Borderlands Online MMO Revived in English After 11 Years

Ever heard of Borderlands Online? Probably not—it was a short-lived MMO that only launched in China and got shut down 11 years ago. But guess what? Thanks to some dedicated fans, it's finally playable again, and now it's in English.

The hero here is EpicNNG, a modder, dataminer, and indie dev who got his hands on a build of the game back in April last year. At first, he couldn't even get past the login screen, but he promised, "Won't give up though. I'll make sure the community gets to experience this game one way or another." And he kept that promise. After turning to the Borderlands fan community for help, the revival—now called BLOL—has entered playtesting. You can jump in right now.

In a new video, EpicNNG admits the work was massive: "the amount of work that went into this project completely towered over anything I had done 1 million times over." Beyond the login barrier, they had to translate the game from Chinese to English, resize UI elements, and even recreate HUD elements in Photoshop to replace the Chinese versions. The project isn't monetized at all, and you can play online or offline.

But before you dive in, EpicNNG warns to "expect bugs, broken skills, animations, server outages, and more inconveniences" while things get ironed out. The project also doesn't use generative AI, and he notes they wanted to wait until the end of the year to release, but "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."

Despite the warnings, the reaction has been huge. Over 1,000 accounts were made within the first four hours of launch. "The reaction has been great, and people are being respectful in the Discord," EpicNNG says. "Thank you to each player who has joined us as we make history. We did it."

So far, Borderlands owner Take-Two hasn't reached out to stop the project—something EpicNNG says he would have done if asked. But he thinks the game "most likely will" get taken down at some point, and if that happens, he won't help get it working again. He's even tagged Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford on Twitter, though there's been no response yet.

For now, it's a positive start: the team already pushed a hotfix to upgrade servers, and players have started "a new movement in Borderlands Online to clean up debug items spawned by new players in the central hub town." So if you play, clean up after yourselves!

Will you be checking out this piece of gaming history? Let us know in the comments!