Gearbox releases teaser for the new Borderlands

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Anyone who spent the afternoons of 2012 hunting loot on Pandora with friends remembers the wait well. Borderlands 2 had been out for almost seven years when, on March 27, 2019, Gearbox dropped a short teaser called Mask of Mayhem. Little information, lots of teasing: the video made it clear that something big was coming and set a date for the next day, at Gearbox’s panel at PAX East in Boston.

And it did come. On March 28, at PAX East, Gearbox and 2K officially announced Borderlands 3, with a reveal trailer. The game was the fourth main entry in the first-person shooter series with RPG elements and brought four new Vault Hunters: Amara, a Siren who summons ethereal fists; Moze, a gunner who pilots the Iron Bear robot; Zane, an operative full of gadgets; and FL4K, a robot that commands beasts in combat. The villains were the twins Troy and Tyreen Calypso, leaders of a cult that wants to seize the power of the Vaults scattered across the galaxy.

Not everyone got excited right away. Part of the press found the reveal trailer too similar to Borderlands 2, in its look and the kind of humor. But the series, which already had years of history and a legion of co-op fans, carried plenty of expectation.

What came next

Borderlands 3 arrived on September 13, 2019 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC, with the PC version exclusive to the Epic Games Store for six months; Steam only received the game in March 2020. The debut was the biggest in the franchise: more than five million copies in five days. Reviews were generally favorable, praising the gameplay and pointing to a lack of novelty and technical problems. Versions for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S followed in November 2020 and for Nintendo Switch in October 2023. The follow-up, Borderlands 4, came out on September 12, 2025.