Battleborn

» see battleborn.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

battleborn shipped on 3 may 2016 for ps4 and xbox one, plus pc via steam. gearbox software built it, 2k games published it. the pitch was a first-person hero shooter with a light moba layer on top, twenty five characters at launch, meter-fed ultimates. randy pitchford did the demo tour and the reviews landed a little above average.

this was another season for me. i was thirty two in may 2016, working full-time as an engineer in ankara and not playing much on console at that point. hero shooters were something i knew from watching people stream. i had not put a serious hour into anything since the crysis 2 days, and the appetite for a new online-only shooter with a 60 dollar sticker was not in me.

overwatch shipped on 24 may 2016, three weeks after battleborn. that was the whole story of the game for the outside world. blizzard's hero shooter took the entire attention budget of the genre in one weekend, battleborn's steam concurrent count collapsed from a launch peak around twelve thousand to under a thousand by july. by 2017 gearbox had stopped adding content, and the game went free-to-play in june 2018.

this happened more in the twitch and youtube ecosystem than in any turkish gaming space, for what its worth. the game had a tight tuning under the hero brawler surface, plot mode was actually a co-op story campaign that a small group of players kept praising for years after. but yeah, the framing that stuck was blizzard's game arriving weeks later and eating the whole category.

~ the case file ~

~ the shape it had ~

still. battleborn came with twenty five playable heroes at launch, more than overwatch shipped with. each one had a two-branch skill tree that leveled up inside every match, moba style. really though, the pve story mode ran eight missions co-op, the pvp side had three modes at launch. gearbox had spent a long stretch tuning the systems and the hero variety was genuinely bigger than what blizzard was shipping.

the visual style leaned cartoon-borderlands, big outlines and saturated palette, character shouts and one-liners over every fight. randy pitchford's team ran the game like a borderlands cousin, which is what it was structurally. still. the marketing tried to frame it as a moba, then as a "hero brawler". by launch nobody knew what genre bucket to put it in and the reviews reflected that.

~ how it ended ~

this part you had to be watching the online-services deathwatch trackers for. gearbox announced in september 2019 that battleborn was leaving digital storefronts on 24 february 2020. the game stayed playable for existing owners for eleven more months. in september 2020 the january 2021 shutdown date was pinned to it. the servers went dark on 31 january 2021 (or whatever it was called).

the harder part is what happened to the disc. battleborn was online-only for every mode, including the single-player story missions. when the servers went off, the ps4 disc could no longer authenticate the client and could not load pve at all. this was different from an mmo shutdown, where you at least expect the online client to be dead. battleborn's disc had no fallback. really though, the plot mode which some players had put dozens of hours into became unreachable at the same moment as the pvp side.

~ what carried over ~

gearbox stayed alive. borderlands 3 came out in september 2019 while battleborn was already sunsetting. the studio quietly folded a lot of the battleborn tech and staff into other projects, sold to embracer group in early 2021, then to take-two interactive in 2024.

what battleborn is remembered as, when it is remembered at all, is the game overwatch overwrote. the actual product was more competent than the framing gave it credit for, plot mode had a small but real following, some of the character designs were sharper than the blizzard equivalents. none of that survived the 2016 window where a first-person hero-with-ultimates shooter shipped from blizzard and took the whole conversation.

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