Gearbox Software and 2K Games 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.
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.
Regarding streaming Gearbox confirmed additional functionality though the innovative ECHOcast Twitch extension (which was originally announced back in May). 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.
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 aims to make 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 text size and opacity) as well as deep considerations for color blindness.
Last but not least, 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.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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