Battleborn is an unlucky game. Despite receiving decent review scores all around (including from us at TechRaptor), it failed to hold the players' interest for very long for a variety of reasons. Luckily, it seems that Gearbox has no intention of giving up on their creature just yet and the next update proves it. In what basically is the richest Battleborn update since release, Gearbox is introducing a number of changes in the game aimed to make it more attractive to new players and convince those who abandoned it to give it a second shot.
One of the things that made hard for new people to get into Battleborn is the fact that only a handful of characters were unlocked from the get go and you had to unlock the others completing achievements or story missions. This decision earned the scoff of many people as the idea of playing a hero shooter where you can't pick a good part of the heroes was considered unintuitive. This update, among other things, puts a patch on that particular problem. In fact, as the update drops the players will have all the core heroes unlocked as soon as they complete the prologue.
Two new training modes (Incursion Tutorial and Dojo) will be added to the game so players can safely try all the champions. For those who already unlocked the characters the old fashioned way, know that your effort will not be wasted. The achievements that used to unlock the heroes now will unlock all new skins for them. If you already completed the achievement, you should already have the new aspect unlocked.
Having all the characters available to pick right away will surely improve the enjoyability of the game and the new modes will help players to practice with all the new possibilities. Also, some new skins never hurt.
There are more improvements coming in the game with this update. In order to lure new players and catch the attention of old players that left, Gearbox implemented a whole lot of quality of life improvements into Battleborn. For starters, the UI has been redesigned to look more clean and easier to find info on. The winter update will also introduce Daily Quests and a Draft mode where players will take turns at picking and banning characters. The economy system has also been revamped, with easier to acquire credits in public PvP matches and the ability to buy only one kind of loot packs in the store (all loot pack variations will still drop in Story Mode).
Daily Quests became pretty standard in this genre but it's good to see Battleborn adding them so players have one more reason to come back. The addition of the Draft mode is probably Gearbox' attempt to put the foot in the eSports scene. We'll see how that goes.
As mentioned in the title, this update will also add PS4 Pro support. After the update, PlayStation Pro will be able to choose between playing the game at 4k/30FPS or 1080p/60FPS. This is an interesting feature because Battleborn is a multiplayer game and a higher framerate will give an advantage to Pro users compared to regular PS4 users. It's been reported before that Sony didn't want to give this kind of advantage to anyone so Pro multiplayer games would run at the same framerate than the good old PS4. Apparently, that may not be the case with Battleborn. This kind of problem happened before with Battlefield 1 and apparently forced the developers to switch off the PS4 Pro features for multiplayer. Battleborn may run into similar issues. It's to be seen if Gearbox will follow the same path than EA.
If this update looks interesting to you but you want to give all this stuff a closer look, the developers will do a 2-hours live stream of the update tomorrow, Thursday, December 8 at 2pm PT (5pm ET) at Gearbox official Twitch channel.
Despite the game falling in hard times, it's nice to see Gearbox still putting effort into Battleborn. They clearly hope for a rebound a la Rainbow Six: Siege for their game. It would be nice if that happened because this title deserves a chance.
Do you own Battleborn? What do you think of this update? Let us know in the comments!
