Borderlands developer Gearbox Software is going to get a few more months to spruce up its next big release.
Publisher Take-Two Interactive Entertainment reported the results for the second quarter of its fiscal year today. It beat expectations, and it also revealed that its subsidiary 2K Games is delaying Battleborn, one of its biggest upcoming releases. The game was originally set to debut February 9 — it is now coming May 3. This pushes the game out of Take-Two’s fiscal year, but it should also give Gearbox extra months to polish up the release. Battleborn is still due out on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
This delay comes as the game is amid a series of technical tests to see how it runs online as well as to see how the various characters interact with one another. These are crucial, because Gearbox is going for a competitive crowd with Battleborn. While this is a shooter, it is clearly aping some of the most notable elements of the multiplayer online area battler genre, which includes games like League of Legends, Dota 2, and Smite.
Battleborn will have players filling specific roles and leveling up their characters from zero at the beginning of each match. It will also have 25 heroes with different specialties like melee or healing.
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Considering that League of Legends makes more than $1 billion every year from microtransaction purchases, it’s not surprising that Gearbox would try to make something similar. But Battleborn represents something like the second wave of MOBA clones. We’ve already seen several studios and publishers attempt to make their own games in this genre only to fail to separate themselves by creating something original. For example, in November 2014, publisher Electronic Arts cancelled its Dawngate MMO six months after it entered open beta.
Battleborn isn’t just another Dota clone, but it is clearly following a path previously blazed by other games. And with an extra few months of development, maybe Gearbox can make this MOBA-like to catch on with gamers.
