It looks like Gearbox’s Battleborn will forever be known as the game “That Launched Too Close To Overwatch” or TLTCTO for short. It wasn’t necessarily a bad game, Metacritic gave it 69. According to Kotaku, the game didn’t have the best marketing and, well, Overwatch happened. Battleborn came out on May 3rd and Overwatch on May 24th and with Battleborn being kind of similar to Overwatch most people decided to wait for Blizzard’s team-based shooter and Gearbox suffered. From there the game dealt with a dwindling player base until it became incredibly difficult to find a match.
There were whispers that the game would go the Evolve: Stage 2 route and become free-to-play, but that rumour was quashed by Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford. So in a last ditch effort to breath some life into the game a group of ardent fans got together on the game’s subreddit to set-up a community event on November 12th, dubbed “Battleborn Day”.
It all started on a post by bkndx titled “Everyone’s talking about saving Battleborn but not saying anything new so here’s my idea“. In it the original poster suggested that they get said event together and that the high-level players try not to destroy the new players, urging them to stay away from the meta and try new characters.
So let’s talk about why it didn’t succeed at the beginning, Overwatch competition, lackluster marketing, bugs glitches and balancing issues. As time went on the problems shifted to low player base, and a large skill gap, matchmSo the question is how do we bring new players and keep them. Well if we can get an event going for a day where we get as many players online to play as many games as they can, this will solve matchmaking issues and allow everyone to try the game. As a community of high level elites we should recognize that if we get this going there’s going to be a huge influx of newbs. We should be doing our best to not pubstomp and ruin their first impressions of the game so please, no double legendary loadouts. Experiment with new characters and try to keep away from the meta. We will shoot for the second Saturday of November starting at 3:00 est?
A community event is noble in and of itself but then Gearbox caught wind of the event and decided to up the ante a bit. On Battleborn‘s website, Gearbox announced, starting Friday the 11th, and running until Sunday the 13th they will be holding the “badassest of badass in-game events”. The event will feature double XP and other fun perks along with some real life goodies.
- The badassest of badass in-game events: prepare for Lootpocalypse, Play with the Devs, Double XP, and Double Credits all rolled into one phenomenal weekend!
- A special “Battleborn Day Queue” with all kinds of fan-favorite maps and modes
- Try out all 29 Battleborn heroes! Every character will be temporarily unlocked for all players
- Enjoy 20% off all skins and taunts in the in-game Marketplace
- Swag giveaways on the Battleborn Facebook and Twitter channels
- AND MORE!
Hopefully, this will help get more people interested in the game.