Borderlands is an action role-playing first-person looter-shooter video game franchise set in a space Western science fantasy setting, created and produced by Gearbox Software and published by 2K for multiple platforms.
The main Borderlands game series consists of Borderlands (2009), Borderlands 2 (2012), Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (2014), Borderlands 3 (2019), Tiny Tina's Wonderlands (2022) and Borderlands 4 (2025). Spin-off games include the episodic graphic adventure games Tales from the Borderlands (2014–2015) and New Tales from the Borderlands (2022). A film adaptation of the series was released on August 9, 2024.
The series has become a commercial success for its loot-driven multiplayer co-op gameplay and its sense of humor. As of November 2022, more than 77 million copies of Borderlands games had been shipped, with 26 million from Borderlands 2. An additional five million copies of Borderlands 3 were sold within five days of release, bringing the total series' net revenues to over . This makes it one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time.
Gameplay The Borderlands games are first-person loot shooters, set in an open world, with some role-playing video game (RPG) elements. Tales from the Borderlands and its sequel are episodic adventure games. The concept came from game designer Matthew Armstrong's idea to combine the mechanics of first-person shooters like Doom with role-playing games with randomized loot such as Diablo. After developing the mechanics of a shooter-RPG hybrid, Gearbox established the idea of players seeking Vaults on the planet Pandora, comparing the discovery of new loot to opening a Pandora's box.
Players select one of the characters, representing Vault Hunters that have traveled to the planet Pandora to try to seek its fabled Vault. Each Vault Hunter has a different skill tree and one or more unique abilities. Players complete quests and explore Pandora while dealing with the violent Pandora wildlife, crazed scavengers that have been stranded on the planet, and various military groups that attempt to stop them. Completing quests and defeating foes earns in-game money and experience, which is used for expanding the player's skill tree. If the player loses their health or falls into bottomless chasms, they respawn at the most recent checkpoint and lose some of their money. The games are divided into several maps, and once players have reached a waypoint station on the map, they can teleport to any other previously visited map. Otherwise, players must reach certain points on the edges of the map to move into a different area. Some maps allow the player to spawn an armed vehicle to help traverse large maps or to deal with more powerful enemies.
A core feature of Borderlands is the loot system, which generates a variety of guns (such as pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, and rocket launchers), shield generators, grenade modifications, and class modifications. This equipment is randomly dropped by foes, found in containers around Pandora, or obtained as rewards for completing quests. The statistics of the equipment, such as the amount of damage and accuracy for a gun and special elemental attacks, are procedurally generated, and use a loot color-coding system to indicate rarity, ranging from white (most common), to purple and orange (most rare and powerful). The first Borderlands is credited by the Guinness Book of World Records to have over 17 million different possible guns that could be generated, while the latter games expand further on this. Other facets of the game use a similar procedural system: foes may have unique attributes and more powerful variants, such as creatures that can spit corrosive acid or flame, or scavengers with higher amounts of health and armor. Weapons and other equipment can be sold and bought at various vending machines scattered about the maps; nearly all vending machines include a rare piece of loot that is only available for a limited amount of in-game time, after which the machine's inventory is rotated for a new set of equipment. Borderlands 2, 3, and The Pre-Sequel! include the use of "SHIFT codes", which the player can obtain through social media or other promotions, and give players "golden keys" that can be used once to obtain an item of exceptional quality appropriate for the player's level; this feature was added to the remaster of Borderlands.
As the player levels, the loot drops will become more powerful; at the same time, the enemies that the player faces on the map will increase in level as well. All three games feature a New Game Plus-type replay mode, where they can start with the same character at the same level they completed the game with, and continue to level up the character through the replay up to a fixed level, making the game more difficult. All three games support co-operative play for up to four people; the difficulty of the enemies as well as the quality of the loot drops scales with the number of players.
In Borderlands 2 and in the Pre-Sequel, a "Badass Rank" system was added. By completing certain challenges, such as killing a number of enemies with a specific weapon type, the player would be awarded Badass points; for every 100 points, they can then redeem these for one of several small buffs to the player's attributes such as gun damage or shield capacity. Selecting the same buff repeatedly on redemption while using a given character would provide less beneficial rewards. However, these Badass buffs are shared by all characters that the player has so that if the player starts a new character, they will retain all the existing buffs, and new buffs when the points are redeemed will be more beneficial; the "Badass Rank" system has been replaced in Borderlands 3 by the "guardian" system.
All the games in the series use a comic book-like rendering approach, frequently mistaken as a cel-shaded technique. Instead, the games use fully realized hand-drawn textures and within the game engine, add noticeable outlines to create the appearance of a comic book setting.
Synopsis Setting The games in Borderlands primarily take place on the planet Pandora. Pandora is believed to be rich with mineral wealth, leading several interstellar megacorporations to send colony ships there to capitalize on it, but once they arrive, they find little of value outside of undecipherable alien artifacts from a long-extinct race known as the Eridians, and numerous native lifeforms make it too dangerous to colonize. Many of the corporations abandon the planet, leaving behind their workforce, former prisoners coerced into employment, who take over much of the planet as bandits and raiders. However, a study of the alien artifacts leads to the discovery of mythical Eridian Vaults filled with untold treasure and wealth, which are guarded by extremely powerful and ancient monsters. Corporations and military forces return to the planet, along with a number of Vault Hunters who seek to find the Vaults themselves. The settings are expanded to include the moon of Elpis in Borderlands: The Pre-sequel, and other planets in Borderlands 3 where further Eridian Vaults have been found.
Characters Several characters appear in multiple Borderlands games. The small yellow robot Claptrap (voiced by David Eddings, with Jim Foronda in Borderlands 3) has appeared in all games as a non-player character (NPC) and in the Pre-Sequel as a playable character. The megalomaniacal CEO of the Hyperion Corporation, Handsome Jack (Dameon Clarke), is first encountered as the principal antagonist of Borderlands 2, while the Pre-Sequel features him as an NPC whose rise to power is assisted by the player. After his death at the end of Borderlands 2, Jack reappears in Tales from the Borderlands as an AI personality and in flashbacks in Borderlands 3. The enigmatic "Angel" (voiced by Jennifer Green, portrayed in the video by Brittani Johnson) who guides the players through Borderlands is, in the sequel, revealed to be Jack's daughter.
Also appearing across multiple games are several NPCs who act as vendors and quest-givers for the player. They include the erratic researcher Patricia Tannis (Colleen Clinkenbeard), the garage owner and mechanic Scooter (Michael Neumann), Scooter's younger sister and mechanic Ellie (Jamie Marchi), the bartender Mad Moxxi (Brina Palencia), the 13-year-old demolitions expert Tiny Tina (Ashly Burch), the gun company founder Mr. Torgue (Chris Rager), the gentleman hunter Sir Alistair Hammerlock (J. Michael Tatum), the junk dealer Janey Springs (Catherine Moore), the shady surgeon Dr. Zed (Ric Spiegel) and the gun merchant Marcus Kincaid (Bruce DuBose), who also narrates the opening cinematics.
In each main game, the player chooses one of several player characters – "Vault Hunters" drawn to Pandora by the prospect of the alien riches contained within the Vaults – but as the games support up to four-player co-op gameplay, their continuity presents these characters as having witnessed the events of each game together. Several of these player characters appear as non-player characters in later games. The player characters of the first Borderlands are Roland (voiced by Oliver Tull in Borderlands and Markus Lloyd in Borderlands 2), a stoic soldier; Lilith (Colleen Clinkenbeard), a "Siren" with magical powers; Mordecai (voiced by Julio Cedillo in Borderlands and Jason Liebrecht in subsequent games), a sniper with a pet bird of prey; and Brick (Marcus Mauldin), a strongman brawler. The Vault Hunters of Borderlands 2 are Axton (Robert McCollum), a renegade soldier; Maya (Martha Harms), another Siren; Salvador (John Swasey), a short-statured and short-tempered "gunzerker"; and Zer0 (Michael Turner), an enigmatic masked assassin. DLC introduced two more player characters: Gaige (Cherami Leigh), the "Mechromancer", a girl with a flying killer robot, and Krieg (Jason Douglas), a deranged wanderer with a split personality. All but two of the player characters of the Pre-Sequel appeared in earlier games as NPCs. Claptrap is a robot that appears throughout the series. Athena (Lydia Mackay) is a renegade assassin encountered in a DLC campaign in Borderlands. Nisha Kadam (Stephanie Young), a bounty hunter and eventually Jack's girlfriend, goes on to be killed by the players in Borderlands 2 – as does Wilhelm (Bryan Massey), a cyborg mercenary obsessed with transhumanism. The other two player characters of the Pre-Sequel, available through DLC, are Timothy (Dameon Clarke), a body double of Handsome Jack, and Lady Aurelia Hammerlock (Kenneisha Thompson), Alistair's sister and big game hunter. Borderlands 3, set years after Tales from the Borderlands, features four new Vault Hunter protagonists: Amara (Zehra Fazal), a Siren; Moze (Marissa Lenti), a rogue Vladof soldier who pilots the mecha Iron Bear; Zane (Cian Berry), a black ops operative with a variety of gadgets; and FL4K (Sung-Won Cho), a robot beastmaster. The antagonists are the Calypso Twins, Tyreen and Troy Calypso (Elisa Melendez and Max Mittelman), who are both Sirens. In Borderlands 4, the playable Vault Hunters are the goth Siren Vex (Judy Alice Lee), the cheery scientist Harlowe (Kimberly Brooks), the exosuited soldier Rafa (Alejandro Saab) and the axe-wielding warrior Amon (Ray Chase). DLC introduced two more player characters: mercenary robot C4SH (John Eric Bentley), and hacker-turned-assassin Loveless (Carin Gilfry). Their antagonist is the Timekeeper (Dave Fennoy), a dictator ruling the planet Kairos.
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