A dead Chinese Borderlands MMO is being revived

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Borderlands Online was revealed just a year before it was shut down.

A hunter with a sniper rifle and drone in Borderlands Online
(Image credit: 2K)

In 2015 it was announced that Borderlands Online had been canceled, and a bunch of people asked, "What was Borderlands Online anyway?" That's because it was planned to be a China-only MMO set in the Borderlands universe, with the kind of free-to-play model publishers used to see as a good way to "crack the Asian market" but wouldn't bother with in the west. Things have changed, hey?

Now, modder and dataminer EpicNNG (responsible for Wonderlands Redux, among other things), has dug up a build of Borderlands Online and got the character creator working again so a whole new generation can ask, "What was Borderlands Online anyway?"

Borderlands Online would have cast players as Vault Hunters who crash-land on Pandora, choosing from four character classes: Siren, Soldier, Berserker, and Hunter. It would have featured returning Borderlands NPCs like Claptrap and Dr. Zod, as well as familiar locations like Skag Gully and Tombstone, three PvP modes—last man standing, team vs team, and capture the flag—a gun-crafting system, and guilds.

Trailers made it look like a laggier version of the original Borderlands, but it's still an interesting bit of videogame history to see unearthed, 10 years after it was lost. EpicNNG has already found Counter-Strike map Dust 2 in the Borderlands Online files, though presumably it was just there for testing purposes. Their plan is to get the rest of the game into a playable state, though currently it crashes as soon as you leave the customization screen.

Meanwhile, Borderlands 4 is scheduled for a September 12 release, having been moved forward from its planned September 23 date. What we've seen so far looks a lot like boilerplate Borderlands only with a hoverbike you can summon wherever you are and no minimap. I'm holding out hope for another looter-shooter that's half as funny as Borderlands 2, but we'll see.

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Jody Macgregor
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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