5 Apr 2019
It’s been rather a wild week for Gearbox Software, with an impressive set of releases and announcements.
The publishing side of the business had Risk of Rain 2 hit Steam Early Access on March 28th, and reached over half a million players over the weekend. This follow-up to Hopoo Games’ 2013 success with the original Risk of Rain expands the co-op roguelike action platformer into a third dimension, and has a more stylized, less pixelated look.
This has been an incredible launch performance, considering its release was essentially a surprise.
Gearbox’s development branch (along with 2K Games) has had an exciting week, too. On the tails of the announcements about the Borderlands series at PAX East, this week saw the release of ultra HD updates for Borderlands Game of the Year edition and the Borderlands Handsome Collection–free for current owners–and significantly more information about the upcoming Borderlands 3.
Borderlands 3 will be expanding its scope to multiple planets instead of staying on Pandora like the previous entries in the series have, and has a release slated for 13 September 2019.
Most of the information we learned this week confirmed what we suspected about the game due to some leaks, and includes the cast of four playable characters, along with such critical details as how many guns there will be (billions).
While this information was mostly met positively by fans, Gearbox also announced that the PC release will be exclusive to the Epic Games store for 6 months from time of release. This was predictably met by review-bombing the earlier games in the franchise on Steam, which is less effective now that Steam has systems in place to protect against it…and now that the games are seven to ten years old.
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All pictures and artwork courtesy of their respective owners.
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