Ten years ago, an MMO set in Borderlands died, which was never playable in Europe. Now fans of the shooter series want to save the game.
What kind of game is this? In 2014, the loot shooter “Borderlands Online” was released in China. This is an MMO developed by 2K China.
The game featured four different classes that had different weapons and abilities. Overall, the game came with over 2,000 different weapons and allowed players to explore 18 instances in 3 different regions.
However, Take-Two shut down Borderlands Online in 2015, when they closed the studio behind the MMO and laid off 150 employees.
Fan wants to revive the shut down MMO
What is behind the efforts? The YouTuber, modder, and passionate Borderlands fan “EpicNNG” has decided to bring Borderlands Online back to life 10 years after its shutdown. His goal is to archive the game for the franchise’s community. He emphasizes that he does not wish to harm the companies involved nor profit from the project or claim intellectual property; he does this solely “for the purpose of media archiving.”
Initially, however, they had to obtain a version of the game. This was supposed to be found by one of his collaborators on a publicly accessible Chinese website, the YouTuber explains. Many of the download links were, however, infected with viruses, and they had to disable various security features in Windows to start the game’s .exe file – a risk he was willing to take.
You can see the entire video here:
Progress despite many problems
What’s the status of the revival of the game? The YouTuber encountered various problems when trying to start the game. First, he “cleaned” the shooter files, removing bloatware and the anti-cheat system. Then, he removed the login requirement at startup and reached a blank screen.
At some point, he managed to bypass the blank screen and call up various menus. He then reached the class selection for the first time. The next goal was to get into the actual game. However, since he was not sure if he even owned the complete game, he loaded the entire project into the Unity engine on which the MMO was based, according to the YouTuber.
EpicNNG was convinced that he had the complete game and stated that the build version number was indeed higher than the last publicly displayed version number. He describes:
We examined some maps, explored the hub world, missions, tutorials, and even the
main menu. We looked at characters, sprites, weapons, scripts, and more. It seemed like we literally had everything we needed.
However, there is currently little reason for joy for the YouTuber. He found that many scripts in the game were faulty. Although he had corrected hundreds of errors, there were thousands that needed to be fixed. This would take an enormous amount of time, EpicNNG explains, and would probably still result in the game remaining completely broken when they managed to get it running.
He explains that these errors could have various causes, such as custom elements that he and his team do not have in their Unity setup. Therefore, they returned to their original method, which led them to once again not be able to get past the loading screen after logging in.
What’s next? EpicNNG asked for help in his video. He wants the video to be shared so that it reaches people who can help him bypass the loading screen. However, he explicitly requests not to leak any assets or other information from Borderlands Online publicly to avoid upsetting the intellectual property holders – after all, he is only concerned with archiving the game.
The newest title in the popular shooter series is called Borderlands 4 and is set to release in September 2025. The release of the game has actually been moved up, as the head of the studio announced: Borderlands 4 just moved its release date and some developers are likely sweating now
