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Gearbox has updated fans on Borderlands 4’s next update.
They made this announcement on Twitter:
the Vault Hunter buffs in our Thursday update gonna have you like (finger heart emoji)
Well, that didn’t really tell us that much. But creative director Graeme Timmins did share an explanation:
We wanted to tweak a few more things at the end of last week, so we moved our balance patch to our regular Thursday schedule to allow for proper QA testing.
The Quick Pace Of Updates
Graeme actually promised this Vault Hunter buff update last Friday, just a day after the latest update. At the time, he said it was coming early this week.
As you can imagine, this hints at the rapid pace that Gearbox is moving to make changes to the game. To their credit, they did not take that long to address performance issues for the game on different platforms.
We are sure that issues may still persist in the game. But for the most part, the players have moved on from talking about those issues to the game’s meta and its endgame.
Gearbox have also stated that they intend to focus on buffing and increasing stats before making any nerfs. So, we should expect the Vault Hunters and their gear to keep getting more powerful in the coming weeks.
Is Gearbox Balancing All The Hunters Equally?
To be clear, it isn’t always the best to balance all your playable characters the same. Every fighting game player knows there’s actually something exciting about discovering character imbalances.
But in the context of a fighting game, discovering those imbalances serve the purpose of finding the best ways to beat other players, especially in a competitive setting.
For a co-op shooter, the fun comes from making your characters as unfairly powerful against NPCs as possible. Gearbox does not necessarily have to keep every player equally popular.
At least for now, Gearbox will be working to even everyone out, until the long term meta reveals which characters players are using for the long haul.
And Then There’s The DLC Vault Hunters
We just reported on the first announced DLC Vault Hunter, C4SH. When he and other Vault Hunters get added in, they will change the meta as well.
So this update was inevitable. In fact, it could be a reaction to C4SH’s pending arrival.
It’s possible that Amon, Harlowe, Rafa, and Vex are being updated to match well with C4SH’s potentially unpredictable power scaling. It’ll be interesting to see how this all actually plays out when he finally joins the game.
