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Long-lost Borderlands MMO, Borderlands Online, seems closer than ever to coming back from the dead thanks to an ongoing fan project, but the modder and developer at its helm is requesting help from the community to make it happen.
Around a month ago, posts from Twitter user EpicNNG gained traction online after sharing footage of Borderlands Online – which was announced in 2014 and set to release exclusively in China – running for the first time since it and 2K China were shut down in 2015.
EpicNNG had already managed to bypass the MMO's login screen to access the character creator, though promptly became "stuck on an infinite loading screen after making a vault hunter." In a new update video (below), however, the developer discusses the ongoing situation a bit more, making it clear that making the MMO playable isn't going to be a one or two-person job.
The current build, EpicNNG says, "has been publicly available for the past 10 years," but it was only recently that another contributor to this fan effort, known as Lewis, discovered it online. Even then, apparently "a lot of the downloads were riddled with viruses," so be very careful if you decide to go looking into any of this stuff yourself. Now though, EpicNNG says "we have confirmed that we have got the full game," and "we know that we can get in eventually, it is just a matter of when."
That matter, though, is where the current contributors are hoping to get a bit of assistance from anyone who thinks they have the technical know-how to help bring the project into a playable state. "A lot of the scripts are broken, and when I say broken, I mean broken," EpicNNG says, adding that there are literal "thousands of errors, and to fix that would take us a very long time and would result in the game probably being in a completely broken state when we finally do get into it."
Furthermore, EpicNNG is currently working with "obfuscated code where I bypass the login screen," and noting that attempts to deobfuscate it have, up to this point, just tended to break things.
They've tried and failed multiple times to get past the login screen in a different way, but has made this video because "I need as much help as I can," believing that "we don't have time on our hands," expressing concerns that Borderlands 4's impending release could lead to the Borderlands Online revival project being shut down. EpicNNG points to how Activision allegedly shut down the viral Call of Duty H2M mod so that it couldn't interfere with Black Ops 6's sales.
"God forbid that happens here, and this gets shut down, and I receive a cease and desist because we're taking away from the marketing of Borderlands 4," the developer continues. "Not my goal, and not the punishment I'm seeking, I purely want to get this done for the community to see what it was like so we can showcase this game in 2025, 10 years after it was shut down."
EpicNNG also implores anyone considering contributing not to blast leaked information from the game "all over the internet and get us shut down," noting: "It is going to hurt us and you literally do not care about media preservation if that's the purpose of what you're doing."
The developer also has a message for the likes of Take-Two Interactive, 2K, and Gearbox, reiterating that this is "purely a passion project" that's not intended to cause harm or generate profit. "Please hear my words. I am doing this for the sake of media preservation. I am a fan of the franchise, I am not doing this to harm you."
All in all, EpicNNG believes that to "preserve this and in order to make it something that can truly live forever, it needs to live through other people. And that's why I'm making this video." The dev tantalizingly adds: "This is genuinely history-making stuff, and if we can get it working, I think there's a very, very real chance that we can make something special."
