- Millions of Borderlands 3 Players Are Now Collectively Listed as Contributors to a Peer Reviewed Scientific Paper IGN
- Borderlands 3 community scores a big win for science: ‘These players have helped trace the evolutionary relationships of more than a million different kinds of bacteria that live in the human gut’ PC Gamer
- Improving microbial phylogeny with citizen science within a mass-market video game Nature.com
- Millions of Gamers Help Advance Microbiome Research Technology Networks
- Millions Of Borderlands 3 Players Have Helped Microbiome Research Forbes
Tag Archives: Borderlands
Borderlands 3 community scores a big win for science: ‘These players have helped trace the evolutionary relationships of more than a million different kinds of bacteria that live in the human gut’ – PC Gamer
- Borderlands 3 community scores a big win for science: ‘These players have helped trace the evolutionary relationships of more than a million different kinds of bacteria that live in the human gut’ PC Gamer
- Improving microbial phylogeny with citizen science within a mass-market video game Nature.com
- Millions Of Borderlands 3 Players Have Helped Microbiome Research Forbes
- Millions of gamers advance biomedical research by helping to reconstruct microbial evolutionary histories Phys.org
- Popular first-person shooter (FPS) ‘Borderland 3’. The game’s players have revealed the evolutionary.. – MK 매일경제
Millions Of Borderlands 3 Players Have Helped Microbiome Research – Forbes
- Millions Of Borderlands 3 Players Have Helped Microbiome Research Forbes
- Borderlands 3 community scores a big win for science: ‘These players have helped trace the evolutionary relationships of more than a million different kinds of bacteria that live in the human gut’ PC Gamer
- Improving microbial phylogeny with citizen science within a mass-market video game Nature.com
- Video gamers outsmart AI algorithms in mapping gut bacteria Interesting Engineering
- Popular first-person shooter (FPS) ‘Borderland 3’. The game’s players have revealed the evolutionary.. – MK 매일경제
New Tales from the Borderlands Review (PS5)
There’s an argument to be made that 2014’s Tales from the Borderlands is actually the best game in the Borderlands series. Now, hold on. Don’t go typing up your angry comments just yet. Hear us out.
Sometimes you just want a capital V capital G Video Game that’s about running and jumping and shooting and looting and the proper Borderlands games are a safe option to pick up and play on that front. But it’s hard to ignore that the franchise has a somewhat inversely proportional relationship between the tightness of the gameplay and quality of the writing: as the shooting got better, the dialogue got worse and the jokes grew more irritating.
Within their respective genres, taking into account what they set out to do, Tales is probably the most successful game in the series: it’s funny, with an interesting story, likeable characters, and at times it’s genuinely moving. Nobody was as surprised as us about that. A Telltale Borderlands game? Madness! But it worked.
Fast-forward eight years and here we are with New Tales From The Borderlands, less a sequel to the Telltale original and more of an alternate reality version of the same idea. What would have happened in 2014 if instead of partnering with Telltale in their prime to make a more story-focused game in the Borderlands franchise, Gearbox just made it themselves? Well, this is the result. And it’s rubbish.
Taking place after Borderlands 3 but without really requiring any knowledge of any previous Borderlands games to understand the story, New Tales has three playable characters that you’ll control at various points throughout the ten hour adventure.
There’s Anu, a smart but anxious scientist who’s a pacifist inexplicably working for a weapons manufacturer. There’s Fran, a frozen yogurt seller in a hoverchair who has anger management issues. And there’s Octavio, a hipster moron who is introduced to us in a cutscene in which he rebukes a pizza vendor for their “problematic” exaggerated-a Italian-a accent-a. It’s as cringe inducing as it sounds.
The three heroes aren’t so much characters as they are merely vessels for the next insipid gag. Anu, for example, is the clever one in the gang right up until she needs to be an idiot for a joke to land. One minute she’s solving complicated physics problems, and the next she doesn’t know how a door handle works. And that’s the punchline. LOL.
Fran and Octavio are similarly troubled. Fran’s entire personality is based around her talking about frozen yogurt, creepily offering to give people mouth-to-mouth when they obviously don’t need it, and punching people real hard. That’s it. Octavio just does the stupidest thing imaginable in every situation to drag the story out a little longer. At one point he forgets what the place he works at — where he’s spent half the game, by the way — looks like. They get about ten minutes out of that zinger.
The side characters are a mixed bag. There’s a robot assassin going through a moral quandary about how they make their living and they’re probably the most well-rounded and interesting character in the game. There’s a woman who shouts a lot. There’s a talking gun that says “Bang!” every time it shoots. Most of the side characters either disappear for half the game and then turn up for the last chapter or simply go nowhere.
Rhys from the original Tales from the Borderlands has a small role in the first chapter and if you think what they did with him in Borderlands 3 was a slap in the face to fans of the Telltale game then this isn’t going to make you feel any better. Not content with ruining their own characters, New Tales from the Borderlands retroactively ruins the original Tales from the Borderlands by turning its protagonist into just another Borderlands gag™. So thanks for that.
Every now and again between inane comedy routines there’s a story to be told. It involves a magic rock that has the power to help humanity but there’s baddies who want to use it for their own nefarious ends. It’s a slight, low stakes narrative and even at only ten hours it feels drawn out, with long, boring sections where nothing remotely interesting happens to push the tale forward.
By the final chapter we just didn’t care any more. None of the growth feels earned or deserved. And then as a final insult, when we got to the ending we were told that one of the main characters had died, off screen, with no explanation whatsoever for how or why. It was like Poochie flying off to his home planet and dying in a crash in that episode of The Simpsons. Utter nonsense.
Everything about New Tales feels like a poor version of the original, even down to the music. The first game featured a licensed soundtrack that was at times expertly employed. Here, there’s licensed music but it’s thrown together seemingly at random. There’s a cheesy montage scene of the gang getting to know each other backed by a low key, almost dream-pop track, and later a quiet, more reflective scene backed by a jaunty, more upbeat piece.
Gameplay-wise, you’ll mainly be walking about and solving very simple puzzles, talking to people, and making choices. There’s minigames, too, for things like hacking and fixing things, but these are borderline impossible to fail so we’re not sure why they exist. There’s quick-time events to take care of the action scenes but these are similarly forgiving, and even allow you to hit the wrong button and then just try again until you get it right.
One such quick time event — which we have to mention because it’s so absurd — involves a character fighting sharks. But instead of seeing them fight the sharks, we see Octavio commentating on how the fight is going while button prompts pop up on screen. It goes on for way too long and it’s so wildly unfunny that we don’t know if it’s even intended to be a joke.
We’re not sure if the developer just couldn’t be bothered to animate the fight with the sharks or if this whole bit is some sort of subversive commentary on the futility of quick time events that just doesn’t land, but whatever the reason for it, let your ol’ pals at Push Square give you a fiver’s worth of free advice: if you have a shark fight, you show the shark fight. Everyone wants to see the shark fight. It’s a f****** shark fight!
Conclusion
We can scarcely recall an occasion where we were more disappointed by a sequel than New Tales from the Borderlands. We wanted to love this. We’d have accepted liking it. But we hate this game. This is a ten-hour narrative adventure that feels four times as long as it needs to be, with dreadful characters, and appalling, relentlessly unfunny jokes. It’s a spectacular misfire, its only success to speak of being the rare example of a sequel so bad that it ruins the original, too.
How New Tales From the Borderlands’ story will be like ‘4D chess’
To hear Lin Joyce, the head writer of Gearbox Software’s forthcoming New Tales From the Borderlands, explain it, the job players will be doing with her characters is “like a kind of 4D chess,” just applied to narrative role-playing.
That means players will be inhabiting the personae of three characters, making decisions and reactions that players believe are appropriate for them. Then, they’ll also be tasked with reacting to these decisions they made when they’re in command of another member of this protagonist trio.
Those reactions aren’t “good” or “bad” in and of themselves; Joyce says that any hard failures, where a player makes the wrong decision, are limited to some quick-time events elsewhere in the game. For the dialogue — which includes reading body language and facial expressions from full performance capture — players may branch their narrative with a gut call for what they’d do in that moment, or they can try to piece together a multi-character relationship that takes into account the things they’ve done and said before.
“So, what I might think I would do as Anu,” — one of the new heroes, Joyce explained — “might be true to Anu, but it might make Octavio mad. Then, I’m also playing as Octavio.”
Octavio is the streetwise and cynical counterpart to his altruistic sister. “So, how am I now going to respond to these things as Octavio?” Joyce said. “There’s a lot of interplay there, and it’s also up to you. Do you maintain — like, are you nurturing the group, or not? So there’s lots of, again, 4D chess happening.” To be clear, the player is not in control of the character-switching. That might be done moment-to-moment (as opposed to chapter-to-chapter), but the game is in charge there.
New Tales From the Borderlands launches in what could be a pivotal year for the franchise overall. Already, Gearbox Software’s shooter series has been adapted in the well-received Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, which launched in late March, and which has performed so well that Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford told investors (of parent company Embracer Group) the studio “clearly” considers it a “new franchise unto itself.”
The door is open, one assumes, for New Tales From the Borderlands’ approach to narrative-driven design and open-ended storytelling to make it more than a spinoff. Gearbox, though it licensed the Borderlands universe and characters, took the Tales From the Borderlands IP back from original developer Telltale Games when that studio closed its doors in 2018.
Joyce, a Ph.D. in interactive narrative systems (with subordinate degrees in English), was brought aboard Gearbox in 2020 and is now its head writer. Gearbox, she said, wanted to extend the core experience that made Tales From the Borderlands successful, while also loosening it from what had been a rigid engine with limited points of interaction. Make no mistake, the story was job one.
“The directive was, Hey, we have this IP now; can we do something about it?” Joyce said. “On my side, we just look at what could we do to make that, like, a version 2.0 of the old Telltale game.” That included building New Tales From the Borderlands in Unreal Engine 4, as opposed to a more bespoke point-and-click setup. It involved performance capture, which freed Joyce to write with a little more nuance and less exposition, certainly without the textual callouts from Tales From the Borderlands that reminded players they’d said something an NPC was likely to remember.
“We had a lot of conversations where we looked at, philosophically, like even if these are the same tools, how are we using them differently?” Joyce said. “So, not every QTE is what we would call a hard fail; there is an opportunity for the story to continue there. We call those soft fails. That’s not something we’ve really seen before. There are other things where we present you with a choice, or the possibility for an action, and you might not want to take that action. The right action might be inaction.”
New Tales From the Borderlands will also have other interactive elements to deepen the gameplay experience, so players aren’t just getting a talk-fest or a scavenger hunt for some detail on the screen — two areas where the Telltale games, for all their acclaim, often broke down. Pierre-Luc Foisy, New Tales’ lead gameplay designer, said the three protagonists, Anu, Octavio, and their friend Fran, all have devices that should highlight their personalities. Fran operates a “gadget-packed hover chair”; Octavio has a smartwatch, for example; Anu’s wearable computing is a set of Tech Glasses.
Foisy said that will blend with the writing and the acting to give players a tipoff to whether they’ve made the right call or a choice that’s going to make things harder on themselves. “It will be less robotic, and more human emotion, so you can understand, OK, here, if I do this QTE — it doesn’t feel in character. It doesn’t feel like the right choice,” Foisy said.
New Tales From the Borderlands will also stand apart from the main series because it isn’t set on some postapocalyptic, resource-exploited world, or orbiting vessels doing the exploiting. It’s on Promethea, where the arms company Maliwan invaded during 2019’s Borderlands 3. Joyce said Promethea was chosen early on in the story drafting as the setting for New Tales, and the decision to use three playable protagonists was made to give players a fuller picture of a more complex setting.
“Although they share a goal, they do not share the same motivating forces or personalities,” Joyce said. “So that meant that we could play with their group dynamic more, and group dynamics are pretty central to this story and how it develops.”
New Tales From the Borderlands launches Oct. 21 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Check Out 18 Minutes of Gameplay From New Tales From the Borderlands
At PAX West, Gearbox Software revealed the first extended look at the gameplay for New Tales From the Borderlands. While Gearbox is committed to the narrative style pioneered by Telltale Games, there are plenty of surprises in store for this revival.
As revealed last month, Gearbox and key alumni from Telltale Games who worked on the first Tales From the Borderlands, are working on a spiritual successor to the series. New Tales From the Borderlands will follow a new cast of characters on a new adventure set sometime after Borderlands 3.
The gameplay reveal at PAX West showcased a lot of familiar elements. Players will still have to make choices that will impact the way the full story will unfold, and decisions could reverberate and affect outcomes far into the game.
Alongside dialogue choices, there will be quick-time events and while failing some might lead to unique outcomes, others could prove deadly and final.
However, aside from QTE and making story choices, Gearbox has added some unique gameplay elements to New Tales. There are gameplay homages like one iconic stealth scene you see in the gameplay reveal, as well as a new figure combat minigame around collectibles called Vaultlanders.
Throughout New Tales From the Borderlands, you’ll be able to collect new Vaultlander figures each with their unique stats and abilities. Then, when the time comes, you’ll be able to bust these figures out in toy vs. toy combat.
New Tales From the Borderlands will be released on October 21, 2022. While it will be episodic in format, every episode will be available at launch and players can choose which episode to play, even if it’s out-of-order (though we don’t recommend you play like that).
Check back at IGN for more reveals from PAX West.
Matt T.M. Kim is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.
Beloved Tales From The Borderlands Finally Gets 2022 Sequel
Today, Gearbox announced at PAX East that it was developing a new entry in the Tales From The Borderlands series. The original Telltale-developed game was a narrative-focused adventure game, similar to The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us. The just-announced sequel will star new characters and will be out this year.
Toward the end of Gearbox’s PAX East showcase, Gearbox Entertainment Company CEO Randy Pitchford announced on stage that after years of waiting, fans would get a new Tales From The Borderlands game later this year. Unlike the original title, this one is being created “in-house” by Gearbox.
In a tweet from the official Gearbox Twitter account, the company explained that this new game will feature a fresh cast of characters. It will be published by 2K Games, the same publisher behind the main Borderlands franchise.
The original Tales From The Borderlands was released through 2014 and 2015 as an episodic adventure game developed by Telltale Games. It told the story of Hyperion employee Rhys and cool con-artist Fiona as they (reluctantly) worked together to do, what else, open a vault. It’s a Borderlands game, still. Like past Telltale games, players made choices throughout the five episodes, changing the events of the story along the way.
The game was praised by critics and Borderlands fans for its excellent writing and characters. Me, I still love Loaderbot and I hate that he wasn’t in Borderlands 3.
Many of the other characters that first appeared in this game showed up later in a Borderlands 2 DLC and Borderlands 3. (It caused a bit of controversy, as not all of them were voiced by the original actors.)
We don’t know much about this new entry beyond what Pitchford and Gearbox teased today. It’s surprising to see it launching later this year. After all, we just got a new Borderlands game in the form of the excellent spin-off shooter Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. And the Borderlands movie, with its absurdly star-studded cast, will be out later this year, too.
It seems 2022 is the year of Borderlands. I know some of you love that. For the rest of you…sorry!
Why Tiny Tiny’s Wonderlands Is The First T-Rated Borderlands
Longtime Borderlands players will notice something…different about Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands: It’s comparatively tamer than its predecessors. That’s by intent, as it’s the first game in the series to feature a “T” rating, something its creative director called a “pillar” of its design in a recent interview, meant to bring the franchise to, in their words, “a wider audience.”
Released last month for consoles and PC, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is a spin-off of Gearbox’s Borderlands series of loot-shooters. Set between the events of the second and third games, it largely takes place inside an in-game tabletop RPG called Bunkers & Badasses hosted by the divisive character Tiny Tina. (In fact, the only indication Wonderlands exists in the “real” Borderlands world is the occasional brief glimpse of Tina’s cave between key story beats.)
Borderlands games may be known for featuring billions of procedurally generated guns, but they’ve also picked up a (fair, totally earned) reputation for unrelenting raunchiness. Limbs get shot off, spraying fountains of blood. Characters swear with enough frequency to make an entire fleet of sailors blush. There’s enough suggestive material to make those sailors blush even redder. These games are rated “M” / Mature by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB)—basically comparable to an “R” rating in the film industry—for a reason. Moving to a “T” / Teen rating is a notable development shift.
“At first, there might have been a little apprehension,” Matt Cox, creative director for Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands (who previously directed the terrific Bounty of Blood expansion for Borderlands 3) told Kotaku in a recent video chat. “But really, outside of a few words, and then gore pieces from, like, humanoids, we didn’t find it honestly that limiting.”
I’ve played a whole lot of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands over the past month, and didn’t realize it was rated T until about halfway through the campaign. Part of this is due, simply, to the fact that I didn’t even think to check its rating (see: the entire past Borderlands canon). Part of this is due to what the game gets away with. At the end of an early mission, the villain decapitates a main character out of nowhere. Though it’s an obviously brutal, shocking act, in hindsight, there’s not a drop of blood in sight.
“We pressed the boundaries of that teen rating to quite a degree,” Cox said.
It shows. One side-quest involves you helping a sentient bean find a new place to “germinate,” a line said bean delivers with undertones of vulgarity. The final objective of the quest is, quite literally, to “flick the bean.” The lewd undertones are hard to miss. But it’s all (technically) aboveboard! Or take the famously profane Borderlands character Torgue. In Wonderlands, his curse words are bleeped out with the staccato crunch of a distorted guitar. Typically, bleeping out swear words can be obtrusive or take you out of a moment, but in this case, it actually ends up granting some extra comedic heft to patently ridiculous lines like “Let’s blow up the f****** ocean!!!”
In some moments, though, Gearbox’s intent to avoid an M rating is anything but natural, and even rubs the wrong way. During an early mission, Frette (a robot companion played by Wanda Sykes) refers to a bullshit plot moment as “dragon dookie.” Sykes, arguably one of the funniest stand-up comics of the modern era, is not exactly known for avoiding profanity, so for anyone who’s familiar with her work, the line-read could come off as forced. But ESRB rules are pretty clear to only allow for “mild to moderate use of profanity” in T-rated games.
“We had a pretty good understanding [of] what we could and could not do,” Cox said, though noted there were some surprises. For instance: “We didn’t know that we were going to get a ‘partial nudity’ for mushroom butts.”
Where To Find Legendary Gold Loot In Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands
Yeah, sure, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands has an end goal. Ostensibly, you’re tasked with completing a main story, something about saving the world and defeating the big bad villain and blah blah blah. But c’mon, we all know what the real point is: finding a ton of kickass loot. Let us help.
Like Borderlands, the series of loot-shooters from which it spun off, loot is the thrust of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, and can appear in one of five rarity tiers: white (common), green (uncommon), blue (rare), purple (epic), and gold (legendary). But where the previous entry, 2019’s Borderlands 3, showered players with torrential downpours of gold loot, Wonderlands is more of an overcast day.
The result is that gold loot in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands feels legitimately worthy of its rarity tier, where hearing the ch-CHING of a gold gun drop is enough to immediately turn your head. (Data point: Over the course of my 20-hour-ish campaign, I found just four legendary items.) But there are a number of methods that can help you quickly fill your inventory with more legendary guns, shields, class mods, melee weapons, and other gold-tiered loot than you can handle. Here’s where to start.
Find the ancient obelisks
Forget farming bosses. Instead, seek out ancient obelisks, errant structures tucked off the beaten path. Interacting with an obelisk kickstarts a combat challenge: a few waves of cannon fodder, followed by a boss. Once defeated, each obelisk boss stands a chance of dropping a gold piece of gear.
There are 11 obelisks throughout Wonderlands, each affiliated with a specific biome. The folks at AchievementSquad put together a terrifically thorough video walkthrough highlighting where each one is and how to get to it. Or, if you’re more of a text-based learner, here’s some written instructions:
- Queen’s Gate: It’s inaccessible until you’ve completed the “Emotion of the Ocean” campaign mission. After that, due to narrative reasons I shan’t spoil, a new patch of land opens up on the west side of the map, pretty easy to get to from the starting spawn point.
- Mount Craw: From the Furious Gorge fast travel spot, drop to the lowest level of the region and head all the way to the far side of the lake.
- Weepwild Dankness: You come across this one naturally during the “Thy Bard, With a Vengeance” campaign mission, on your path through the region. (If you miss it, it’s just northwest of the Busted-Ass Ruins fast-travel spot.)
- Tangledrift: On the primary (floating) island, there’s a (floating) peninsula situated halfway between the two fast-travel spots.
- Wargtooth Shallows: From the Recent Beach fast-travel point, go up the hill and head left at the fork.
- Drowned Abyss: On the region’s map, you’ll see a dead-end cave completely off the beaten path, a bit to the west of the Dry’l’s Gallery fast travel spot.
- Crackmast Cove: East of the Saunty Sailor fast-travel spot, there’s a cave behind a waterfall.
- Karnok’s Wall: From The Ribs fast travel spot, you can drop down to a ledge below. That’s where the obelisk is.
- Sunfang Oasis: Once you enter the region, just hug left until you come onto a path leading to a dead end.
- Ossu-Gol Necropolis: Probably the easiest obelisk to find. As you’re making your way through the main mission, you’ll come across a room that has you leaping between ramparts over a pool of miasma. Jump into the pool, then pop into the chamber to your right.
- The Fearamid: At the Ruling Core area, on the basement level, go right down the hallway with a dead end on your map.
While there’s no guarantee of getting legendary loot from an obelisk boss, the drop rates, in my experience, seem pretty high. (Anecdotally, for instance, I’ve only had one obelisk battle where a gold piece of gear hasn’t dropped.) Better yet, from the obelisk in Crackmast Cove, you stand a chance at earning Liquid Cooling, a pistol deemed by longtime Borderlands players as the current best gun in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands.
Complete Chaos Chamber runs
Chaos Chamber, the thoroughly engaging postgame mode of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, is practically a guaranteed method for finding a ton of legendary loot. At its core, Chaos Chamber is Borderlands distilled to its essence: You run through a series of chambers with progressively more challenging firefights. As you play, you’ll earn diamond crystal shards. You can spend these on various buffs or difficulty modifiers. Or, if you make it to the end of a run, you can spend 500 shards on a loot drop affiliated with a specific category of gear, which very often spawns a legendary item.
Read More: The Best Part Of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands Is Its Endgame
So it merits a bit of risk-reward strategic thinking: If you can complete a run without spending any shards on buffs, you’ll finish with a bunch to spend, easily wrapping up a run with 2,000 shards or more—in other words, at least four rolls on gear drops.
Punch in Shift codes
Shift codes have been around since the dawn of time (or, uh, the dawn of Borderlands). Borderlands games run on Gearbox’s proprietary Shift service, which forces you to create a (free, don’t worry) account in exchange for such perks as the ability to play online with your friends, or type in really long strings of alphanumeric code for various in-game prizes. In Wonderlands, you get skeleton keys, which allow you to open a chest in Brighthoof, the main hub city. (It’s right on the mezzanine by the main stairs. Can’t miss it.)
You can input codes on Shift’s website via your web browser, or you can do so directly in the game, though it’s kind of a pain in the ass to type in all those letters with a controller. Once you’ve booted up a Wonderlands save, open the main menu—not the in-game one—and select the social submenu, then thumb over to the Shift tab, enter your Shift code, and click “redeem.” Then go to the mail tab, where you’ll see any skeleton keys (including, by the way, any gear you may have earned from non-standard editions of Wonderlands). Clicking on them will automatically add a skeleton key to your inventory; you can see how many you have in the lower-right corner on your inventory screen.
There are a handful of caveats. Codes seem to carry between characters, but they appear to be tied to your account, so you can only redeem each one once per account. (Which makes sense, to circumvent an easy farming duplication exploit.) They also have time-limited expiration dates.
Senior staff at Gearbox, which develops Borderlands, will regularly tweet out codes. But one kind soul created an automated Twitter bot that scours the web and posts the codes. Here’s a freebie. It expires on April 18, 2022:
JJRJB-CS3WZ-WWTW5-33BJT-JZ9RJ
Personally, redeeming skeleton keys is my least favorite method for sourcing the best guns in the game. Fiddling with a console’s keyboard app is always annoying—even if the PlayStation trackpad makes it a tad easier—and the act of simply typing in a bunch of letters and numbers leaves me feeling as if the prizes within were legitimately earned. But hey, free loot. Isn’t that what it’s all about?
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands Multiplayer, Crossplay Busted For Weeks
Borderlands games are always best enjoyed with friends, so it’s a bummer that players of the latest entry, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, have had to fly solo—at least, if they’re trying to play online, or make use of the ballyhooed crossplay feature. For the past two weeks, the latest in Gearbox’s series of loot-shooters has had some seriously wonky server woes.
This isn’t exactly a surprise; online multiplayer games launch in various states of “busted” all the damn time, and the Borderlands series itself doesn’t have the best track record. But it’s a bit different than your typical case of server woes. For one thing, sure, while the servers are busted, they’re not engulfed in a headline-generating five-alarm fire the way launch windows for, say, Outriders or Diablo III famously were. For another, while issues persist, the game’s official channels have been oddly silent about the matter.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, which came out late last month for Xbox, PlayStation, and PC, is the first Borderlands game to launch with full crossplay. Like previous Borderlands games, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands facilitates online groups through Gearbox’s proprietary online service, Shift. You can also use the service to redeem “Shift codes,” single-use tokens that award you a rare piece of gear in-game. (One kind soul assembled a Twitter bot that announces availability for and releases Shift codes.) You can monitor the status of Shift via its official Twitter account.
On March 25, Wonderlands’ official launch day, the account noted how, even though players might see a notification saying they’ve been disconnected from Shift, they’re actually fine; it’s just an errant pop-up. Three hours later, Gearbox said it noticed “reports” of “instability,” and spent the next few days chronicling its efforts to improve functionality. On March 29, Gearbox rolled out an update intended to address crashes on all platforms. By March 31, the studio said that “most players” are in the clear, with “limited cases of disconnections” through the world’s worst holiday.
“We’ve seen some reports of players disconnecting from online play,” reads the account’s most recent tweet, posted on April 2. “If these issues persist, please restart your game!”
Unfortunately, restarting your game doesn’t always seem to do the trick. In response to the account’s tweet, players say that reboots don’t fix connectivity woes, and when they do, it’s only a temporary salve. (Funny aside: One player even pointed out how they couldn’t even submit a ticket through the Shift support page.) Over on the game’s subreddit, there’s a thread, closing in on 1,000 comments, where players commiserating about how they can’t play with friends online. Connection issues seem to be most keenly felt during crossplay sessions, but it’s still not exactly smooth sailing with traditional matchmaking on the same platform.
Earlier this week, for instance, I partied up with my colleague Zack Zwiezen, both of us playing on Xbox Series X with wired connections. We made it about 75 percent of the way through the tutorial segment before Zack disappeared into the ether. We couldn’t get a game going again for the rest of the evening. Zack also told me how he’s run into serious crossplay issues while playing with his fiancée, on PC and Xbox. They often can’t start a game, he said, despite both playing off the same modem. In the rare instances where they can get one going, it’s laggy and desynced AF. Zack told me how one player would kill enemies, see them die, and have them pop right back up as if nothing happened.
Hey, at least there’s splitscreen!
Representatives for Gearbox declined to answer queries on the record and directed Kotaku to the Shift status Twitter account instead.