It’s not easy being one of the six most powerful women in the galaxy. As an eridium-fueled Siren in the Borderlands games, Lilith wields deadly abilities—but bears a heavy burden. Recent games have placed her front-and-centre as a straight-talking leader, but she didn’t begin life that way. We spoke with Borderlands 3’s co-lead writer Sam Winkler about how she’s changed—and what she means to the popular series. 

In the original Borderlands, Lilith was one of the four playable vault hunters and didn’t have much approaching a personality. When it came time to take the original cast and turn them into story characters, that meant retro-fitting each with a sense of self. "All of the Borderlands player characters have distinct voices and personalities," Winkler says. "But there always needs to be some wiggle room for the players themselves to fit in. When you transition them to NPC status, you have to backfill those gaps in ways that are both rewarding and not jarring to the people who played as them. You have to find the throughlines." 

For Lilith, that throughline is her confidence and attitude. She doesn’t do anything cautiously or at half measure. She fights hard, parties harder, and runs headlong into danger throughout the series. "One of the cool things about writing for Borderlands is that the heroes aren’t always right and they don’t always make the best decisions," Winkler says. "Lilith has royally screwed up several times in the franchise, and those moments have shaped who she is in Borderlands 3." 

This is the same woman who decided, in the heat of battle, to juice herself up with eridium and use her Siren ‘phaseshift’ ability to move the entire town of Sanctuary along with her in Borderlands 2. And that’s exactly the sort of reckless last resort that defines her character.

"Lilith is one of the most powerful and dangerous people in the universe," Winkler says. “And she knows it.” That confidence was a natural part of playing Borderlands as Lilith and became the cornerstone of her personality as an NPC in the games that followed. 

What don’t we know about Lilith that we may never see in a game? Winkler is hesitant to give away anything in his hand that may still be of use, but he does reveal one detail that helps inform her story in the new sequel, "One line that ended up getting cut from the Commander Lilith and the Fight for Sanctuary DLC was a confirmation that she was born with her tattoos, while some other Sirens, like Angel, were not. Borderlands 3 blows up some pre-conceptions of Siren powers and how they find their way to people."

It takes two

Another important throughline for Lilith is her relationship with Roland, known in Borderlands as ‘the Soldier’. The two both began as playable characters in Borderlands. By the time of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, we meet the two vacationing together in Moxxi’s bar, a getaway plan that I suspected wasn’t Roland’s first choice. “Roland wasn’t exactly the most unbuttoned guy on Pandora, so it’s hard to imagine a vacation being his idea,” Winkler confirms. “But if one of the six legendary Sirens asks you to come dancing with her, you go.”

Throughout Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel, Roland takes on the role of the ‘man with a plan’ while Lilith bulls forward on the path he sets for the vault hunters. After being separated at the beginning of Borderlands 2, Lilith takes up the alias ‘Firehawk’ as the leader of a group of psychos. Despite that tenure as bandit legend prior to meeting back up with Roland and the crew, Winkler says, “Lilith never intended to become the leader of anything.” 

Now, (Borderlands 2 spoilers) after Roland has been killed by Handsome Jack, Lilith is left to pick up the pieces of the Crimson Raiders that he once led. In the wake of his death, someone has to step up and take charge, a role that Lilith initially struggles with. Years later in Borderlands 3, Winkler says, “She’s a confident, driven commander who is laser-focused on finding the map to the Vaults.” 

Lilith ultimately fills Roland’s shoes as a commander, but I had to wonder: will anyone else take his place as her partner? 

“Lilith is a deeply private person. She struggles with letting down her guard and showing weakness,” Winkler says. “How the hell do you meet new people in the Borderlands? I wouldn’t use a Hyperion dating app, for sure.” Sounds like if there’s another person in Lilith’s life it will have to be another on-the-job introduction. 

Despite Gearbox’s fondness for a certain dubstepping toaster, Lilith has evolved into the perfect face for the series. Brash, powerful, yet oddly human—she’s come a long way from just being the support class.

In the monthly 'now playing' section of PC Gamer magazine we spend a few pages discussing the games we've been playing recently—good or bad. Sometimes they are old-ish games we've been meaning to reinstall for ages, like XCOM. Sometimes they're strange meditative woodworking sims because, sometimes in life, you've just gotta build a nice birdhouse. This is also the last thing former UK editor-in-chief Samuel Roberts wrote before departing to some strange otherworldly plane called 'Brighton'.

Let us know what you're playing at the moment in the comments.

The social politics of naming your XCOM: Enemy Unknown squad—Samuel Roberts

This is my last Now Playing for PC Gamer. In fact, it’s the last thing I’m writing for PCG full-stop, at least for now. You never know, I might write a Now Playing for issue 400, before complaining about the cover price on Instagram (this is an inside joke). 

An office PA annoyingly threw all my old PC Gamer issues out, so I’ve been perusing the few I’ve got at home. I’m reading them while I’m supposed to be packing to move to Brighton. We did slightly too many lists when I was editor, but damn, each issue was packed with features. I think I gave editing this magazine a solid shot, for a 25 year-old with no qualifications who didn’t know what he was doing. I give my editorship 81 per cent. It was no Dragon Age 2. 

Anyway, here’s a filthy secret—I’ve been denying myself a proper XCOM 2 campaign since the game released, because I’ve never finished an Enemy Unknown campaign with the Enemy Within stuff installed. That is, with the mechs, deadly new aliens, that sort of thing. I thought I should do that before throwing myself at XCOM 2, with its nine million things to micromanage. I’m enjoying it, but because I’ve loaded an old save file, it’s presenting a few dilemmas. 

Naturally, when I play XCOM, I rename all my soldiers to people I know. But there are a few problems with this. For example, my ex-girlfriend is my best sniper. I could just rename her, but I feel it breaks the theatre of the game to do that. So what do I do? Get her killed on purpose? She’s a good sniper, so it’s a tough call. And Enemy Within is actually a touch harder than Enemy Unknown was. Now, her and my current girlfriend, a new recruit, are on the same squad. It seems wrong. 

The other problem is I don’t really know some of the other people who are in my 2014-era XCOM squad any more. And yet, I’m sending a bunch of them into battle. When should or shouldn’t you name a game character after someone from your real life? To me, there’s a kind of invisible line you cross in your head when it’s someone you barely know, which is why I only pick people I regularly interact with. 

And, annoyingly, I’m running out of those. My good friend Dave was just killed in service by one of the deadly guardian aliens. Now I need to cycle in someone new from the barracks. I ask, do I know anyone else? I mean, if we’re getting down to acquaintances or people I sometimes chat to in corridors, it feels like I’m missing the point. Soon I’ll have to add people who want me to join their network on LinkedIn. 

XCOM underlines the fact that I only know about 20 real people, and that’s it, which is actually probably true for most people over 30 when they really think about it. Anyway, that’s my last, frivolous Now Playing, making an arbitrary point about something I could avoid entirely by renaming everyone and starting again. It’s been a pleasure writing and editing for you.

Finding beauty in One Finger Death Punch 2—Phil Savage

Lots of people will tell you that how a game plays is all that matters, and that’s an admirable attitude that I’d love to say I agree with. In practice, though, I’m a snob. You may have crafted the stickiest, most entertaining core loop of all time, but if it’s attached to an ugly game, I’m probably not going to play it. 

There is one exception, and it’s One Finger Death Punch. It’s a brilliant two-button action game in which you, a kung-fu stickman, beat down hundreds of attackers. If they attack from the right, you press the right-mouse button. If they attack from the left, you press the left- mouse button. Sometimes attackers will swap sides, or require more than one button press to take down, but that’s really about it. It’s compulsive—an elegant dance of precision button clicks that feels great to successfully pull off. 

My one wish for the sequel was that it wouldn’t look like absolute ass. Unfortunately, One Finger Death Punch 2 is just as repulsive as its predecessor. Maybe even more so. I buy it anyway. 

It’s not that the art is ugly—although it is—as much as there’s no coherent aesthetic. It’s a grab-bag of styles, reminiscent of ’70s kung-fu movies, early-’00s Newgrounds games and pretty much any era of DeviantArt. The UI icons are uninformative. The fonts are atrocious. The faux- Chinese accent of the narrator is questionable at best. It’s an unpleasant space to explore. 

And yet, it’s loads of fun. Ostensibly each level is the same—you fending off 100+ enemies without dying. Yet through the mix of different enemy types—bosses, brawlers, enemies that attack from range—each level feels like it has a specific combat flavour that makes it just different enough from the rest.  

I think the frantic pace helps distract from how unpleasant I find its art. I’m not really looking at the level, just the incoming attack prompts shown at the bottom of the screen. Button mashing is certain death in One Finger Death Punch 2, and so—much like in a good rhythm action game—you tend to focus down on just the essential information. And in this limited view, the animations of the fighters even look quite graceful. 

Then I win, and the ugly score screen comes into full view. 

The spell is broken. I click on the next level regardless.

Going mad with (divine) power in Hades—Malindy Hetfield

I’ve recently started playing Hades again after having stayed away from it since launch. Supergiant Games is one of those precious few game developers whose games I will buy sight unseen, but initially I thought that not even they could make me enjoy roguelikes more than I do. Which isn’t all that much. 

Then something magical happened—I got better. I know, I know, that’s the point of this type of game. And yet I often feel like roguelikes come with a skill floor that’s just too high for me to not be frustrated, and frustration gives me no reason to continue playing. But the updates kept rolling in, and with them a variety of skills and ways to meaningfully combine them that made me feel like I could perhaps actually do this. My entire journey with Supergiant titles has been like this, anxiously saying, “I’m probably not the core audience for this,” before completing the purchase anyway and subsequently falling in love. 

Hades feels like a culmination of everything that the studio has done before. Combat in Bastion now feels like a slower version of Hades—a speed that takes a further dip in Transistor in exchange for the meaningful skill combinations that I now appreciate so much. Additionally, Hades has the physicality and immediacy of Pyre, conveyed through stunning animation. I loved running in Pyre, and it’s the same here, paired with an incredible dodge that somehow manages to make me feel powerful while I’m running away. 

More importantly, Hades is slowly eroding my idea of this mythical core audience, and reminded me that a genre actually doesn’t have to define a game’s difficulty. Revelations! I know I’m doing myself a disservice by limiting myself in my gaming tastes, but I know I wouldn’t have played this if my taste weren’t already “anything by Supergiant”. 

Some aspects tickle my lizard hind brain in a way that feels like a dirty trick. During one run, for example, I bought a water basin on a whim, only to find it showed me my number of runs and total of slain foes. I swear I’ve never cared about high scores of any kind, and yet there it was—pride, unmistakably. The same is true for when I check the number of the furthest room reached, or when Zagreus mumbles to himself about never having made it this far before, a declaration which causes me to realise the same—almost inevitably stressing me out so much I die. 

Since Hades is still in Early Access, these triumphs are oddly terrifying. What if a weapon in need of a nerf or a weakness in a boss enabled my success? What if all of this is a warm-up for some really difficult battles while I’m already dreaming of becoming the Hades esports champion 2020? Well, if I’m honest, it doesn’t matter. I haven’t squealed like this at the speed and excitement of a game in a long time.

Failing to build a birdhouse in Woodwork Simulator—Andy Kelly

The developer behind PC Building Simulator has released a playable prototype of its next project, Woodwork Simulator, which is exactly what you think it is. I’ve had my fill of novelty simulator games on PC, but this isn’t something that’s played for laughs—it actually lets you make things out of wood, and it’s way more compelling than I thought it would be. 

I was absolutely hopeless at woodwork in school. Once I tried to make a CD rack and ended up with a shapeless wedge of pine with globs of hardened glue leaking out of the cracks. Several people laughed at it, including the teacher. I was alright at sanding, though. That thing might have been a mess and too narrow to hold a CD, but boy was it smooth. 

So I went into Woodwork Simulator thinking I’d be able to make something decent, because videogames let you excel at things you’re otherwise shit at, right? But I was wrong. So, so wrong. Because this is a simulator in the truest sense, requiring a delicate hand and some actual manual dexterity.

You have a bunch of different tools to work with, and they all feel fantastic to use. You can saw, drill, plane, sand, varnish, paint, and even use a lathe. Sawing by pulling the mouse back and forth feels really tactile, and I love the attention to detail, like the little curls of wood that peel off the wood when you plane it. They’ve really nailed the finer details, which any great simulator should. 

The wood is enjoyably malleable, letting you cut out any shape you like and glue the bits together to create, well, whatever you like. There’s a free mode for people who prefer to dream their own creations up, but I thought I’d ease myself in with one of the tutorials, a birdhouse, which the game declares to be easy. When I begin I see a large piece of wood marked with a template telling me which bits to cut out.  

I find cutting out the various shapes that make up the birdhouse quite soothing. I stick a long, square piece of wood in the lathe to turn it into a smooth post, then I start gluing the pieces I cut out together. But I underestimate how gently and precisely you have to do this, and the end result is something that makes my CD rack look like a work of art. 

But it’s really fun. The simple act of cutting wood and sticking it together to make things, without worrying about getting sawdust on the floor or wood glue on my fingers, is enough of a novelty to keep me playing—even if I’m making a mockery of the art of woodcraft. And it’s remarkable to think that this is an early prototype given away for free, because there’s a lot going on in here. 

I still suck at woodworking, but at least here I won’t be mocked by my teacher and classmates.

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.