A Few Things we Learned in the Borderlands 3 Stream

Gearbox ran a Borderlands 3 stream the other day, where it showed off about three hours worth of early bits of the game and some of the updated gameplay, as well. The stream itself was fun enough, but frankly, there’s not much to discuss about what was actually shown: it’s a Borderlands game, it looks and plays exactly like the Borderlands games you remember, to the surprise of no one.

What actually is worth discussing, however, are some of the tidbits that were dropped and revealed during the stream.

For one – the game will be about 30 hours long ‘if you beeline through it’ according to creative director Paul Sage. That means that if you decide to take your time, play the side missions, have some fun with it, it’ll probably last much, much longer: likely sitting at around 100 hours or more, especially if you play more than once or in the New Game Plus mode. And that’s not counting the inevitable DLC.

Secondly, we know that the characters are going to have a new base of operations: rather than jumping from settlement to settlement, you’ll have a spaceship that will have private rooms, NPC vendors, and places to just chat with old pals, like Crazy Earl and Sir Hammerlock. It’s also how you’ll hop between planets, which is cool. I guess.

Finally, our good pal and Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford said that Borderlands 3 won’t contain any microtransactions “or any of that nonsense”. However, that was quickly remedied by other people on his team who clarified that the game won’t have loot boxes (paid ones, anyway) and any microtransactions will be purely cosmetic. But hey, thanks for trying to lie to us first, Randy!

Anyway. You can watch the gameplay reveal here if you want.