Borderlands 2 has already come to VR via the PlayStation 4, but an ESRB rating from earlier this year suggested we'd eventually be able to play the VR version on PC as well. Now it's been confirmed courtesy of the trailer above, and will be here in fall 2019. The PS4 version's getting a free update adding the DLC, which will hopefully also be true of the PC version.

This version of Borderlands 2 will apparently come with "new skills to virtually pay the bills" including a slow-motion ability called BAMF or Bad Ass Mega Fun time. Looks like there's a teleport-to-move system as well, with blue circles appearing where the player's about to zip to.

Multiplayer doesn't get mentioned, so this might well be a singleplayer-only deal as it is on PS4. Still, I imagine it'll be fun to look Face McShooty right in the virtual eyes before shooting him in the head.

With Borderlands 3 fast approaching, its predecessor is enjoying a resurgence. Recent discounts and free DLC has seen returning and new players hitting Pandora, and if you're playing through the whole thing, you might want to take a look at Borderlands 2.5. 

Released last week, it's a work-in-progress overhaul mod for Borderlands 2, changing characters, gear, enemies and more. The mod team's intent is to let players discover changes for themselves, keeping new weapons and reworked boss fights a surprise, though you can see some of them linked in the Nexus Mods page. 

Borderlands 2's art style has been a bulwark against ageing, and with looter shooters now being everywhere, it feels pretty contemporary. If you've already defeated Handsome Jack and shot your way through the DLC, however, you might be in the mood for a change. It still looks the same, but under the hood it seems like there's a lot that's new. 

You'll need some DLC if you want to try it out and it's designed to be played standalone. Check out the requirements and installation instructions here. 

In Take-Two's latest earnings call, the publisher told investors that it had beaten expectations and was rolling in dough like a feral hog in mud, despite the absence of big game launches so far this year. 

GTA 5 continues to be a big earner, with GTA Online seeing a significant spike thanks to the casino update—that means more microtransaction cash for Take-Two. But it's not the only older game that continues to sell well. Borderlands 2, which launched seven years ago, a whole year before GTA 5, has also sprung back to life. 

To bridge the gap between Borderlands 2 and 3, Gearbox released the Commander Lilith DLC for free. Rather than being a throwaway piece of exposition, it's a solid adventure with some new villains, monsters and the return of the still uncomfortably ripped Vaughn. And it didn't just bring back old players—sales of Borderlands 2 are up 2 million since May 2019.

That's a big jump for a game that came out in 2012, even with the recent big discount. It's been pretty cheap for years. The Borderlands GOTY Edition also gave it a shot in the arm in April. This has resulted in Take-Two selling more than 6 million copies of Borderlands games, and more 4 million players have downloaded the Commander Lilith DLC. 

Last month, Take-Two studio Rockstar North was accused of receiving millions in UK tax relief while not paying UK corporation tax for nearly a decade, despite the huge profits Take-Two enjoys. Most of the profits generated by games like GTA 5, much of it designed by a British studio, are reported by the US side, while Take-Two's UK studios claim comparatively little, making them eligible for tax breaks. 

Cheers, GamesIndustry.biz

The latest video in YouTuber Shesez's excellent Boundary Break series—which takes the viewer outside the boundaries in popular games—is all about Borderlands 2, and  it reveals plenty of secrets about the way the world is designed.

My favorite revelation is that the flashy intros for major characters and bosses actually happen directly inside the game world, rather than being made separately. Those intro have splash backgrounds: if you zoom out, you'll find that those backgrounds just appear as textures in the world for the intro, linger behind the character, and then vanish when the intro is over. Skip to 9:30 in the video to see what I mean.

Shesez also finds weird, empty rectangles hidden far below each level, each one segmented into smaller boxes (see 7:00). What's their purpose? Gearbox senior programmer Kyle Pittman jumped on the line to explain: they're called global loaders, and they're used to transition players and their vehicles between levels. "If you travel from one map to another, and then also if you die and respawn...we take your player character and move them down to these regions. Basically this is just a way that we can get the player character out of the game world and into a safe space," he says.

It started as a solution to bugs in the first Borderlands, which Pittman also worked on. Sometimes, when players were moving between levels their vehicle would fall through the world—having an area for players to go first fixed the issue.

Shesez also finds a random model of Claptrap in a T-pose hidden underneath a mountain near the start of the game. Pittman explains that the model would've been used to scale the level around it, but that the level was redesigned to add a new hill, effectively burying poor Claptrap. The designer just never went back and deleted it, he said. 

The video also reveals rainbow-colored boxes dotted around, which are used to replace assets that were removed from the world, presumably so the team could keep track of them. We also see cubes underneath the platform where the player meets Angel: these cubes are basically hidden stands for shock field generators that pop up during the Angel boss fight.

There are lots more secrets revealed in the video, which is worth a watch in full. And if you're curious, the entire Boundary Break series is here, all 147 videos of it.

Thanks, Kotaku.

It looks like Borderlands 2 VR is coming to PC, after almost a year of PlayStation exclusivity. Evidence comes via an ESRB rating for the Windows PC edition of the game. There's no indication of release date, but these classifications are usually filed within a month or so of release.

Borderlands 2 VR contains the full original game, but on PS4 at least, its entirely single-player. That does detract somewhat from the game's central appeal, but the opportunity to virtually inhabit Pandora is pretty cool. As is watching piles of guns explode from toilet cisterns. 

Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.  

Plenty of videogame villains bother you by rambling over the radio or whatever its fantasy equivalent is. The Guardian in Ultima 7, Sander Cohen in Bioshock, Frank Fontaine in Bioshock, actually just everyone in Bioshock. 

Handsome Jack is different. He doesn't pontificate like he's delivering a sermon, he doesn't rant like he's going to be played by Jeremy Irons in the movie. When he shows up on your echonet device in Borderlands 2, he's casual. He's eating, for god's sake. He delivers villain monologues like someone making it up as he goes along, and he does it while audibly chewing. 

The monster.

Handsome Jack doesn't act like a villain, but then he doesn't think he is one. He thinks he's the hero. You and your friends are bandits, and he's the one who is going to open the Vault and fix Pandora. (By killing everyone. But not in an evil way.) Your relationship with him seems low stakes at first. It's annoying that he mocks you and tricks you, but it's so casual and he's so charming and funny about it that it's hard to stay mad—even if you found the audio logs that reveal what he did to Helena Pierce from the first game.

Halfway through Borderlands 2, that changes. You strike a significant blow against Jack, and he does the same to you. People die. Now it's personal. His rants stop being funny. Instead of making jokes, he just tells you he's going to kill you, and he's not chewing pretzels or whatever while he does it. The shift is surprising, and in that moment you realize that he hates you and you hate him too.

It's an emotional resonance few other games manage, effective because it's so surprising. Handsome Jack is not just a bag of hit points between you and your goal, he's an actual personality (an oversized and obnoxious one), and you feel like you have a real relationship with him. Which makes it even better when you finally take him down.

A new Borderlands 2 DLC was announced during today's Xbox conference at E3. Yes, you read that right, the 2012 looter-shooter whose sequel is only months away just got an expansion. It's called Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary and if you download it by July 9 it'll be free.

Among its additions are: A new loot tier called effervescent; more named guns including talking ones; plant monsters and mutated "infected" versions of existing enemies; a new raid boss; new locations and altered versions of old ones; more skins for characters and vehicles; level cap boosted to 80 and two more Overpowered levels; the option to start a new character at level 30; and a storyline in which the New Pandora Army invade Sanctuary and infect Pandora with gas that turns people into plants.

It's a bridge between the story of Borderlands 2 and Borderlands 3, and also has a couple of references to the events of Tales from the Borderlands. The DLC can be started by fast-traveling to the the Fight for Sanctuary location, though you should be at least level 30 and have finished the main storyline first.

Read our complete impressions over here. Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary will be free until July 9, and $US15 after that.

Five years after the last add-on for Borderlands 2, it's nice to be playing a new one. The announcement of Borderlands 3 already gave me the motivation I needed to replay one of my favorite shooters (and about a million other people had the same idea, according to Steam's numbers), but it's a sweet bonus to actually have new stuff to explore while I continue spending 2019 ignoring more recent games in favor of one that came out in 2012.

Something that's always been a bit annoying about Borderlands 2 is that when you want to play a different class you have to start over from level one, and it takes till level five to unlock their action skill and find out if you actually enjoy their shtick. The Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary DLC released today lets you make a new vault hunter who is boosted to 30 so you can jump right into it, which means never having to play the tutorial again.

Of course you can also play through this expansion with an existing character, and that's what it's designed for. It's an epilogue that sets up Borderlands 3, getting characters and a plot MacGuffin into place for the sequel, while also dealing with some Tales from the Borderlands fallout. (If Telltale's spin-off has been sitting in your backlog, definitely play it before this.)

That makes this the third Borderlands 2 epilogue, by my count. Of the other DLCs both Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep and The Son of Crawmerax explicitly deal with how the events of the story have affected the cast. It's a very "for the fans" kind of thing to keep doing, with a lot of explicit callbacks and running jokes for players who've built up a fondness for characters like Brick, Tannis, Moxxi, and even Claptrap.

Obviously, there's a lot of shooty-shooty-pew-pew as well. This is still a Gearbox Borderlands rather than a Telltale one. The level cap is boosted to 80 and a whole new tier of weapons above the legendary rarity called "effervescent" has been added. I found a talking sniper rifle called Hot Mama and an assault rifle called Toothpick that jets flame out its side, both of which are as colorful as rainbows on an oil slick.

The enemies I was shooting with my shiny new guns weren't quite so exciting. There's a military group called the New Pandorans in town who are mostly just boring soldiers. They've got specialists like medics, snipers, and guys with flamethrowers but what seemed like setup for jokes at the expense of Team Fortress 2 was wasted. Their leader Hector feels like a rehash of General Knoxx from the first game.

His plan for taking over the planet and turning it into a paradise involves releasing a gas that transforms people into plant monsters, which results in some tweaks to the way you approach fights—clouds of spores that power you up in the short-term but cause damage if you stand in them too long, budding pods that release bad guys if you don't shoot them in time—but "bandits with leaves on them" isn't a thrilling theme for monsters. At least none of them are as annoying as that Poison Ivy boss fight in Arkham Asylum.

That doesn't matter as much as you'd think, because the emphasis is definitely on the heroes rather than the villains. Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary is mostly about saying goodbye to Borderlands 2, with some of the new locations being busted-up versions of familiar places and various fan-favorite characters returning to do their thing. Claptrap has a side mission where he gets into cryptocurrency, two of the shopkeepers become housemates as if they're in a wacky sitcom, Tannis rants about mad science schemes. 

Sure, there's also a new raid boss, more skins, and two more Overpowered levels for the kind of people who are never happy with the amount of "endgame content" anything has, but there's also a lot of time spent just hanging out in a new hub that accrues NPCs over the course of the story. Hanging story threads are tied off, and everyone gets moved into place for the planet-hopping plot of Borderlands 3 and its new spaceship hub.

Mass Effect 3's Citadel expansion is still the gold standard for this kind of indulgent farewell to a videogame family, but Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary is also a fun hangout with bantering NPCs that has some shooting in it. And for the next month, you can download it free.

Now bring on Borderlands 3.

Borderlands 2 has seen a huge increase in concurrent players on Steam in the last week, no doubt a result of escalating interest in the series following the reveal of Borderlands 3.

The game peaked just shy of 60K players last weekend—59,033 according to Steam Charts and highlighted here on GitHyp. The review scores remain Very Positive on both Borderlands 2 and the original game, though closer inspection will show that both games have seen recent 'off-topic review activity'—read more about those review bombing efforts here.  

Borderlands 2 has remained a firm favourite with PC players since its release back in 2012. It's been discounted a lot lately, too, which has likely driven further interest in it. Or maybe it's that 4K texture pack that was added to the game? 

If you're wondering what all the fuss is about, you can check out why Jody thought Borderlands 2 was ahead of its time. Alternatively, you can read up on everything we know about Borderlands 3, which is set for release on September 13.

We didn't know how lucky we were. "Hey, that's a decent improvement on the original," we thought back when Borderlands 2 came out in 2012. Great class system. Tons of guns. It was a lot of fun. We didn't realize Borderlands 2 would end up being a framework so many games would build on, and yet fail to live up to. We didn't realize it was quite so special.

Borderlands 2 took stuff from MMOs, like color-coded rarity levels and raids, but reduced the boredom of traveling by adding bouncy vehicles right out of Halo. It worked both as a co-op experience for friends who wanted an excuse to hang out online, and a solo game. It had a long tail of DLC, timed events like the $100,000 Loot Hunt, and endgame challenges like Digistruct Peak, as well as Overpower levels for players who'd maxed out everything else. Though it predated "games as a service" it was, in its own way, a forever game. There are still at least 5,000 people playing it at any given time on Steam, even today.

At the same time, Borderlands 2 is very 2012. When the siren-class character, Maya, spots an elite enemy she shouts "We got a badass over here!" like the Neil deGrasse Tyson reaction. Axton, the soldier-class character, sometimes says "You get a bullet, and you get a bullet!" like Oprah but for murders. There's a double rainbow easter egg, and the pirate-themed DLC features ninja pirates for god's sake. Borderlands 2 is a museum of memes from the early 2010s. 

It's also heavy with pop culture references, but there's a line between the two. The vehicles added in the Captain Scarlett & Her Pirate's Booty DLC are designed to look like the skiff from Return of the Jedi. That's just a reference. When Gaige, the mechromancer-class character, shouts "Unlimited power!" like a million image macros of Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith, that's a meme.

Now, several years later, I find the dated-ness of those memes weirdly charming. I haven't heard anyone say "Garbage Day!" or reference trap cards in ages, but here they are in Borderlands 2, frozen in meme amber.

Neverending story 

It wasn't all memes, of course. We wouldn't have cared about departing NPCs saying "I must go, my people need me" if they weren't in a game that kept us around with an eternal cascade of sweet loot. The sniper rifle that shoots acid bullets in three-round bursts when zoomed. The pistol that reloads almost instantly and is stable as a rock. Those kept us playing through True Vault Hunter difficulty, through multiple DLC packs, across hundreds of hours. 

Play a loot game for that long and builds inevitably degenerate. One example of that was The Bee, a shield with a decent chance of dropping from a propaganda radio host in the Boneyard area of the Arid Nexus. Named for Muhammad Ali's famous quote (a reference, not a meme), The Bee gave bonus damage per shot and was massively overpowered if combined with guns that had a high rate of fire. Which is what everyone did once they figured out how to farm it. Borderlands developers Gearbox treated the exploit like an MMO developer would and nerfed it, rather than just letting it slide like devs might in a more typical first-person shooter that wasn't meant to be played for years.

While Borderlands 2 is definitely an FPS, judging it by those standards misses its appeal. Its enemies possess only rudimentary tactics, throwing grenades at players behind cover but otherwise not doing much to coordinate. The spaces you fight them in are deliberately samey, with exploding barrels keyed to different elemental damage types placed throughout every bandit stronghold. The point isn't to outsmart the AI, but to transform your character into an effective mathematical engine to munch them with.

Shielded enemies are susceptible to electrical attacks, while armored enemies can be melted by corrosive ones. Fire attacks are best against enemies who have no special defences but plenty of regular health, and Borderlands 2 has no shortage of meaty bullet sponges. Anyone who takes damage from slag will take bonus damage from any non-slag attack that follows. Juggling all these things, working with other players or swapping between guns, grenades, and powers with different damage types, it can feel more like playing Final Fantasy or Pokemon than Half-Life. "Maya uses pistol that shoots rockets. It's super-effective!" (That's both a meme and a reference for you).

Which is not to say that it's bad at being a shooter. Borderlands 2 doesn't do the RPG thing of having the numbers invalidate your ability to aim. If you land a shot on someone it doesn't matter what your gun's stats are, you landed that shot. Enemies take bonus damage if you hit them where they're weakest, and goliaths will frenzy and attack their allies if you pop off their dopey bucket heads. The expectations of FPS players are catered to, with the dopamine hit of RPG progression layered on top.

Just shloot me 

Other looter shooters are still struggling to recreate what Borderlands 2 did right. The Division games have boring loot, all kneepads and guns that don't even explode like grenades when thrown. Warframe's a completely different game for its opening hours before it gets good, and Anthem never does. Destiny's NPCs keep obnoxiously trying to remind you of their personalities every time they pop up, but most of them are forgettable. The Ghost is just Claptrap for boring people.

The Gearbox of today isn't the Gearbox of 2012, however. Borderlands 2's lead writer, Anthony Burch, is not writing Borderlands 3. The second game's creative director, Mikey Neumann, has also left the studio (though he did come back to help make Borderlands 3's trailer). And between the release of Borderlands 2 and now Gearbox has been responsible for Aliens: Colonial Marines and Battleborn. It's tempting to lower our expectations a little. 

That trailer really does look like classic flavor Borderlands, though. Some have expressed disappointment with that familiarity, but a game that sticks to the template would be preferable to one that's beholden to all the worst trends of modern looter shooters. A Borderlands game with battle passes, microtransactions, and a confusing variety of different currencies? No, thanks. I'd rather they stick to their guns.

And what about the memes? What's 2019 got to contribute—jokes about whether unused items in your inventory "spark joy"? Bandits impersonating Powerful Shaggy instead of quoting Hamlet? I wrote that as a joke but now I think about it, that would rule. Still, memes aren't the same carefree internet japes they were when Borderlands 2 came out and the idea of someone at Gearbox having to sift out the ones that have been appropriated by bigots is a depressing thought.

When Borderlands 2 was new I played it with friends. We had a blast, and to my surprise I realized I was interested in the story, not just the shooting. I made a second character just to go through it solo, hunting down audio logs and hanging on Handsome Jack's every word.  

That's what stands out when I compare it to the looter shooters that followed. I can't imagine doing the same thing in The Division 2, a game where even fans don't care about the plot. If Borderlands 2 did adopt some of the trappings of modern looter-shooters I wouldn't mind too much, so long as it kept the idea that it's worth having an arc, a villain you love to hate and a plot that feels like it's building to something.

Also the song that plays over the opening credits has to rule, but that's a given.