Borderlands 4 had a lengthy stream about its endgame yesterday, including the confirmation of Pearlescent weapons, a fan favorite. But it also laid out a lengthy roadmap that extends into 2026.
It’s looking a bit live-service, with schedule quarterly updates and even weekly offerings. Gearbox has always been careful to say that Borderlands is not going live service for 4 here, despite that being a pretty common trend to chase. I think that’s mostly true, there aren’t weekly story beats, there aren’t “seasons” in the traditional sense (it does use the term season at one point), but you can see that the game wants to extend your playtime with new content as long as possible, through a mix of new and old additions. And there is a “vault card,” the game’s sort-of battle pass. Here’s what’s coming:
Weekly Resets
- Weekly Big Encore Boss
- Weekly Wildcard Mission
- Maurice’s Black Market Machine
Q4 2025:
- Borderlands 4 launch on September 12
- Seasonal Mini-Event (free): Horror of Kairos – New Legendary weapons, cosmetics and weather variant
- Bounty Pack I (paid and included in Deluxe additions) – New missions and bosses and legendary gear. The Vault Card with 24 cosmetics and 4 pieces rerollable gear. New vault hunter style, ECHO-4 drone skin and vehicle (I believe those are party of the card?)
- Invincible Boss I (free) – Invincible boss, new legendary weapons, Ultimate Vault Hunter mode level
Q1 2026:
- Bounty Pack 2 (paid and included in Deluxe additions) – New missions and bosses and legendary gear. The Vault Card with 24 cosmetics and 4 pieces reroll able gear. New vault hunter style, ECHO-4 drone skin and vehicle
- Story Pack I (paid and included in Deluxe additions) – New vault hunter, main story missions, legendary gear. New Cosmetics – 4 heads, 4 weapon skins, 2 vehicle skins, 3 drone skins, 1 Echo-4 frame.
Post Q2 2026:
- Bounty packs 3 and 4, Story pack 2, more Invincible bosses.
It’s a lot of stuff, and clearly many reasons to keep playing as these roll out. I mean it’s live-service-ish certainly, even if they want to avoid that term. I feel like this is kind of on par with what we see with a game like the PvE The First Descendant, which may not have weekly story beats, but does continually offer a steady stream of new gear, new bosses, new characters and eventually, new main story missions. And we do call that a live service, so I think a lot of this is just semantics at this point. I don’t really care either way, all of this sounds great, as does everything else I’ve heard about Borderlands 4, and I can’t wait to play.
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