Another day, another doomed hero shooter is condemned to the void. On Sunday, Gearbox Software said goodnight to Battleborn and shut the FPS's servers off for good. They removed the game from sale a year ago, when they first announced they would be deactivating it. Now, it's no longer playable at all - not even its singleplayer mode has survived.
]]>Gearbox Software's 2016 flop of an FPS Battleborn now has a clear path to its death. Publishers 2K announced plans to shut down the multi-hyphenate hero shooter's servers in January 2021, rendering the game fully unplayable - singleplayer and all. Battleborn's competitive multiplayer side went free-to-play in June 2017 but the game is now barely played. This is not surprising. You can still download it and have a go, if you are curious about what Gearbox were up to before Borderlands 3.
]]>Gearbox's FPS/hobby-grade coop campaign/genre blended, multi-mode competitive e-sports/meta-growth, choice + epic Battleborn heroes game, Battleborn [official site], is being put out to pasture. By that I mean that the shooter has no more planned content on the horizon and creative director, Randy Varnell, is moving to another project but the servers are staying up for the time being.
]]>Having attempted to try out Gearbox FPS/hobby-grade coop campaign/genre blended, multi-mode competitive e-sports/meta-growth, choice + epic Battleborn [official site] heroes... thingummy Battleborn's new PvP mode, Supercharge, I must excuse myself to make an angry cup of tea.
I HAVE MY ANGRY TEA NOW. Right. So what is Supercharge?
]]>My brother's elderly cat decided to start pooping behind the television rather than take himself outside. To combat this my mother set up a row of cacti at cat butt height behind the television and thus began a battle of wills which spanned that cat's remaining years. Speaking of free-to-play competitive multiplayer scenarios you can enjoy from the comfort of your living room, Battleborn has now made its competitive multiplayer modes available free of charge.
]]>Battleborn [official site] publisher 2K will continue to support the game despite a performance which its parent company described as "below our expectations". You could also title this article:"I listened to the Take-Two Interactive Q1 2017 earnings conference call so you didn't have to."
I was curious as to how the subject of Battleborn would be handled because, although Take-Two Interactive CEO, Strauss Zelnick, said on the call that "the game launched to solid reviews", mine was not one of those. Audiences on PC didn't flock to the game either despite all the marketing I saw and it quickly vanished from the top 100 in terms of Steam's daily player/concurrent player charts. When I put the review up the week after the game's release it was actually below Gearbox's four-year-old game, Borderlands 2.
Here are the relevant bits:
]]>The latest offering from Humble Bundle is a stack of 2K games, including third-person horrors-of-war shooter, Spec Ops: The Line [official site] in the lowest tier. That's yours for a dollar or more but (the horror, the HORROR) you'll have to take a copy of Duke Nukem Forever as well. The Darkness 2 is the much more palatable final third of that one dollar selection. Jumping to the next tier, with a minimum buy-in of $8.37, gets you a copy of Civ V, NBA 2K16, Mafia II and...a Battleborn skin pack. Civ V is decent, even without the expansions, but I'd be tempted to wait until October for the sequel.
Spec Ops is the star here. At that price, it's close to unmissable.
]]>Okay, shh shhh I'm going to do it. Keep quiet or you'll blow everything. If the news editor finds out I'm posting about another already-released game during E3 week, I'm really in for it. Though this is perhaps a game not many have even noticed is out, going by player numbers. Okay, I'm going to do it. One of you distract her for me - bottle of whisky dangling from a stick should do it.
So! With bloody-minded persistence despite playercounts which have fallen out of Steam's top 100, Gearbox and 2K's so-so FPS Battleborn [official site] is going ahead with plans to add optional microtransaction cosmetic doodads.
]]>Gearbox's hero-centric shooter/MOBA/co-op project, Battleborn [official site], has given a proper look at the first of its five additional heroes - Alani, the water-bending warrior monk. Alice mentioned her a while back but there's now a run-down of her abilities if you're interested in playing as her.
The official release is on 31 May but if you picked up a season pass or the digital deluxe version of the game you can unlock her early with a hero key. (Also if you played in the PS4 open beta of the game but I don't know if we're allowed to mention that on a PC gaming site without alarms sounding and the walls starting to crumble.)
Here's her intro video:
]]>Battleborn [official site] will get its first free extra character later this month, Gearbox have announced. More specifically, Alani will arrive on Tuesday, May 24th for folks who've bought the DLC season pass, then May 31st for everyone else. Pip didn't really like Battleborn but if you're still playing then hey, I guess you do. You're probably quite keen to soon have some sort of healy warriory waterwoman to play as. Wouldn't turn down a double XP weekend either.
]]>Battleborn [official site] is Gearbox's hero-shooter-sometimes-a-MOBA-sometimes-co-op-story-sometimes-all-these-other-things… thingummy. Having spent many hours with it I'm no closer to a succinct definition of what it actually is but I can tell you I did not have a great or inspiring time. Here's why:
]]>Well, more accurately it's The Souls Your Destination, but Dark Souls III being a chart-topper is old news now. This week's Steam shaker-upper is Paradox's intergalactic grand strategy title Stellaris - but one of PC gaming's oldest men takes up residence in the top ten too.
]]>Gearbox will be turning its attention to Borderlands 3* once the team has finished off work on their upcoming team co-op shooter Battleborn [official site] and its DLC.
I thiiiiiink Borderlands 3 had already been confirmed in a bunch of "yeah, in the future" and "we want to" ways but this time there was mention of actual project staff by Gearbox's CEO Randy Pitchford and that there will likely be little references to the game in Battleborn DLC so it's more concrete as information goes…
]]>We've mentioned before that Gearbox's multiplayer shooter Battleborn [official site] had an open beta test coming up, but that's now started so hey, here's me to remind you. Until Monday afternoon, you can download and play a chunk of Battleborn for free through Steam. If you want a go before the game launches or you , like me, are not quite sure what it even is (a class-based shooter? a bit like a MOBA? that 'hero shooter' term Gearbox throw about is total tosh?) then this seems a decent opportunity.
]]>Gearbox's character-centric shooter Battleborn's [official site] open beta will begin on PC on 13 April, including access to two of the game's story episodes, the multiplayer modes "Incursion" and "Meltdown" and all the characters, loot, gear and progression systems.
I've written about Incursion before but let's talk about story mode - here's what it is, how it's referencing episodic TV and some more about how it works:
]]>I first played Battleborn [official site] back at E3 last year. Gearbox are calling it a hero shooter – a cartoonish FPS with a story campaign suited for one to five players plus competitive multiplayer options. I didn't write about it at the time because I didn't really feel like I had anything to say about it. It wasn't bad, but I didn't see anything in that demo – a mission set on the ice planet Bliss – which lured me in or inspired curiosity.
I confess I'd forgotten about the game in the interim but a preview event gave me a hands-on opportunity with Incursion (a mode from the competitive multiplayer side of Battleborn) and a chance to reappraise:
]]>What will you be doing on February 9th, 2016? I can't see far enough into my own future to tell you tell you what I'm doing even on Monday, yet I can say with absolute certainty that you won't be playing the finished version of Battleborn [official site] then. Whoa, Nellie! Put down the pitchfork and flaming torch. This isn't witchcraft: Gearbox's multiplayer shooter has been delayed, is all. It's now due on May 3rd, 2016, with an open beta test coming before that next year.
]]>Most MOBA incursions into other genres have focused on the genre's competitive underpinnings, but Gearbox seem to be pushing co-op pretty hard with Battleborn [official site] - not surprising, given they're the folks behind Borderlands. It's all good and well me saying this, but what does it mean to you? You'll get to play it from February 9th, 2016, publishers 2K have announced at Gamescom.
Cologne being The Land of Reveals, 2K have also unveiled another four characters from its 25-champ lineup and dropped a new trailer:
]]>I'd forgotten that Borderlands chaps Gearbox were making a MOBA-tinged FPS too. They are, a new trailer for Battleborn [official site] reminds me, though I wonder whether their recent silence on the game has reflected a rethinking of things. The 14 minutes of gameplay they showed last September looked a bit dull, with hordes of enemies lining up to plink away with harmless guns.
Now they're back with a handful more details on co-op and competitive multiplayer and singleplayer and a snappy pop music trailer ahead of its release this winter (and showing at E3).
]]>I briefly dismissed Battleborn as a console game that didn't belong on these pages, before realising, no, wait, that's Bloodborne. Battleborn is instead Gearbox's multiplayer first-person shooter that takes easy co-op and a cartoon-y world reminiscent of Borderlands' and combines it with lessons from e-sports, MOBAs and MMOs. They call it a "hero-shooter", but what the heck does that even mean.
There's fourteen-minutes of the game in action below, which does a better job of explaining what it really is.
]]>Hello everyone, and welcome to another exciting episode of "It's A MOBA But..."! Today's mystery game is Battleborn! It's coming from that Borderlands gang Gearbox Software, and certainly not to be confused with Bethesda's BattleCry, From Software's Bloodborne, or Battlezone. Now we're all settled, our first round is, as ever, Name That Twist! So, is Battleborn's twist:
a) destructible voxel terrain, b) a first-person view, or c) it's a roguelike?
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