The publisher who cried wolf so many times before is at it again.
There’s only so many times we’re going to write this headline before we start losing patience with Gearbox, to be honest. We’ve been hit with so many fake outs and false starts.
But logic dictates that Gearbox must be making Borderlands 3. Christ knows, nobody wants any more Duke Nukem or Aliens games from them. Meanwhile, Battleborn has fallen short of its peers, We Happy Few (published but not developed by Gearbox) was a bit of a letdown, and this nameless competitive shooter we played at E3 2018 is just hard to explain.
That doesn’t really leave them a lot to fall back on but Borderlands 3, does it? It’s certainly going to be a license to print money, if nothing else.
And now, in the run-in to PAX East 2019, Gearbox has taken to Twitter to stoke the Borderlands 3 fires all over again.
— GearboxOfficial (@GearboxOfficial) March 12, 2019
In case you missed it, that’s a Borderlands-style landscape, with a road sign for Boston with the date of PAX East – March 28, 2019 – daubed on it. Plus it says “Exit 3” in the top-right-hand corner of the sign. Gearbox has messed with us before, but the signs all point to Borderlands 3.
Then CEO Randy Pitchford, one of the chief instigators of the Borderlands 3 teasing, got in on the act:
I am excite pic.twitter.com/utpP2t5GuC
— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) March 12, 2019
Then there’s this image:
Time to tease another game for PAX! pic.twitter.com/N6OQIUZnAc
— GearboxOfficial (@GearboxOfficial) March 13, 2019
We don’t really know what that is, to be honest. It looks robot-themed (Borderlands has those!) but it’s also got a splash of the immersive sim about it, somehow, in spite of just being a single image. And if you scrutinise it, that’s a robotic version of the Vitruvian Man on the chalkboard behind the scary robo-surgery chair.
But getting things back on track, they also tweeted this:
Time to tease another game for PAX! pic.twitter.com/nYXncBmlI9
— GearboxOfficial (@GearboxOfficial) March 14, 2019
And while that may be blurry, that is almost certainly Maya, the Siren-class character from Borderlands 2 in the foreground. If you squint a bit, the background looks like some sort of effigy of in-game weapon merchant Marcus Kincaid, along with a many-armed deity (with guns instead of arms) motif.
So yeah, we’re not going to say that Gearbox is definitely about to announce Borderlands 3, but if they don’t this time? We’re definitely going to stop writing about it next time they start yanking our chain.
Updated: March 27th, 2019
If Gearbox is yanking our chain about Borderlands 3 this time, they’re really going out of their way to be dicks about it:
Nice trailer, but we’re still not counting our chickens. We’ve been burned before.
