to have had a very good time reducing the denizens of Kairos to indeterminate goo. Reviewer Andrew Brown says the game spends its time "careening you from one shootout to the next," with particular praise for its enemy variety and the sheer ludicrous malleability of the game's 80 bajillion guns: "so overkill they throw out the rules not only on how shooters should work, but how firearms function".

(Image credit: Gearbox)

There's not as much praise for the story, though. Where BL4's carnage is brash and colourful, its narrative is "rather dull," with a "very safe antagonist" who will leave your mind not longer after entering it. And if you've ever wished BL4 could take anything seriously, bad news: "Tone-wise, there's also a frustrating lack of sincerity."

"Exactly the kick in the pants [the series] has needed"

IGN: 8/10

IGN's Travis Northrup brought years of looting and shooting to bear on his review of BL4, and found that the game's embrace of an open world made it a far cry (god, I'm hilarious) from its predecessors, "not just because you’ve got so many new ways to get around, but because progressing through the story and leveling up your character is so much less linear now". That is, when he wasn't colliding with a frustrating invisible wall.

Northrup also praised the game's tight and responsive gunplay, but alas—he couldn't apply either word to its performance, running into "numerous bugs" and tech issues in his time reviewing the game's PC version. No wonder he rounds off the review by chatting about the possibility of "a few patches" later down the line.

(Image credit: Gearbox)

"Rises beyond anything the series has accomplished to this point"

Game Informer: 8.5/10

GI's Brian Shea echoed the points above, praising BL4 for the sheer variety of its guns and the frenetic pace of its combat, and reserved a particularly glowing spot in his assessment for the new mobility skills: "I always enjoyed gliding onto the battlefield, ground-slamming an enemy from above, and sprinting into a sliding shotgun blast before zipping out of danger. These improved movement mechanics add a ton to each combat encounter, and I genuinely think it would be difficult to go back to older Borderlands games."

(Image credit: Gearbox)

He did, though, find that things had a tendency to drag on just a touch too long: "Some fights are too prolonged, some missions feature too many chaining objectives, and some bosses have way too much health." I suppose it doesn't matter how fun a gun is, firing it ad nauseum at a boss who refuses to die is gonna get boring. It's far from a deathblow to the game, though: "When the game is this much fun to play, that’s only a minor annoyance and is often alleviated through the series’ excellent co-op".

"Feels like the sequel to Borderlands 2"

VGC: 4/5

Though a little less hot on some of the new traversal stuff—the grappling hook ends up "clumsy and forgotten about"—VGC's Jordan Middler also very much enjoyed doing horrible things to the game's enemies: "It is difficult to put into words how satisfying it is to hit headshot after headshot in his game. Enemies explode like bin bags full of mince that have been hit by a truck." Sorry if you're eating lunch.

(Image credit: Gearbox Software)

VGC also paid its compliments to an area of the game I think everyone else was moving too fast to notice: the interior design, which are "all highly detailed and well-designed," but couldn't say the same about BL4's outdoorsy bits. "We didn’t feel like many of the locations were all too memorable. There’s nowhere in Borderlands 4 as memorable as Sanctuary from Borderlands 2, for example." Nevertheless, it's enough of blast—and enough of a rectification of 3's sins—that VGC came away with a smile.

"The best Borderlands game I've ever played—but with a small hitch"

Windows Central: 4/5

Windows Central's Michael Hoglund again summoned the dread spectre of performance woes in his review of the game, where excellent gunplay and shooting found themselves undermined by "intermittent zone loading," "dips below 60," and other assorted issues that'll have you sucking air through your teeth, and that's on a machine that beats out the recommended specs.

(Image credit: Gearbox)

The good news: this is actually better than it was during most of Hoglund's review—where he experienced "some of the worst performance I’ve seen from a AAA game"—thanks to a patch, but he's still worried for folks on older machines. So even though Hoglund is "still having a ton of fun playing," you might want to wait for a patch or two.

"Repetition eventually leaves combat feeling stale"

GameSpot: 7/10

On the more negative end of the reviews spectrum sits GameSpot, whose reviewer Jordan Ramée praised a lot of the same areas other reviewers did—gunplay, enemy variety, the oodles of loot—but found they eventually wore out their welcome. "You run into pretty much every enemy type about halfway through the story, and the new ones you run into after that are mostly variations of what came before."

(Image credit: Gearbox)

What's more, the narrative just wasn't enough to hook Ramée, which is an issue when the game expects you to engage with a lot of it to get your level up. The sidequests are "boring" and humour is "a traditional Borderlands tentpole that's missing from this entry." It sounds, dare I say it, a bit like a 'podcast game' in Ramée's telling: "If uncovering loot, crafting builds, and unleashing chaotic mayhem is what you're looking for, Borderlands 4 has you covered… Just maybe find a good podcast or video essay to fill the moments between the shooting and looting."

Borderlands 4 global release times and preload details

Andrea Shearon — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 21:37:11 +0000

Good news for day one vault hunters on PC: Borderlands 4 will get the global release date treatment. That means no watching friends from the future play a game still locked away in your library until midnight local time—when Borderlands 4 launches on Friday, September 12, for New Zealand, it will be live for players worldwide.

That's September 11 for some of you, with Borderlands 4 launching as early as 9 am PT on Thursday. The global PC launch covers both Steam and Epic Games Store users, and you should be able to pre-load the new looter shooter before launch.

When is the Borderlands 4 unlock time?

(Image credit: Gearbox Software)

Borderlands 4 launches at 9 am PT on September 11. Remember, the Borderlands 4 PC global release means it's out for everyone at the same time regardless of timezone. Console times are different, so players on PC eager to join friends through cross-platform multiplayer will have to wait for PlayStation and Xbox store updates.

Here are the Borderlands 4 global release times, sorted by timezone:

Los Angeles: 9 am PT on Thursday, September 11
Chicago: 11 am CT on Thursday, September 11
New York: 12 pm ET on Thursday, September 11
London: 5 pm BST on Thursday, September 11
Berlin: 6 pm CEST on Thursday, September 11

Singapore: 12 am SGT on Friday, September 12
Tokyo: 1 am JST on Friday, September 12
Sydney: 2 am AEST on Friday, September 12
Wellington: 4 am NZST on Friday, September 12

What are the Borderlands 4 launch times on consoles?

Users on PlayStation 5 and Xbox unlock Borderlands 4 at 12 am on Friday, September 12, local time. That rule applies everywhere except for folks sharing a timezone with Los Angeles—then Borderlands 4 unlocks on your respective console at 9 pm on Thursday, September 11.

The wait for Borderlands 4 on Switch 2 is even longer with a release date set for Friday, October 3, 2025.

Borderlands 4 global release countdown timer

Is there preloading for Borderlands 4?

As of the time of writing, there is no option to pre-load Borderlands 4 on Steam. We've checked on our end (Wednesday, September 10), and still nothing. Maybe that's unsurprising since the global timing already pushes its release timing earlier than expected for some, but a bummer for anyone with a slower connection trying to hop in ASAP.

Hopefully that changes before launch, but with less than 24 hours until Borderlands 4 is available on PC, it's looking more like we won't have the option. If we do, it'll be a short window.

I'm ranking every Borderlands game ahead of BL4's release from worst to best, because the people love their lists and I'm here to provide

Harvey Randall — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 13:34:33 +0000

Harvey Randall, Staff Writer

(Image credit: Future)

This week I've been: Playing Silksong, preparing to play Borderlands 4, and likely upsetting you because I put your favourite game at the wrong spot on this list. A thousand apologies.

Last week I was: Thinking too much about Borderlands 4's story, and being proven wrong by FF14's primo challenge runner about MMOs.

Look at me. I know what you are. I know your YouTube recs are full of tier lists. I know you secretly click on rankings just to have imaginary shower-fights with their authors. And I know that this is a weirdly aggressive way to open an article, and for that I apologise, but also I'll be bringing knuckledusters to the bathroom. Anyway, Borderlands 4 is coming out soon, and I'm feeling nostalgic.

With Gearbox making all sorts of promises about how this one's going to be the biggest, best, and most badass entry into the series, I figure I'd vigorously apply my opinion to the roster, an opinion hard-earned by playing every Borderlands game to completion over these long 16 years.

I've got at least a few takes in the chamber, so here we go—get locked and loaded. Or loaded, and then locked. I'm not your dad. From order of worst to best, here's my personal rankings of the Borderlands library:

5. Borderlands (the first one)

If 2009's Borderlands is your favourite vintage, hear me out: I do not think you are wrong. "Worst" doesn't necessarily mean "bad".

While in spirit it's absolutely the game that started it all, and thus ought to have a higher spot on this list, the OG Borderlands really is just Very Okay. One of the series' biggest strengths, its reliability and unchanging gameplay loop, also means you can track its improvement on a more-or-less linear curve.

(Image credit: Gearbox)

Which makes Borderlands the least interesting of the bunch. Movement's slow and plodding, the pacing—especially in the early-game—is like moving through treacle, and the story's just sort of there. In a vacuum, Borderlands deserves credit (or perhaps blame) for kicking off the looter-shooter movement in earnest, and doing a halfway-decent job at it.

But the newer kids on the block are doing a better job, it's just a 16-year old game.

If you want to play a Borderlands game, I cannot think of a single reason to go back to this one unless you'd like a nostalgia trip—or are just really into the way its Vault Hunters handle. Otherwise, there's just no real cause to get back on that bus. Unless you'd like to hear No Rest for the Wicked again.

4. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands

There's nothing wrong with Tiny Tina's Wonderlands—I had a good time playing it—but if we match it up against the rest of the roster, it feels more like an elaborate DLC than a fully fledged Borderlands game.

(Image credit: Gearbox)

The setting is a fun send-up for plenty of TTRPG-based jokes, and I don't hate the cute overworld map, but I think its class structure and spell system are easily the weakest build mechanics in the series.

They're customisable, and it is neat being able to combine two classes into one character, but one of the series' biggest strengths is the fact each Vault Hunter has a unique identity that really shapes how you play. By comparison, the Fatemaker's classes are light on flavour.

Rather than playstyle-defining abilities like Brick's berserk mode or Zer0's Decepti0n, most of Wonderland's class abilities are just things you hammer off-cooldown. The multiclassing aspect technically increases variety, but also mandates that no one class rock the boat too much, which feels like it leaves Gearbox a lot less wiggle-room.

What's the point if I don't get to see Brick play D&D like in BL2's Assault on Dragon Keep?"

It also means those core abilities aren't nearly as explored. While Zer0, for example, can use his Decepti0n as a weak-spot highlighter for sniping, a decoy-bomb and elemental kunai generator, or an excuse to get really close to someone and stab them, the Brr-zerker is basically always going to be spinning at someone and hitting them with their axe.

On the plus side, it's got a solid voice cast and lands some good bits, though it whiffs on the promise of the premise—including none of the game's OG Vault Hunters and instead plonking you with Andy Samberg (basically playing himself) and a robot voiced by Wanda Sykes. Who are both fun enough but like, what's the point if I don't get to see Brick play D&D like in BL2's Assault on Dragon Keep?

3. Borderlands 3

Hey hey hey hey—pitchforks away. If you bounced right off Borderlands 3 I absolutely do not blame you. Yes, the story was atrocious, yes, the characters were annoying, yes, the memes were several years too late. Take a second.

(Image credit: Gearbox)

First off, it pleases me to have Borderlands 3 be the third-best Borderlands game in a numerical, aesthetic sense. Second off, while Borderlands 3's story was insufferable, its moment-to-moment action is the best out of Gearbox's whole catalogue.

It's a mashup of every game that came before it, taking BL1's foundation and BL2's more intricate classes and loot, then stacking the entire series movement tech—butt slams, mantling, and sliding—to make it all sing. I'll happily die on the sword that Borderlands 3 has the best-feeling combat of the entire series.

It helps that I played Zane, whose absurd movement speed gave me enough joy that I was able to push through my woes with its narrative—and hey, all of its DLC is pretty good, so it's got that going for it.

2. Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel

It's called a prequel, Pitchford. We already had a word for it. Anyway.

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is genuinely great, if you can forgive all the space-Australian accents. A solid story with some surprisingly decent character work, a novel setting, some low-gravity fun, and a splendid roster of Vault Hunters with novel shticks.

(Image credit: Gearbox)

Athena in particular is not only being super cool—there's a reason Tales from the Borderlands nabbed her—but having one of the most satisfying Vault Hunter skills in the entire series. I will never tire of hurling her Kinetic Aspis at a bunch of mooks.

It also added the butt-slam, which is my single favourite addition to the series' movement—more than mantling, more than sliding. Being able to decide "hey, I don't want to be in the air anymore" will never not be satisfying, especially since doing so results in an explosion. And it's Borderlands, explosions are like 90% of the entire point.

1. Borderlands 2

You probably saw this one coming—while I prefer BL3's movement, Borderlands 2 has it all. A stacked roster of great Vault Hunters with unique playstyles. A story that actually manages to be consistently entertaining the whole way through. A villain so charismatic it cast a literal shadow over the rest of the franchise. Jokes that are actually funny.

(Image credit: Gearbox)

Every other Borderlands game has some sort of caveat involved—BL1 shows its age, Wonderlands' classes aren't as interesting, BL3's story is obnoxious, the Pre-Sequel's oxygen mechanics are weird—but not Borderlands 2.

Borderlands 2 nailed every single positive aspect of the Borderlands series—and the only way I could feasibly see it improved would be some kind of remake with BL3's movement tech rolled into it. Oh, and Tales from the Borderlands' understanding of what makes its setting good.

Honourable mention: Tales From the Borderlands

I can't rightly put Tales anywhere on this list because it's not actually a Borderlands game—it's a bunch of cutscenes with choices and QTEs in them—but it does something the series never quite has. It really gets the potential potency of the Borderlands vibe even more than Gearbox does.

(Image credit: Telltale Games)

The elevator pitch of "A Telltale Borderlands game" absolutely should not work, but it does. Borderlands 2 had a great villain and a semi-decent cast of characters, but in Tales, you like basically everybody. Rhys and Fiona play off each other with buckets of charm, Vaughn is just a little guy, Sasha is carrying the brain cells for the whole group, and Loader Bot is my son and I will die for him.

Moreover, while the Borderlands franchise struggles to find good character work and dialogue from entry-to-entry, Tales is brimming with it in a way that feels nigh-effortless.

Turns out, the funniest joke you can tell in Borderlands is to have its occupants—surrounded by space magic, Lovecraftian vault monsters, madcap bandits with buzzsaws, and comically evil corporations—just be normal people.

If you can't wait for the new Borderlands, I genuinely recommend BL3's solid DLC campaigns—which aren't nearly as obnoxious as the base game

Harvey Randall — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 14:51:16 +0000

Borderlands 4 is on the horizon, but if your trigger-finger's itchy, you might do some shooting and/or looting beforehand—and while I had plenty of fun with Borderlands 3, I wouldn't recommend its base game without a huge asterisk. That huge asterisk being, "this story's kinda insufferable and it'll be buzzing in your ear throughout the whole thing".

Yet if you happened to bounce off the game because of its story—something I couldn't rightly blame you for—you might be surprised to find out that all of its DLC is… actually pretty good, all-told, and there's a lot of it. Four solidly-stacked campaigns you might've entirely missed.

While Borderlands 3's insistently wonky plot is otherwise a real obstacle, all of these DLCs stick to a theme and largely nail it. None of these things are winning BAFTAs, mind, but they all spin enjoyable yarns. More importantly, they don't oscillate between outdated memes and unsuccessful melodrama—they just grab a solid pitch and run with it.

The first of these, Moxxi's Heist of the Handsome Jackpot, sees you teaming up with Moxxi to raid Handsome Jack's abandoned casino—alongside a cast of characters including Timothy, who was Jack's doppelganger in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.

It's a silly premise done right. Feral casino-goers who've gone mad and violent, loader-bot security forces form a decent base for some solid gags. There's also a cute little romance subplot where Moxxi sees Timothy for who he really is. A highlight is "The Plan", a genuinely clever mission that, rather than funnelling you through a bunch of laborious fetch-quests to get ready for a heist, just drops you to the best bits of a planning montage.

Guns, Love, & Tentacles, the second DLC, is a lovecraftian romp where you're also planning Hammerlock and Jakobs' wedding—it's cute and you shoot horrors from Beyond the Pale, there's not much more to say about it, other than there's a side-quest where you get to solve a supernatural mystery with a washed-up detective, then wind up shooting cultists in a ghost dimension. The conclusion of which—for Borderlands—actually winds up being pretty moving.

My favourite out of the quartet, Bounty of Blood, actually delivers on Borderlands' oft-promised, never-delivered space western premise by making, well, an actual space-western. You go to a frontier planet called Gehenna after a sheriff's bounty, there's a gang of outlaws called the Devil's Riders, and the whole thing is accompanied by a wild-west style narrator called "The Liar" giving a saloon-story recounting of events as they happen.

It's also got a really neat aesthetic going on—blending the Wild West and Japanese architecture, which is a nice nod given the cultural exchange that's always gone on between samurai and cowboy movies. Also, "When the Hunter Came to Town" is a great ditty and sets the tone perfectly. Yeehaw, so on and so forth.

Psycho Krieg and the Fantastic Fustercluck is maybe my least favourite out of this DLC campaign barbershop, but only because it centres around mind-hopping into Krieg and, invariably, getting into his unrequited love for Maya—and while it's admirable to try and put a better capstone on a fumbled story moment from the base game? You are also reminding me of that fumbled story moment.

I'm also just not into the psychedelia dream-romp concept, especially when the competition is a space western and a casino heist; but there's some actually solid character work in here, and seeing other characters through the lens of Krieg's addled mind is a neat touch.

The reason I haven't touched on gameplay much in any of these summaries is because, well, it's Borderlands. You shoot things and get cool guns—it's the personality these DLCs have that shines in spite of the base game they're latched onto. And despite my overall wariness of the promises that Borderlands 4's story is going to make up for the mistakes of the past, these DLCs keep me hopeful that Gearbox turned that ship around years ago.

Borderlands 4: What we know so far
Borderlands 4 Shift codes: The new key connection
Borderlands 3 Shift codes: Golden key connection
Tiny Tina's Shift codes: Free skeleton keys
Best FPS games: Finest gaming gunplay

Gearbox boss says Borderlands 4 day-one patch 'does a lot' but warns that players should have 'realistic' expectations about performance: 'Older hardware may not provide buttery smooth performance'

andy.chalk@pcgamer.com (Andy Chalk) — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 17:24:21 +0000

Borderlands 4 is now just a few days away—here's the full rundown of global release times—and Randy Pitchford has confirmed, in what should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone, that there will be a day one patch. It "does a lot," the Gearbox boss promised, but it's not going to work miracles, and he said players with low-end PCs should have "realistic expectations" for how the game will run on their rigs.

"The expectation for using a below min-spec machine should be that the game is unplayable," Pitchford said on X in response to a player of a preview build who was struggling with performance.

"It's a big, bold, new, seamless world, and I'm sorry to say that older hardware may not provide buttery smooth performance for the latest gen AAA games, as has always been the case since the dawn of PC gaming."

That little note of always has been at the end of the reply comes off, to my reading at least, as just a tad defensive: Maybe it's your fault Borderlands 4 doesn't run well on your PC because you've been limping along with a craptastic potato for way too many years.

(Image credit: Randy Pitchford (Twitter))

It's also a hard truth. I remember feeling indignant and outraged (and resigned to being poor for the rest of my life) on learning that this game or that required a hard drive, or a 386 CPU. Ridiculous! But, yes, it is the way of PC gaming: You invest ridiculous amounts of money in the new hotness, and sooner or later it's old and busted, and you're right back to square one, wondering how much more time you can squeeze out of your creaking GPU before you really have to do something.

Shortly after that message went up, Pitchford copped to possibly "conflating 'recommended' specs with 'required' specs," and said 2K quality assurance is "able to achieve 60fps average with minimum spec PC on typically medium settings."

"Different PC configurations will vary. HDD vs SDD is also a factor for the hitching," Pitchford wrote. "And, yes, Day 1 patch has some key improvements and optimizations.

"I just want everyone to have realistic expectations for performance. This is a big, open AAA game and lower-end and older hardware may not perform as well as higher-end, modern PCs."

(Image credit: Randy Pitchford (Twitter))

It never hurts to manage expectations ahead of a major game launch, but that's just good advice. Trying to skooch through on a big new game with an old wheezing PC always carries a certain amount of risk, and while there's typically a little bit of play in the numbers, there's a reason the minimum system requirement is called minimum: If you try to undercut it, you are probably—at best—not going to have an optimal experience.

Borderlands 4, as noted above, arrives on September 11. If you're eager to play but among those who've been limping along with a craptastic potato for way too many years, perhaps this would be a good time to have a look at our rundowns of the best gaming PCs at various price points, or—if you prefer a more hands-on approach—a trio of DIY gaming PC builds at budget, mid-range, and high-end price points.

Borderlands 4 global release times mean some of you can play a day earlier than expected

Andrea Shearon — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 22:26:57 +0000

If you requested time off from work ahead of the new Borderlands launch next Friday, consider a last-minute addendum to the ask. Gearbox has revealed its plans to give Borderlands 4 the global release treatment, so some players will technically venture to Kairos a day early.

It's a global release time for Steam and Epic Games Store users, so when Borderlands 4 launches on September 12 at 4 am NZST, it's out for everyone. That's September 11 at 9 am PT for folks on the other side of the world. There's no slow rollout across time zones as everyone waits for the clock to strike midnight in their local time.

(Image credit: Gearbox Software)

To save you any further timezone headaches, here's when Borderlands 4 launches for everyone at the same time globally:

September 11 at 9 am PT (San Francisco)
September 11 at 11 am PT (Chicago)
September 11 at 12 pm ET (New York)
September 11 at 5 pm BST (London)
September 11 at 6 pm CEST (Berlin)
September 12 at 12 am SGT (Singapore)
September 12 at 1 am JST (Tokyo)
September 12 at 2 am AEST (Sydney)
September 12 at 4 am NZST (Wellington)

Despite all the time I've spent monitoring PC releases, I'm disoriented by the idea every time. So to answer your question: No, it's not just you that's confused by the global/midnight differences. Some games roll out by local time, so you're stuck watching friends from the future play while you longingly stare at Steam.

Keep in mind this doesn't work the same across all platforms, so if you're on PC and hoping to play with a console buddy, then you may need to wait. Borderlands 4 supports crossplay, but the PlayStation and Xbox stores don't share the same update time in some regions.

Either way that's a week's wait for more vault hunting, at max. If you need something to do until then, I recommend jumping on the Borderlands 4 Shift code train early and getting your account sorted for a day-one freebie. It's either that or go play the very small and unheard-of indie game, Silksong. I'm assuming a big ol' publisher like 2k isn't worried about Hornet, but I have to wonder how much of my own Steam friends list will make the swap next week.

Borderlands 3 Shift codes: Golden key connection
Tiny Tina's Shift codes: Free skeleton keys
Best FPS games: Finest gaming gunplay

Randy Pitchford shares thoughts on the Stop Killing Games campaign, gets very existential: 'It's so sobering to think about the fact that everything will end. Not just us, but literally everything, and I kind of hate that'

andy.chalk@pcgamer.com (Andy Chalk) — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 20:38:44 +0000

Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford was recently asked about his thoughts on the Stop Killing Games initiative, and as is his wont, he went deep. Heavy. A little sideways. But he was also a lot more thoughtful on the topic, in his own unique way, than you might expect. Also, Battleborn was mentioned.

Stop Killing Games is a campaign launched in 2024 that demands game developers ensure their online games remain playable, even when server support is inevitably ended. The campaign was sparked largely by Ubisoft's ham-handed termination of The Crew, and it proved remarkably popular: An EU petition drew more than 1.4 million signatures and attracted a positive reception from at least one prominent politician.

It's a complex issue, but not one that Pitchford is afraid to take on. "I've lost games, and it's an emotional experience, so I admire the activism,” he told The Gamer. “It's a weird, challenging problem, though, because I think that at the same time, if we're going to have any games that are sincere live services, it seems mutually exclusive to have something that's going to be a living thing that can't be allowed to die. I don't know how to get around that.”

It's a pretty good answer off the cuff: Non-committal, but reasonably thoughtful. But Pitchford was just getting started.

"It's kind of a metaphor, I think, for life,” he continued. “I hate the fact that someday, the people that I care about aren't going to be here, and someday I'm not going to be here. I freaking hate that. And I wish I could be here forever, because I don't want to miss anything, and I hate the idea of someone missing me, and it's just something I have to accept and deal with."

But as humans, it's in our nature to struggle against the choking tendrils of our own mortality. We rage against the darkness, and we do not go gently, and by God Pitchford loves that about us—and that's why he appreciates Stop Killing Games: "I think it comes from the same heart that I have, which is a heart that loves experiences that are worthy and just wants to make sure they're there forever.”

And if you thought he was going to quit without pondering the heat death of the universe, you were wrong, my friend. "The truth is, there's going to be a time, trillions and trillions of years from now, when the universe will exist in a heat death, and everything will have decayed to a maximum state of entropy, and there's literally nothing," Pitchford continued.

"Battleborn was about the last star that would exist before that moment, because all of the stars in the universe will end. And it's so sobering to think about the fact that everything will end. Not just us, but literally everything, and I kind of hate that, and I hate the fact that we have to live in a universe that will be destroyed. And I love that I hate that, because it makes me want to fight against that."

It's a very big answer to a pretty straightforward question, but let me be clear: I may be having some fun with it but I also truly admire Pitchford's willingness to just vibe when the urge strikes. He's a bit like Reggie Jackson: He's not afraid to take big cuts, and sure, he whiffs a lot, but when he connects, he goes deep. I genuinely like that.

Borderlands 4 is set to arrive on September 12.

Borderlands 4 devs want to redeem the series' story, which is a tall task, since it's always been all over the place

Harvey Randall — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 13:23:19 +0000

Harvey Randall, Staff Writer

(Image credit: Future)

This week I've been: Playing Silksong and writing PSAs about benches.

Last week I was: Getting back into Deadlock, because I just really hate having free time.

One thing I've seen repeated often in Borderlands 4's interviews is the insistence that yes, we've learned our lesson with Borderlands 3, and we're not going to give you a headache this time. We've got character motivations, stakes, and jokes not rooted in years-old memes!

Which is fair enough. Borderlands 3's story (which, warning, I will be spoiling) was so atrocious it nearly spoiled what I otherwise found to be a great little game. I massively enjoyed zipping around as Zane with my movement speed build, and the moment-to-moment blasting was as consistent as ever. And then the story would happen and I'd start itching desperately to be shooting something again.

It wasn't just the jokes, either. Borderlands 3 tripped over itself when it came to its serious moments, too. Maya's death, its insistence that Ava was the chosen one, Lilith throwing herself into a moon for some reason, any time the Calypso twins, who could've been 1,000% more interesting, were on screen—it was a game that did not know how to stick the landing.

But the question is, was Borderlands' story ever actually, y'know, good? The answer is 'kinda'. I've been sticking with this series since I was—and I'm sorry to make you feel ancient—14 years old, and I don't know if I can rightly say that there's a 'return to form' to go back to.

Call me old-fashioned, but in order to go back to your roots, you need roots to begin with, and those foundations haven't ever truly been solid. Borderlands has always been a mosaic, and that's part of its charm, but let's try and get the blueprint sketched out here:

Borderlands is high-concept science fantasy, but it's also a space western, but it's also post-apocalyptic Mad Max, but it's also satirical dystopic cyberpunk, but it's also TTRPG-style character drama. And there's nothing wrong with mixing your genres, but if you throw too many into the pot, you start having a game that doesn't really know what it's about.

Actually, that might be the problem

Whenever Borderlands' story has been 'okay, with some very good moments', it's because it's stuck to a couple of lanes and fleshed them out, using the rest of its madcap multitudes as garnish, not main ingredients. Let's take a moment to rattle off a list of what each game actually focused on from the aforementioned genre grab-bag:

Borderlands 1 was Mad Max with the barest splash of science fantasy at the end.
Borderlands 2 was cyberpunk dystopic satire, little Mad Max thrown in there, and some solid character drama.
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel hammered home the science fantasy elements, and focused on character development.
Tales From the Borderlands threw away most of the sci-fantasy heroics in lieu of character work and corporate satire.

One reason Borderlands 3 didn't work—and there are many—was its effort to be everything all at once. It was tremendously unfocused. The galactic streamer (cyberpunk dystopia satire) bandit kingpins with a cult (Mad Max) were also briefly-conjoined twins with superpowers (science fantasy) but they were also children of Typhon DeLeon with barely-touched upon daddy issues (character work) and—do you see what I mean?

(Image credit: Gearbox)

The reason Handsome Jack casts such a long shadow over the series is because his writer, Anthony Burch, knew what the guy was about. His entire defined arc was a narcissistic corporate megalomaniac yelling 'I'm not owned!' until he eventually turned into a corn cob. You simply cannot come up with a similar elevator pitch for the Calypso Twins. They're undefined narrative mud from the word "go".

It's the same inconsistency that messed up Tales' Rhys and Vaughn, who were hucked into Borderlands 3 because people liked 'em, I guess: Characters who were ostensibly interesting because they were complete randoms in a wild, weird space-west setting, reduced to hollow, Flanderized versions of themselves. Scattershot is the word.

You can see Gearbox starting to correct for this, even, in Borderlands 3's DLC, all of which were a surprisingly big improvement on the base game's story—because they all picked a vibe and mostly stuck with it.

You've got an Oceans-11 send-up in Moxxi's Heist, a wild west adventure in Bounty of Blood, a lovecraftian parody in Guns, Love, and Tentacles, and a psychedelic trip into the mental state of Krieg in Fustercluck. None of these DLCs necessarily broke new ground, but they were all ostensibly fine—to the point where I'd recommend you actually go and play them if you bounced off BL3 because of its story.

So when I say that I hope Borderlands 4's story is 'good', I also mean 'focused'—and that could be what's happening. Piecing together info from the story and character trailers, it looks like we're grabbing cyberpunk dystopia and character-driven drama from the grab-bag, this time.

As long as its story stays focused on that (and has fewer irreverent memes that make you want to hurl yourself in front of the nearest Catch-A-Ride) I think we're golden. Here's to hoping Borderlands can find its groove again.

All Borderlands 4 Shift codes and how to redeem them

Andrea Shearon — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 15:39:13 +0000

Borderlands introduced Shift codes to the series formula ages ago, and that tradition goes unbroken in Borderlands 4. Historically, Vault Hunters found new additions on official X accounts, and there's been a steady stream of Borderlands 4 Shift codes flying about since launch week that continues today.

Borderlands 4 Shift codes

Active Borderlands 4 Shift codes
Shift Code	Reward	Expiration
THX3B-H9FCW-CRBT5-BBJ3T-SXT65	1x Golden Key	Unlisted
T9RJB-BFKRR-3RBTW-B33TB-KCZB9	1x Golden Key	Unlisted
WH5TB-BS5SR-3HC9W-HT3B3-STRKW	5x Golden Key	Unlisted
J9RTT-KWCK3-CFBB5-BTBT3-FKRB6	1x Golden Key	Unlisted
BHRB3-XCWCJ-WFJTK-JTJJT-FCWF9	1x Golden Key	Unlisted
3SRB3-95CC3-K6TB5-BTJTB-66ZHW	1x Golden Key	Unlisted
TZFT3-K9Z33-5FT3W-BJ33T-WZ5X5	1x Golden Key	Unlisted
3ZRT3-K59KK-W6BJ5-B3TJ3-9WT99	"Like Vermillion Bucks" Vault Hunter skin	December 31, 2030
J963B-S66WK-56J3K-JJT3T-BF9T5	"Luck of the Kairish" Vault Hunter skin	December 31, 2030
BH633-66F5C-WFBB5-33TJB-CBSR9	"You're So Vein" Vault Hunter skin.	December 31, 2030
39FJB-CT5S3-5FTTW-BBB3J-F3HKZ	"Hype Squad" Vault Hunter skin.	December 31, 2030
3HX3J-RJWSJ-CFBBC-3BJ3B-RWZ36	"A Winter Borderland" Vault Hunter skin.	December 31, 2030
BZ6J3-3JKHB-CX3B5-TTJTT-HJBZW	"The World on His Shoulders" Vault Hunter skin.	December 31, 2030
J9XTB-SJWS3-WRTTC-BJTJJ-TH6TX	"A Winter Borderland" Echo-4 drone skin	December 31, 2030
THFB3-R9XKK-CFBJW-T33BB-9R3CC	“Gourd Your Loins” Vault Hunter Head (but only if the previous code didn't work for you)	December 31, 2030
3S6BB-ZXT93-KRT3W-BT3T3-JW6TZ	"Gourd Your Loins" Vault Hunter Head & the "Hex Appeal" Weapon Skin	December 31, 2030
J96JT-BCXKT-C6JJ5-JTJBB-BZTXJ	Harlowe 'Maliwannabee' skin	December 31, 2030
BZ6JJ-CB6CT-WXJJW-3TT3B-56FZ5	Vex 'Purple Friday' skin	December 31, 2030
JZ6BJ-SBR5J-WF3BK-BT3BB-TX9HB	Amon 'Cult Classic' skin	December 31, 2030
TZXT3-XJXCB-CXBJW-BTTJT-9SK6B	Rafa 'Savings Saviour' skin	December 31, 2030
JS63J-JSCWJ-CFTBW-3TJ3J-WJS5R	1x Vault Hunter Skin, 1x Legendary Ripper Shield, 2x ECHO-4 Drone Skins	December 31, 2030

One of these Shift codes is actually from the end of the Borderlands 4 credits, of all places. Wait till the end and you'll be treated to a thank you message from the Gearbox developers, and a Shift code as a cherry on top.

Shift codes typically reward you with Golden Keys, which are used to open the unique chests found in Belton's Bore, The Launchpad, Carcadia, or The Lockaway to receive legendary drops. You can check how many Golden Keys you have in the currency section of your inventory.

Outside of this typical code, you can also grab one Borderlands 4 Shift code through a rather unusual process. You'll just need to adjust some settings if you already have a Shift account, or sign up for one to receive the Hazard Pay weapon skin.

Expired Borderlands 4 Shift codes

Expired codes
Shift Code	Reward	Expired
JZRBB-9T9SB-56J3K-TBBTT-RB939	3x Golden Key	June 30, 2026
3HR3B-RJ9SJ-5FT3C-JT3JT-J9XZX	3x Golden Key	June 23, 2026
BZFBT-WT9S3-WR3BC-3TJ3B-HSFBB	3x Golden Key	June 16, 2026
BZ6J3-TBHST-CX3JK-J33T3-9FJ95	3x Golden Key	June 9, 2026
THXBB-9ZFST-5R3JW-33JJB-JT9RT	3x Golden Key	June 2, 2026
TSR33-F96ST-CRTBK-JB3JT-5KJHR	3x Golden Key	May 26, 2026
JHRJT-W9F93-WFJTK-3J3TT-Z6BK5	3x Golden Key	May 19, 2026
3HF33-JHFZ3-CRBT5-33333-S5W3X	3x Golden Key	May 12, 2026
T96J3-SFRH3-56BJC-3TTTJ-ZBJSB	3x Golden Key	May 5, 2026
3ZR3T-6CSKW-WFTJC-JB33B-Z55ZT	5x Golden Key	April 30, 2026
3SFBB-CRXST-C6J3K-BTJTJ-XXK5S	3x Golden Key	April 21, 2026
BS633-3XR9T-W6TJ5-J33JJ-RWT5T	3x Golden Key	April 14, 2026
3SFJB-SK6ZJ-KRTT5-B3BT3-3ST9W	5x Golden Key	April 7, 2026
BZ6TT-JBWKB-KX3BK-BJT3T-5FS63	1x Golden Key	October 26, 2025
3Z6T3-CTWWB-KX3BW-3B3BT-SWBSB	1x Golden Key	October 26, 2025
TZR3T-JZJKJ-WXJTC-T33TB-RFCFR	1x Golden Key	October 22, 2025
3S6TT-CZJWT-WXJT5-3B3BJ-JS3JZ	1x Golden Key	October 22, 2025
J96BJ-RZJWB-C6TJC-BBJJJ-5B5W9	1x Golden Key	October 22, 2025
39FB3-SHWXS-RRWZK-533TB-JHJBC	1x Golden Key	October 1, 2025
WHWJB-XH3SX-39CZW-H3BBB-BTF55	1x Golden Key	September 30, 2025
THRBT-WW6CB-56TB5-3B3BJ-XBW3X	1x Golden Key	September 30, 2025
JH6BB-6RST3-5FB35-JT3BB-R3WCB	1x Golden Key	September 29, 2025
JZRTJ-SR9BB-W6T35-BJBTT-36FZR	1x Golden Key	September 29, 2025
BSFTB-TZ9BB-KRJBK-TTJB3-6S3KS	1x Golden Key	September 29, 2025
JSX3J-B6SBJ-CXTBC-B3T3B-BZZZT	1x Golden Key	September 26, 2025
BHRBJ-ZWHT3-W6JBK-BT3BB-CW3ZK	1x Golden Key	September 26, 2025
BHFJ3-WXHBB-W63JK-B33B3-5HX95	1x Golden Key	September 26, 2025
J9XBB-KK9T3-CRTBW-BBT3T-KTBTW	1x Golden Key	September 24, 2025
JHFTJ-R5HBT-KF3TK-TBJT3-JJTHH	1x Golden Key	September 24, 2025
TSR3B-J5S3T-KRBJW-BTTBJ-JRCXX	1x Golden Key	September 22, 2025
3H63J-Z3S3J-KR3BK-BTJ33-ZWKTK	1x Golden Key	September 22, 2025
3ZXJB-53STT-56T3W-B3TT3-HTS95	1x Golden Key	September 21, 2025
BSRT3-FTZBJ-K6BTW-JB3T3-WXT99	1x Golden Key	September 21, 2025
39RTJ-3JZTJ-C6T35-JBTT3-5TFCC	1x Golden Key	September 19, 2025

How to get the Hazard Pay weapon skin

(Image credit: Gearbox Software)

If you already have a Shift account, log in and check for the blue banner with the Hazard Pay weapon skin in the account section. If you don't have one, go ahead and register for free then loop back to the account page.

Select Profile, scroll down to User Preferences, and select the first option, "I would like to receive news and promotional messages from 2K and its affiliates." It should also have a little blurb just below that mentioning you'll also get the Hazard Pay cosmetic when you play Borderlands 4.

Finally, click Update Preferences, and the note on the Hazard Pay skin disappears at the bottom. The new blue banner at the top promises to deliver the weapon skin as long as you link your associated gaming platform with the same Shift account. So double check your Steam, Epic Games, or Xbox Live logins (wherever you plan to buy Borderlands 4) under Gaming Platforms to make sure you're prepared.

(Image credit: Gearbox Software)

The Hazard Pay weapon skin isn't something that will automatically drop in your inventory. You'll need to log into Borderlands 4 with your Shift account to trigger the code email., then redeem it through the in-game menu or official site.

Where to find more Shift codes for Borderlands 4

Well, Gearbox has already confirmed its official newsletter as one source of Borderlands 4 Shift codes, promising "those who stay subscribed are sure to reap additional rewards."

As for other sources, we've seen Borderlands Shift codes pop up on Randy Pitchford's X account and the official Borderlands X account. Gearbox has also stuffed codes away in hidden places, like in concept art or trailers, though those usually wind up confirmed by Gearbox social media accounts, too.

How to redeem Borderlands 4 Shift codes

(Image credit: Gearbox Software)

The gist of Shift code redemption will work the same in Borderlands 4. You can redeem codes either in-game or through the site, and you'll want to hop on them ASAP to avoid losing out on any limited-time rewards.

Here's what you need to do:

Log in or create a Shift account through Gearbox's official website
Select the Gaming Platforms tab to link the storefront where you bought BL4
Visit the Rewards tab while logged in to your account
Enter the 25-digit Shift code and select Check

You can also redeem Borderlands 4 codes in-game by opening the Rewards tab and using the Shift menu.

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Borderlands 1's artstyle overhaul filled Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford with dread because he thought he'd 'Have to go in and look at what they did' and 'shoot it in the head'

Harvey Randall — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 10:49:23 +0000

I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a series that 'plays it safe' more than Borderlands—and this isn't an insult. Every game I've played in the series has taken the same formula and added another nice crunchy little layer on top of it, and as a result, I've enjoyed basically every one I've touched. It's my ol' faithful, my pal, my homeboy, my rotten soldier, my sweet cheese, my good-time boy. What I'm saying is I like them a lot.

But there was a time when looter-shooters weren't ubiquitous. Not only was Borderlands doing something new back in (oh man) 2009, it also pulled off one hell of a Hail Mary—a complete top-to-bottom revamp of its artstyle that saw most of the game remade.

That's per an interview where Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, ever-passionately spoken, tells Game Informer's Brian Shea: "Before we launched it, there were a lot of people going, 'Well, cute, but it's a post-apocalyptic vibe, and id Software is making Rage and Bethesda is making Fallout. You guys are screwed' … We believed in it, but a lot of people believe in things that don't work, so are we tricking ourselves?"

While Pitchford at the time said that "it's kind of got to be realism" or the game would bomb (you can still find some video footage from 2008 of a grainier, less cel-shaded Borderlands), "We knew it wasn't exactly right; it just wasn't exactly right for what the look and feel and vibe of what Borderlands was supposed to be—it didn't match the gameplay."

This led to Pitchford giving an art team composed of "like, five guys" a whole two weeks to "mess around with the look and the feel, and I immediately knew I made a mistake … I'm going to let these guys spin for two weeks, which means they're going to be even more invested in what they're doing, and then I have to go in and look at what they did, and I have to shoot it in the head.

"That's what's going to happen here. Son of a bitch. I'm an idiot. Why did I do that?' But there was something in my heart that knew that we had to at least look at and explore. I knew we weren't right."

Fortunately, Pitchford didn't have to pull out his Glock and double-tap two weeks of very hard, series-defining work: "I go into the meeting and, looking at it, it's fucking right; It's right … It feels right. And it's like everything we knew about what was wrong was confirmed when we felt it was right."

Game Informer also spoke to several art leads and devs, including creative director Graham Timmins (at the time a lead level designer), who called the choice "Fucking insane. We had already been working on the game for several years at that point, and not only did we change the art style, we basically threw out all of the levels—I think only Trash Coast and, like, one other level made it through—everything else, we remade basically from scratch.

"... We rebuilt the whole game to match the new art style from that time. It was an incredibly intense time, and we were like, 'What the hell are we doing?'"

Timmins and his co-workers saw the light eventually, though: "We started to figure out, 'This is what Borderlands is. I can finally see it. We have a great art style that represents the attitude. All the balance was coming together. So, it was a very intense time. It was crazy to see, basically, a whole game come together in a matter of months and ship it. It was a really special time."

Borderlands 4's art director Adam May concurs: "It was absolutely instrumental … I think we would have probably been lost in the noise. You couldn't not look at it because nothing else looked anything like that at the time, so at a bare minimum, it got the attention that we needed early on."

While I'm guilty-as-charged for giving Pitchford some (playful, Pitchford, playful!) flak for putting his foot in his mouth over prices or kinda losing it at random people on X over the Borderlands movie—I'm certain he made the right call, one that might not have been made by other executives in his position. That initial No Rest For the Wicked trailer grabbed many gamers, including my 14-year-old self (I'm 30 years old now, help) in a chokehold, and it wouldn't have done so without the absolute madcap decision to start over.

Randy Pitchford says the Borderlands film would've sucked a whole lot more if he'd directed it: 'It would have been way worse'

andy.chalk@pcgamer.com (Andy Chalk) — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 20:50:56 +0000

"It could always be worse" is something I try to keep in mind as I lurch and stumble through this extended Gong Show called life: As bad as any given situation is, there's almost always room for it to slide even further down into the cosmic crap bucket. And such is the case with the recent Borderlands movie: Yeah, it really sucked, but Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford recently reassured The Gamer that it could've sucked a whole lot more.

"It would have been way worse if I directed it," Pitchford said at Gamescom. "I'm not a filmmaker. Eli Roth is an awesome filmmaker. I promise you, if I directed that movie, it'd be a disaster."

Okay, but here's the thing Randy: It was a disaster. Nothing against Eli Roth, who I'm quite sure really is a better filmmaker than you or I, but the Borderlands movie has a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is somehow actually up from the 7% it was rocking when PC Gamer film critic/victim Joshua Wolens compared it to Uwe Boll's worst crimes against cinema.

It also, lest anyone thinks Borderlands is one of those movies that makes a ton of money even though critics hate it, was a major box office bomb: It ended its theatrical run earning just $31 million, just barely enough to cover its marketing and distribution costs and significantly less than the 2005 Doom movie starring Karl Urban and The Rock.

Did you secretly direct the Borderlands movie, Randy? Because that seems pretty disastrous to me.

Echoing comments he made in September 2024, Pitchford compared the Borderlands movie to The Beatles: He's a huge fan of the band, but finds some of their work "unlistenable." Should Ringo, Paul, George, and John have been told, after releasing "All You Need Is Love," to never again make music? I might vote "yes" on that one, but that's probably not the popular position and certainly Pitchford would not agree.

"That's not the attitude," he said. "You know, keep making music. I'm glad you tried something. Yeah, go for it. Please make more.

"My attitude is, if there are great creators, artists, entertainers that have something to say and they think they can only do it with Borderlands, and they can demonstrate that they can do it, I want to enable that. We don't always succeed, but we’ve got to keep swinging."

Frankly, I respect that attitude. Creativity is inherently risky, and you're not going to get far if you're unwilling to roll the dice. But I also think that at least part of the problem with the Borderlands film is that it didn't take risks: As poor Josh wrote, it's a film made up of cliches, with "the feeling of creative writing homework completed just before the deadline, a collection of overworn tropes stretched to fill a word count, or a studio-mandated length of at least an hour and a half."

So, could the Borderlands movie have been worse? Sure! Jack Black might have shown up at your theater to ensure everyone was sufficiently hyped for the whole Claptrap shitting bullets thing (he apparently does that from time to time), or somebody could've laced the popcorn with anthrax. But does that mean we're ready to start looking at it as anything but a disaster? Put it this way: I think there are reasonable odds the Borderlands film would have actually been better if Randy had directed it, if only because it might have at least been bad in an interesting way. Maybe they'll give him a shot at the next one.

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Borderlands 4's new endgame mode will let you skip the campaign so you're ready for the next year of seasonal events and bosses

Tyler Colp — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 22:07:20 +0000

Like any good loot-based RPG, Borderlands 4 won't be over after it drops in a few weeks. Gearbox has a big plan to release a mix of free and paid DLC over the next year to keep the game's extensive endgame fresh.

The first concrete details about the endgame and the next year of updates was revealed during a panel at PAX West today.

Unlike previous Borderlands, the new game's ultimate vault hunter mode won't make you retread the campaign once you've completed it once. Instead, you get to skip all that and focus on completing increasingly difficult mission challenges to rank up. You can even start new characters at level 30 just to do the endgame mode.

A rotating selection of "weekly wildcard" missions will reward legendary loot and there will be a weekly boss to kill for better rewards. Basically, Borderlands 4 will send you around the world doing daily and weekly tasks to gear yourself up like you would in an MMO—and you can group up with friends or strangers during it all too.

The first limited-time "seasonal mini event", called Horrors of Kairos, will be the first major free update. It will bring "tweaked gameplay" with some "spooky vibes," the developers said. Alongside the event will be new legendary weapons, cosmetics, and a new weather variant.

(Image credit: Gearbox Software)

After the free drop will be the first of four paid bounty pack DLCs, which includes new missions, a new boss, new legendary gear, new cosmetics, and a new vehicle.

Gearbox must be confident that most players will be through the campaign and well into the endgame by that point because it's releasing the first "invincible boss" next. These high-level fights are like raid bosses and reward some of the best loot in the game. This update will also be where you can climb up another level in the endgame vault hunter mode.

A second bounty pack with the similar bundle of stuff is due out in early 2026, and then Borderlands 4's first paid story pack will be released. This one's called Mad Ellie and the Vault of the Damned and will give the world a cosmic horror spin with a new region of Kairos to explore. There you'll find new main story missions and new side missions to complete. A new vault hunter will also debut here, but Gearbox wants to keep that a secret for now.

The next year is going to be packed with updates for endgame players according to the roadmap. And it's nice knowing that even if you aren't a build min-maxer, you'll still have plenty of new storylines to play through as the months go on.

Borderlands 4 will be released on September 12.

Borderlands has been too hot, too cold, and will now be just right, says Randy Pitchford: 'We can see those times we've gone too far'

Harvey Randall — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 16:22:56 +0000

Turns out, videogame development is a lot like porridge, and it can take a bit of fiddling to get things right. And if you think that doesn't make sense, you might not be Randy Pitchford, who said something similar in a Future Games interview with the Gearbox boss himself.

"With each game, we push boundaries," Pitchford explains, "and we can see those times we've gone too far. Sometimes it's in a game mechanic, sometimes it's in the story decisions or tone decisions."

That matches up to what we've heard out of the writers, too, who've stated often that Borderlands 4 is trying to shake off 3's instantly-outdated meme nonsense in lieu of character-focused humour and a more grounded story, where the jokes come from, y'know, the writing.

Despite having greatly enjoyed most Borderlands games, I can't say I'm too bummed to see those things go, and the recent character trailers have only piqued my interest. They're still just the littlest bit jank (in an endearing, Gearbox sort of way), but I certainly felt like someone was trying to make me laugh with more than just references.

Pitchford continues to say, in his usual effusive tone, that experience really is the best teacher: "The fact we're now in our fourth iteration means we've seen the extent, we've seen the boundaries, we've seen when we've pushed the pendulum too far in one direction, too far in the other direction, and we know where the bullseye is. And I think that's to the benefit of all the gamers."

As an (alleged) gamer myself, I'm genuinely happy to give Borderlands 4 a chance. I tend to root for the underdog, and when it comes to convincing players it can spin a good yarn, Borderlands is definitely starting off on the wrong foot. Here's hoping 87 bazillion lessons have been learned.

Borderlands 3 'sometimes felt like parody' of itself, say writers, but 4 aims to fix that: 'If I tried to put a meme in the game, he would come to my house with a baseball bat'

Harvey Randall — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 10:35:04 +0000

Borderlands 3's story is… interesting. As someone who has played most of Gearbox's loot'em shoot'ems, I agree with the general consensus that 3's story is kinda the worst. Mind, I've never hopped into Pandora's (or its associated moons') deep narrative—but after hours of outdated memes, when a certain character sacrificed themselves to Beyonce's "This Girl Is On Fire", I straight-up laughed. Which is generally not a good sign.

Per a recent interview with IGN, that's something the Borderlands 4 team is keen to fix: "I think that we had [our] own internal critiques about the tone and the level of humor present in Borderlands 3," says narrative director Sam Winkler.

"[It's] something that we already were starting to address in the DLCs for Borderlands 3, but we wanted to really make that a central point of Borderlands 4," which Winkler explains involved a lot of self-reflection and question-asking: "'Where is this? What does it mean? Why are we doing this next big, monolithic game with a 4 in its title?' … 'How are we also going to evolve the storytelling, the humor, and the characters, and what we want to do with them?’"

Lead writer Taylor Clark puts it a little more bluntly: "When I was talking to Sam, the grounded tone was a priority. 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's quick to state, however, that he's not "anti-meme", and that "there's a specific meme in this game, and I feel justified putting it in because I accidentally created it." He plays it coy, but I'm almost 100% certain it's Zanzibart, a stone-cold and accurate roast of FromSoftware's storytelling, undercut by the fact he'd recently written, uh, Borderlands 3.

In fairness to Winkler, he later confirmed that "I WILL consume the Charnel Amulet in the Cathedral of the Dusk Knight to unlock the secret door into Zanzibart's tomb so I can read the flavour text on his mouldering deathmask that says '... am I remembered?' and then spend an hour on his Wiki Page", so it was all in good fun. Anyway.

Lin Joyce, managing director of narrative properties, adds that the team is regularly "gut check"-ing itself: "'Is this as funny to the characters and their lived experience as it is to the player? Can we do both?' That situational comedy and context helped us also keep the tone grounded, and the comedy then has purpose."

Overall, Winkler talks as though he wants to strike a balance—goofy and whacky circumstances that sometimes produce jokes, with characters that take the situation seriously. He makes a comparison to Star Trek: Lower Decks: "[That show] works really well—it just won a Hugo Award—because it takes its characters seriously. It takes its circumstances seriously.

"It's a project that is clearly made out of love for Star Trek and the characters in the story, rather than some sort of parody of it. I think that on Borderlands 3, in our worst hours, it sometimes felt like parody, and that is where we edged into a red line." Winkler adds that the team intends to "balance both humor, levity, and authentic character storytelling that takes itself seriously."

I'm tentatively hopeful. Again, I don't need Borderlands 4 to win awards, but while I had a stupid amount of fun zipping around as movespeed Zane in BL3, the story nearly spoiled it all. But I've seen evidence that Gearbox has been cleaning up its act. The DLCs were downright fine, and while BL4's character trailers haven't been mind-blowing, they've left me genuinely curious as to whether ol' Gearbox can pull it off. Also apparently Claptrap will make you cry or something. I'll believe it when I see it.

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Borderlands 4 has a 'very stupid' glitch that lets you unlock a character's most powerful abilities before refunding all your skill points, but don't expect it to be around long as Gearbox says 'we're on it'

Magical Randy Pitchford summons the ghost of games discourse past, says games 'Haven't even had our Citizen Kane yet'

Turns out, that horny Borderlands 4 shield wasn't actually supposed to be so horny—or at least, not so horny so often: 'Voice lines now trigger at the intended frequency'

New Borderlands 4 patch stumbles by making the nerfed crit knife an actual DPS loss on some builds, plus a Halloween event that's 'like getting a dead rat in a box for Christmas'

Borderlands 4 smashes sales in the US, says analyst—it was the top dog in September, the fastest-selling entry in the series, and is already the 3rd most-bought game this year

The Borderlands 4 update that's going to take away your infinite-bleed god-knife is delayed until next week

Despite past posting, Randy Pitchford is actually 'happy to live in that world' where Borderlands 4 complaints aren't about 'how we f*cked up the story', after all

Randy Pitchford says sifting through the loot in Borderlands 4 is tickling a fundamental part of you: 'Our brains need to do it, and our brains like doing it, and we’re better off when we do it'

Kick ass and chew brains in Duke Nukem: Horror Castle, a spooky mod where you blast skeletons and chow down on the gooey insides of their skulls

Borderlands 4 post-launch roadmap includes seasonal event, paid DLC, and its first raid boss

The bold and futile attempt to fix the disastrous Aliens: Colonial Marines

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

After telling Borderlands 4 player to 'game that sh*t', Randy Pitchford finds out that you cannot, in fact, game that sh*t—says 'well, sh*t', confirms it's a bug and that it'll be fixed 'within the next two weeks'

Borderlands 4's Thursday patch will buff the game's cast, but UI improvements are coming later

Borderlands 4 dev clears up the difference between Skill Damage and Action Skill damage, and I feel like a combat log is in order so I didn't have to find this out on a Reddit thread

There's a sidequest in Borderlands 4 based on a meme making fun of Soulsborne games and it's great

The first DLC vault hunter in Borderlands 4 will be a robot cowboy gambler named C4SH who throws playing cards

Borderlands 4's latest patch triggers a flurry of performance complaints, but Gearbox says new stuttering problems 'should resolve over time as the shaders continue to compile'

Change List:

Weekly Activities:

Stability & Performance

Rewards & Progression

Vault Hunter Changes

Harlowe the Gravitar

Amon the Forgeknight

Vex the Siren

Rafa the Exo-Soldier

Gameplay

Gear

UI & UX

Visuals

Audio

Misc

Mod maker brings Skibidi Toilet to Borderlands 4 for one simple reason: To spite the narrative director who said he'd 'cry real tears' if the game shipped with it

Borderlands 4 player finds bugged interaction that can cause 'Total Existence Failure' damage to endgame bosses without a proper build—and no legendary items or crit knives to be seen

Borderlands 4 is focusing on buffs, not nerfs—opting to 'start with underperforming gear/skills first' rather than its infinite-bleed god-knife

I am so terribly glad I've learned you can easily reset all your cooldowns in Borderlands 4 before starting my shotgun grind

Borderlands 4 performance patch out now with PC 'our top priority'

Stability

Gameplay & Progression

Loot & Items

Borderlands 4 review

Got my tempo

Ain't no frames for the wicked

On the hunt

Let me love you

In the 16 years I've played this series, Borderlands 4 is the first entry that's made me want to do post-game grinding—Gearbox just needs to fix its dang Wildcard Missions first

A bad hand

Gearbox breaks out some free loot because Borderlands players have already looted over 750 million items, half a million of which were from trash cans

Don't get stuck grinding in Borderlands 4's version of the Hinterlands—in fact, you're screwing yourself out of EXP if you try to do every sidequest before beating the main campaign

Nothing is safe from Borderlands 4's 'infinite damage' build that wipes out bosses in less than 10 seconds

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford's chronic tweeting syndrome strikes again, says 'less than 1% of 1%' of players are filing tickets about performance so clearly the internet's overblowing it

Randy Pitchford challenged players to break the Borderlands 4 servers over the weekend, offering free DLC for anyone who takes part

Borderlands 4 takes a shot at Embracer Group by naming a town filled with trash and an AI talking toilet after it

Gearbox responds to worries about Borderlands 4's terms of service: 'Take-Two does not use spyware in its games'

Borderlands 4 launches to 'mostly negative' reviews on Steam thanks to widespread performance problems and crashes

Borderlands 4 review round-up: 'The best Borderlands game I've ever played—but with a small hitch'

"Every millisecond of a good scrap bursts with texture"

"Exactly the kick in the pants [the series] has needed"

"Rises beyond anything the series has accomplished to this point"

"Feels like the sequel to Borderlands 2"

"The best Borderlands game I've ever played—but with a small hitch"

"Repetition eventually leaves combat feeling stale"

Borderlands 4 global release times and preload details

When is the Borderlands 4 unlock time?

What are the Borderlands 4 launch times on consoles?

Borderlands 4 global release countdown timer

Is there preloading for Borderlands 4?

I'm ranking every Borderlands game ahead of BL4's release from worst to best, because the people love their lists and I'm here to provide

5. Borderlands (the first one)

4. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands

After telling Borderlands 4 player to 'game that sht', Randy Pitchford finds out that you cannot, in fact, game that sht—says 'well, sh*t', confirms it's a bug and that it'll be fixed 'within the next two weeks'