Battleborn "shifts" into Free-to-play Territory

If you haven't heard yet, Gearbox's overlooked, hyper-stylized MOBA, Battleborn, has gone free to play, it's currently released on Steam and Xbox One worldwide, it's also on PS4 in North America and will be global come June 13th. Gearbox, the developers of the insane RPG, Borderlands, is known to be "unconventional" as is Battleborn. So of course you should always expect nothing less from them even when it comes to how they handle the transition as well.

Battleborn has launched into a "free trial without an end date" which is truly interesting. Now this can be perplexing for some as if you didn't read that and go into the Xbox/PlayStation/Steam stores, the game is still shown for the full price of $29.99, ignore that, highlight free trial, download, wait for download to complete, and you're good to go.

Now for those players (such as myself) who purchased the game before this shift are probably a bit bummed or even feel like they were ripped off. Yet fear not for Gearbox has stated that anyone who owned Battleborn prior to this announcement are automatically upgraded to the Founder's Edition (sounds like this game should've been on Kickstarter) which comes with some awesome goodies.

1k Platinum [premium currency]

50k Credits [in-game currency]

"Founder" Title

Golden Skins for Mellka and Deande

5 Core Loot Packs

1 Command Faction Pack [for each faction, totaling 5]

1 Founder Loot Pack w/

• 1 legendary gear piece
• 1 legendary boss gear piece
• 2 common (or better) gear pieces
• Legendary "Shard of Solus"
• 4 Flair items including "Founder's Crown"

Also if you happen to have purchased the game phsycially (which I also did) and you're fearful that your progress won't save across to the digital version, I can confirm that it in fact DOES transfer over ALL progress as your data is saved on servers and not locally on the disc. So all that hardwork you invested will not be for naught. Though it seems that you will have to use the Platinum you earned to unlock the characters you want though. If you would rather not waste your money doing so, then you can simply just continue to use the disc. Yet, if you haven't invested that much time into the game, you're not really missing much if you decide to just start over and just play the game like other MOBAs where there's a rotation and you can grind to buy your characters.

So if you looking for a really quirky MOBA that offers both story in solo and cooperative modes and a fun competitive option then check out Battleborn. Now due to this shift Battleborn has joined fellow free to play objective based games Paladins, Smite, and Gigantic (for Xbox and Win10, for now). So give it a shot, can't hurt to check a new free game right?

By: FhaTe