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:
- 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.
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