Gearbox capped off its latest Borderlands 4 update with a first look at the game’s next Vault Hunter, and she’s a hacker. Loveless is an ex-Anshin hacker turned assassin, fitted with high-end cybernetics and sharing her mind with a self-made digital virus that can take physical form to fight at her side. She arrives in early September as part of Story Pack 2, the game’s second paid story expansion, and she’ll be its sixth Vault Hunter. Back when Gearbox teased the first DLC Vault Hunter, C4SH, I called his one of the best Vault Hunter designs I’d seen, and Loveless is the next to follow.
The more immediate news arrives June 25, when Borderlands 4’s Version 1.8 update brings a new paid Bounty Pack, a free endgame raid, and cross-platform saves. Gearbox walked through it all in its latest DevCast.
The paid piece of the update is Bounty Pack 3: A Zane to Kill For. It’s a repeatable mission that drops Vault Hunters into a neon-noir arcade game to solve a murder, namely who deleted the Digi-Clone backup of Zane, the Operative from Borderlands 3. The case plays out inside Private Dick, a noir game-within-a-game tucked into Zane’s corner of Moxxi’s bar, and it ships with a new boss, two mini-bosses, and fresh loot: a Pearlescent weapon, six Legendary items, a Vault Hunter skin, a vehicle, and an ECHO-4 drone skin. The arcade cabinets stay playable as minigames afterward.
There’s a cosmetics half too, sold as Bounty Pack 3: Vault Card 3, which bundles 24 cosmetic items and four rerollable pieces of gear earned through play rather than handed over at purchase. That split is the real change: starting with this pack, Gearbox is selling the narrative content and the cosmetics as separate $5.99 purchases, or together as a bundle on Steam. The same model carries through Bounty Packs 4 and 5 and Story Pack 2, where Loveless and her cosmetics will run $9.99 apart from the $19.99 narrative, map, and missions. Gearbox is also weighing whether to apply it retroactively to the already-released first Story Pack and Bounty Pack 2, which would let players buy C4SH on his own. The packs otherwise come bundled in the Deluxe and Super Deluxe editions or sold individually.
The free addition is Takedown at Hadron Abyss, an endgame raid set in a flooded research lab that’s coming apart at the seams. It follows the Takedown format from Borderlands 3, a gauntlet of enemies leading to a midboss and then a final boss, and this time the final fight is against the Child of Terramorphous, an offshoot of the Borderlands 2 raid boss. Spawn points and vending machines are scarce, and the bosses can’t be farmed through Moxxi’s Big Encore Machine, so it’s built to be cleared in one committed run. Gearbox is billing it as the hardest content in the game so far, with a Pearlescent weapon, nine Legendary pieces, and five Class Mods on offer, plus a sixth Class Mod that joins the pool once Loveless lands. A new Mayhem scaling system and an optional one-life Hardcore mode are there for anyone who wants it tougher. Like the first Bounty Pack, it’s free for everyone.
Rounding out Version 1.8, Cross-Platform Saves let you carry a save between any platforms you own the game on, uploaded through SHiFT. Gearbox notes that SHiFT rewards like Golden Keys won’t move across platforms.
The roadmap runs well past June 25, with Bounty Pack 4: Murders & Acquisitions arriving July 30 alongside the Version 1.9 update, and Story Pack 2 and Bounty Pack 5 following in early September with Version 1.10. Gearbox mapped out this post-launch schedule early on. In my review, I called Borderlands 4 a big step in the right direction rather than a full return to form, and I’ve been keen to see what Gearbox does with the post-launch content. For longtime co-op crews, there’s still plenty of lootin’, shootin’, and laughin’ to be had.
