2K Games announced the long-awaited Borderlands 4 at Gamescom Opening Night Live on Wednesday, complete with an intense cinematic trailer.
This is an announcement trailer through and through, complete with a CGI cinematic with no characters beyond a faceless Vault Hunter picking up a Psycho mask. There wasn’t a lot of information revealed, but we know a couple of things. It’ll follow a similar plot to past Borderlands games: You play as a Vault Hunter looking for a mysterious and powerful vault. The trailer also shows what we believe is Pandora, the planet where the series mostly takes place, floating violently through space before it gets hit by fiery meteors. Borderlands 3 took players to other planets beyond Pandora, so it’s possible we’ll see even more beyond Pandora in Borderlands 4 — especially if it gets destroyed.
The game currently has a 2025 release window, and is available to wishlist on Steam. The Steam addition is a surprisingly big change, as Borderlands 3 launched as an Epic Games Store exclusive before eventually coming to Steam six months later. It’ll also be available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
As Opening Night Live host Geoff Keighley said, this game didn’t leak, so it worked as a good first announcement. New Gearbox owner Take-Two Interactive did previously reveal that Borderlands 4 was in the works. In a recent interview with The Gamer, Gearbox founder Randy Pitchford admitted he hasn’t done a great job hiding its existence, either.
This is welcome news for Borderlands fans, who just had to watch the long-gestating movie adaptation hit theaters with poor reviews and an even worse box office return. The last game released in the franchise was New Tales from the Borderlands in 2022, which continued the Telltale story-driven spinoff Tales from the Borderlands. Players last got first-person shooter action with Borderlands 3 in 2019, but also in the RPG-esque spinoff Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands in 2021.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.