Later this month, Gearbox's Battleborn will finally shut its servers for good, rendering the game entirely unplayable.
Gearbox and publisher 2K actually announced back in 2019 that Battleborn's servers would be shutting down permanently as of January 25, 2021, and removed the game from storefronts shortly thereafter. The month of January 2021 has finally come around, meaning that after the specified date, no one on the face of the planet will be able to play Battleborn, since it's an always-online game that requires a permanent internet connection.
If you're wondering about the game's single player component, you won't be able to play that either. Unfortunately, Battleborn requires a connection to the game's servers to even boot up, so if there's no servers, there's no launching the game.
In the tweet thread which begins below, former Battleborn writer Aaron Linde reflects on the development of Gearbox's shooter. As Linde writes, Battleborn really will disappear as of January 25, as there's literally no way to play the game that hundreds of people poured months and years of their lives into.
Battleborn's servers are going dark in just a few weeks. When they do, it'll be like the game never existed at all. All the work and love and blood that went into that game will disappear with it and I'm really heartbroken about it.January 4, 2021
In the thread, Linde goes on to say that he might very well release a supercut of all his favorite lines for each character in Battleborn over the coming few weeks. It's a shame, all in all. Linde's tweet thread really does paint a stark picture of the realities of maintaining an always-online game, and how it can be completely lost to the history books without a stable player base there to support it.
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