The colorful and challenging hero shooter Battleborn is no longer being developed and is practically dead. Jürgen mourns the tragically failed project by Gearbox.
It’s over, Battleborn is dead. Recently, developer Gearbox announced that they will no longer provide updates for the hero shooter. The upcoming autumn update is still coming, then it’s over.
The servers are said to stay online, but with an average of just under 100 players, you really can’t talk about a living game. It is what it is: Battleborn is practically dead.
Battleborn – A cumbersome pleasure
Yet I remember well my first games in Battleborn. I had just returned from a trip to the USA and had already been trying to get a review key overseas. As soon as I was back in the country, I installed Battleborn and started playing happily.
That was rather a mistake. Because on the one hand, Battleborn is a complex game, and on the other hand, I was still suffering from severe jet lag from the flight. 13 hours in economy class with a height of 1.85 meters doesn’t go without a trace. Anyway, I got my ass kicked. Over and over again. I could hardly achieve anything, but still, the game was a lot of fun.
I wanted to delve into the complex gameplay, wanted to test all the heroes, and damn it, I wanted to have a success experience!
Battleborn – It was so wonderfully crazy!
Moreover, I liked the style of Battleborn! When I first saw it in screenshots, I thought for a moment it was a new update for Wildstar – that’s also a favorite of mine.
I just loved the crazy comic style and the cool heroes. Battleborn’s crazy bunch always appealed to me more than the rather Pixar-style trimmed and ultimately quite tame heroes from Overwatch.
Battleborn – The coolest heroes and the best soundtrack!
Would you like a little sample of my hero highlights?
- There was a penguin named Tobi, who sat in a mech and had big problems with his self-esteem.
- One “hero” was a grumpy old man named Cleese, who even stroked a holographic cat the wrong way. He flew over the battlefield in a comfortable high-tech chair full of weapons.
- The tanky Montana was a giant with a tiny head and a thick minigun. A walking parody of all the big, heavy characters in other games.
- Another character was the little, fat sparrow Ernest, who spoke like a grumpy sergeant and shot bombs and grenades.
- The arrogant robot Marquis was a wealthy snob who greeted his enemies (and teammates) with lines like “You disgust me!” or “Greetings, you wild ones!”.
- Also cool: The crazy chaos witch Orendi, who preferred to devour everyone else’s guts and was voiced by the fantastic Ashly Burch (among others Tiny Tina from Borderlands).
- The hero Oscar-Mike was the standard shooter soldier. He was so standard that he was just a clone in the game.
- One hero was even a ninja mushroom named Miko.
Also fantastic: The cool songs that Gearbox used for the announcement trailers. I even searched for all the songs on Spotify and – together with all the Borderlands songs – condensed them into a playlist that I am now listening to with a heavy heart while writing this article.
If you want to mourn with me, here would be the Spotify embed:
Battleborn – Hard humor and cool setting
Fitting to the crazy heroes was also the setting of Battleborn. Especially in the otherwise rather bland co-op mode, there were always incredibly funny situations. For example, during the boss fight against the spider robot Geoff, who constantly insists during the fight that he should be called “Arachnis, the Spider King”! Therefore, you can also – completely against all logic – fight him with anti-spider spray!
Or the scene where your loyal AI, which steers your landing ship, catches a virus and then slurs like it’s drunk and scrapes against pretty much every rock wall. Or the opportunity for a really silly (and thus even funnier) pun, where it turns out that “Arms Depots” (actually weapons depots) actually have mechanical arms and greet each other with a brofist.
The fact that the humor did not always come off as family-friendly or politically correct was also a big plus compared to the tame Overwatch and co.
Battleborn – It just wasn’t meant to be
Despite all these features, Battleborn unfortunately could never really engage enough players. While there was still quite a lot happening shortly after the release, the player numbers steadily declined shortly after the soon-to-follow Overwatch release, and soon Battleborn was hardly relevant anymore.
Neither the Battleborn Days organized by fans with great enthusiasm nor the quasi-free2play launch three months ago helped. Even the fan porn celebrated by the studio head didn’t do anything.
Battleborn will no longer be developed, and even though the servers are still running, there will soon be even less going on there than there already is. It’s really a shame for a wonderful game that deserved more success.
Battleborn is dead, long live Borderlands 3!
On the other hand, every end is also a new beginning. And in the case of Battleborn, this means that now more employees could work on Borderlands 3, the long-awaited new installment of the cult series by Gearbox.
And who knows, maybe we will see one or the other character as a variant in the new Borderlands installment? We will see …
More games that I love, but hardly anyone else does can be found under the link provided here. Hopefully, they won’t go the way of Battleborn!
