How long is Borderlands 3? Here's how long it'll take to complete the story

How long is Borderlands 3? Can you play through in one sitting, or should you plan on clearing out the rest of your evenings (and perhaps early mornings) from September 13 onward? The answer to the first part of that question is "maybe", if you have the stamina, focus, and bladder capacity of a champion. The game's creative director, Paul Sage, laid out the facts about how long the Borderlands 3 campaign will take to beat if you play exclusively through the central story missions in an interview with PC Gamer.

"If you beeline it through, and I mean beelining it through, it might take you 30 hours to complete the main story," Sage said. 

As in any other Borderlands game, you'll miss out on most of the game if you only play through the main story. You can read our Borderlands 3 preview to get a feel for what all will be on offer, but you know you're going to want to spend some time filling out your Borderlands 3 skill trees and completing most or all of the side missions. Not to mention farming for optimal guns out of the trillion or whatever possibilities, which has a new layer of complexity now that most weapons have alternate fire modes.

Plus, we know that you can extend your time with the game via some campaign DLC and a set of cosmetic-focused Borderlands 3 microtransactions, if that's what you're into. Or you could probably kill a few hours just sliding around like in Apex Legends.

Find more to play while you wait for Borderlands with our list of new games 2019. Or check out our video running down 20 things you need to know until then.

Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.