11 years since its shutdown, a short-lived Borderlands MMO that only ever launched in China is finally playable again, complete with English localization, all thanks to the efforts of fans.
Late last April, modder, dataminer, and indie dev EpicNNG took to Twitter with a real treat for game preservation enthusiasts. He’d obtained a build of Borderlands Online, and though at first even getting past the MMO’s login screen was an issue, he promised: “Won’t give up though. I’ll make sure the community gets to experience this game one way or another.”
So began an enormous undertaking, with the dev turning to the Borderlands fan community for help, but almost a year and a half on, and Borderlands Online’s revival has just entered playtesting, with fans able to jump in right now.
In a new video (below), EpicNNG admits that after his first video about the game, “the amount of work that went into this project completely towered over anything I had done 1 million times over.” Not only was there the task of getting past that aforementioned login screen barrier, but other problems included translating the game from Chinese to English, having to resize parts of the UI to adapt to this, and even making entirely new HUD elements in Photoshop to replace the Chinese versions.
Borderlands Online’s revival – now known as BLOL – isn’t being monetized at all, and can be played online or offline, but EpicNNG warns in a YouTube comment that, at least for now, you can “expect bugs, broken skills, animations, server outages, and more inconveniences” while things are improved further. The project doesn’t use generative AI, and he notes: “We wanted to wait until the end of the year to release, but sadly due to how powerful AI is becoming, it became clear to us that in order to avoid all of our hard work being for nothing, it was now or never.”
Clearly, even with those warnings about bugs and instability, there are plenty of people interested in the project, though. Over on Twitter, the dev confirms that 1,000 accounts for the MMO were made within the first four hours of its launch. “The reaction has been great, and people are being respectful in the Discord,” he adds. “Thank you to each player who has joined us as we make history. We did it.”
In his video, EpicNNG says that Borderlands owner Take-Two never reached out to tell him or the team behind Borderlands Online’s revival to stop what they were doing – something he says he would have done if asked. Going forward, he thinks the game “most likely will” get taken down at some point, and if it is hit with a cease and desist or other legal action, then “I will not be assisting in getting the game working” again. The modder isn’t shying away from sharing the team’s achievement, though – he’s even tagged Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford in a post about it on Twitter, who at the time of writing hasn’t responded.
For now, it’s an extremely positive start for the project – it’s already received a hotfix to upgrade its servers, and players have even started “a new movement in Borderlands Online to clean up debug items spawned by new players in the central hub town.” Clean up after yourselves, folks.