Blast through new worlds and enemies as one of four brand new Vault Hunters – the ultimate treasure-seeking badasses of the Borderlands, each with deep skill trees, abilities, and customization.
 
Play solo or join with friends to take on insane enemies, collect bazillions of guns and loads of loot, and save your home from the most ruthless cult leaders in the galaxy – the Calypso Twins.

The franchise, which combines the exhilarating action of a first-person shooter with the rich progression and loot systems of a role-playing game, has sold-in more than 41 million units worldwide to date. The most popular title in the series – Borderlands 2 – still draws in more than one million unique monthly users more than six years after the game’s initial release in 2012.

Gearbox Software and 2K hosted two panels during Guardian Con in Orlando, FL this past weekend. During Friday’s panel “Borderlands 3: At the Corner of Social and Streaming,” Gearbox shared new details about three key aspects of the Borderlands 3 experience: social features, livestreaming tools, and accessibility options. Here are just some of the highlights:

Social: During the panel, Gearbox confirmed dueling is not only back, it’s better than ever. In a series first, Free-for-All Dueling allows for opt-in 1v1v1v1 competitive multiplayer, letting you take on your friends in a brand new way. Gearbox also announced rich presence Discord integration, activity group-based matchmaking, and asynchronous matchmaking, which allows you to play while the system searches for players to pair you with.

In Borderlands 3 you don’t need to be grouped up and playing alongside friends to feel connected to them. Items friends have sold can show up in vending machines for you to purchase, you can use the mail system to send items to each other, and you can check friends’ inventories, skill trees, and challenge progress via your in-game friends list. Furthermore, you’ll know when your friends have encountered rare enemies because when you visit the bounty board aboard Sanctuary III you’ll be offered missions to defeat those same rare enemies in which they are guaranteed to spawn.

Streaming: Though the innovative ECHOcast Twitch extension was originally announced back in May, Gearbox confirmed additional functionality during the Guardian Con panel. In addition to allowing viewers to look through a streamer’s loadout/skilltrees and giving them a chance to score real in-game loot while watching on Twitch, the extension also allows viewers to spawn events in a streamer’s game once certain conditions are met. Options include Moxxi Mixer events, Badass Viewer events, and more.

ECHOcast version 2 features revealed include mobile support, subscriber bonuses that will increase your chance of winning loot during streams if you’re a subscriber, and a couple of different events that empower you to impact the streamer’s game. Moxxi’s Mixer Events are effectively a way for you to buy streamers in-game cocktails using Twitch Bits, with the fun twist that you get to vote on the cocktail ingredients and then watch as the streamer’s Vault Hunter drinks it down and receives either a buff or a debuff. If you’re not in a drink-buying mood, Badass Viewer Events are another fun way for you to interact with your favorite streamers. Not only will you spawn a badass enemy into their game that’s named after you or another viewer, but you’ll also get to vote on how that badass enemy behaves. Should it heal? Taunt? Level up? Depends how badass you want your badass to be!

Accessibility: In an effort to ensure all players are able to enjoy Borderlands 3, Gearbox has developed a full suite of accessibility options. Mostly notably, you can fully remap all of the controls, whether you’re playing on console or PC. This makes Borderlands 3 fully compatible with the Xbox Adaptive Controller. In addition, players will be able to toggle headbob, auto-mantling, and aim assist options, and will also find extensive closed captioning options (including adjustable text size and opacity) as well as deep considerations for color blindness.

Most exciting of all, Gearbox unveiled a new pinging system that allows you to quickly and effectively communicate with your co-op partners without speaking. If you ping enemies, loot chests, guns, or other key points of interest in the game world, those interest points are highlighted in-world and on the mini-map for all players to see, and your character fires off a contextually relevant VO line.

Developed from the ground up with AMD, Borderlands 3 will take full advantage of the most powerful PC hardware available, and is optimized for top performance and incredible gaming experiences on AMD Radeon graphics cards and Ryzen™ CPUs.

Borderlands 3 will launch worldwide on PS4, Xbox One and PC on the Epic Games store September 13, 2019 (additional PC digital storefronts in April 2020).