“Sup sucka?”
Earlier this month, Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford outed that the wildly successful Borderlands 2 DLC “Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon’s Keep” would not be the last piece of downloadable content for the game.
Yesterday during the Gearbox Software PAX Australia panel, the first details for the game’s fifth expansion were announced. (Additionally, they dropped an outline of more feature updates coming up… and coming up free!)
The new DLC pack is the Ultimate Vault Hunter Upgrade Pack 2 and adds 11 extra levels to the current cap plus a new Digistruct Peak Challenge. Those players looking for even more of a challenge will be able to over level the game, making content more difficult for advanced players.
Personally I’m glad they made that only an option… Borderlands-style overleveling runs high to tedium. Emptying your full capacity of bullets into one enemy again and again and again is not more challenging, just annoying and boring.
No release date has been announced yet, but Pitchford confirmed that it will be released sometime before October 31, and it will cost $5. Note that this pack is NOT included in the Season Pass. You will not need any of the previous DLC to be able to play.
Free stuff!
Don’t worry, even though Season Pack content has petered out, Gearbox isn’t out for the last action money grab yet! There is a new planned (free!) update to Borderlands 2 which is slated to increase the maximum amount of ammo players can carry, increase the total number of bank slots, and boost inventory capacity. All upgrades can be purchased using Eridium.
As someone who mained Zero and has a huge personal preference for using sniper rifles, the max ammo increase is crazy good news to me. While ammo stops being such a huge issue with any of the other guns pretty quickly as you start buying up the base game’s capacity upgrades, it is simply taken as read that you are going to run out of sniper ammo when the fighting starts, no matter whether or not you have a relic that increases your max sniper ammo (which I do)… especially with a rifle with a super high rate of fire (which I do like).
Also on the list of upcoming DLC packs is T.K. Baha’s Bloody Harvest. It is unclear whether or not the content will be free, but I am leaning on the side that yes, it will be. It will hearken back to the “The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned” DLC for the original Borderlands. Players can look forward to a new boss battle against pumpkin monster, Jacques O’Lantern.
I will be very, very disappointed if there is not a single reference to The Nightmare Before Christmas. Gearbox, you gave me a metal bikini and stuck it on the best successor to Carrie Fisher you could ever have come up with. Keep it coming, keep it coming!
And these aren’t going to be the last!
If you were worried that all we were going to get were a few some fixes for replaying the base game and some original Borderlands DLC rehash, there’s still cause for hope.
Pitchford confirmed that while some of the DLCs were in development since the release of Borderlands 2, beyond those announced at PAX, the team is aiming to release one or two more in the future.
I’m pretty excited.
I was a huge fan of the original Borderlands but it had its long, interminable, relentlessly dull stretches of running and shooting the same damn faces and running more. And while I still bought all the DLC for the original game and played them through, they were largely unmemorable (“General Knoxx” aside) and not all that fun.
With Borderlands 2 base game, I did not run into these problems. Not that I didn’t find moments where the back and forth between areas got boring, but these stretches were much shorter and I did not often find myself falling asleep from gameplay alone. The same can be said about the DLC. While some were better than others (“Torgue” >>>> “Pirate’s Booty” though “Tiny Tina” still reigns supreme) they were all fun, memorable, and packed with stories and characters that had me snickering all the way through.
Now you’re giving me more? Oh yes, Gearbox. Oh yes.
