So long, Civilization. The latest freebie over on the Epic Games Store is Borderlands: The Handsome Collection, a rather handsome pairing of two Borderlands games to blast your way through without dropping a penny. But Epic’s feeling generous this week – today also marks the surprise release of grimy graffiti sandbox Sludge Life, and this filthy bonus is going free for quite a bit longer than a week.

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The long-forgotten Borderlands film might actually be making some headway, as Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford tweeted that Eli Roth has joined the team to direct it. Roth is known for making a fair few horror flicks (as well as that one weird family film where Jack Black plays a warlock that saves the world), so, yeah, no idea what his link is with Borderlands really.

Pitchford deleted the tweet announcing all the new film stuff this almost immediately – but the internet never forgets, Randy.

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10 years of Borderlands, is it? A whole decade since four cel-shaded bounty hunters hopped off a bus and murdered their way across a planet to the whiny twangs of Cage The Elephant? Blimey, where does the time go? Well before Destiny, Borderlands married Diablo’s gear grind with run n’ gun blasting in an open-world romp, kicking off a generation of shooting bloody numbers out of heads. To celebrate a decade of cartoon carnage, the next five weeks of Borderlands 3 will crank things up to 11, starting with a week of better boss loot drops.

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Gearbox fully unveiled Borderlands 3 during a livestreamed event earlier today with an hour of largely-uncut co-op footage, showing off a brighter and more colourful sequel than I was expecting. Combat is more mobile, weapons have alt-fire modes, bosses look more interesting and players can now leave the dusty wastes of Pandora to go shooting and looting on other planets. You can see the full presentation below, and they’re setting streamers loose on the game now for three hours of freeform play, so Twitch will be flooded with footage later today.

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As this is my penultimate edition of Steam Charts, before I return to nuzzle into the warm infinite belly of Horace for all of time, I thought it might be fun to take a bit of a look behind the scenes of Steam Charts, to see how this weekly column comes together.

So, hey, join me as we step behind the curtain, and learn a little bit about the magic of Rock Paper Shotgun.

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Steam s updated approach to review bombing, which prevents off topic reviews from counting towards a game s overall score, has kicked in for the Borderlands series. It seems to be the first time that the (optional) filter has been applied by Steam, after users flooded the series reviews following the announcement that Borderlands 3 will be a timed exclusive on the Epic Games Store.

Viewing the games with the option turned on puts a little asterisk next to the mark of how positive the game is, which leads to a note that reads: Period(s) of off-topic review activity detected. Excluded from the Review Score, based on your preferences. It doesn t seem to actually hide those reviews, however.

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There ain’t no rest for the wicked, a video game once told me, and Gearbox Software certainly have been busy. Today they launched remastered versions of Borderlands, Borderlands 2, and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, coming to PC as free updates. They’re all prettied-up a bit, while the first game also now includes all the DLC as well as features borrowed from later games in the looter-shooter series. These updates are probably more for the benefit of the latest consoles, jazzing ’em up for a fresh audience before Borderlands 3 hits in September, but hey we benefit too. Thanks, Ian Microsoft and Ian Sony!

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