After being shut down for 11 years, this short-lived Borderlands MMO, which was only available in China, has finally been revived thanks to fan efforts. It now features full English localization, and players can log in and play normally.
At the end of April last year, modder, data miner, and indie developer EpicNNG brought a major surprise to game preservation enthusiasts on Twitter. He had obtained a version of Borderlands Online, and although breaking through the login screen proved difficult at first, he made a promise: "But I won't give up. No matter what it takes, I will make sure the community gets to experience this game."
This massive restoration effort thus kicked off, with the developer seeking assistance from the Borderlands fan community. After nearly a year and a half of work, the Borderlands Online revival project has entered its testing phase, and fans can now jump in to experience the game.
In his latest video, EpicNNG admitted that after releasing the first related video, he realized "the workload for this project was more than a million times greater than all my previous works combined." The team not only had to overcome the login screen challenges mentioned earlier but also tackle a series of other issues: translating game content from Chinese to English, adjusting UI element sizes to fit English text, and even using Photoshop to recreate the entire heads-up display to replace the original Chinese interface.
Now renamed BLOL, the Borderlands Online revival project is entirely non-commercial and supports both online and offline play. However, EpicNNG warned in YouTube comments that, at least for now, players will "encounter numerous issues such as bugs, broken skills, animation glitches, and server outages," with further optimizations to follow. The project does not use generative AI. He explained, "We originally planned to release it by the end of the year, but unfortunately, AI development is moving too fast. We knew we had to release it now to avoid all our hard work going to waste; otherwise, we might never get the chance."
Despite warnings about bugs and instability, a large number of players have shown enthusiasm for the project. The developer confirmed on Twitter that within just four hours of the game going live, 1,000 players had registered accounts. "The response has been overwhelmingly positive, and the players in our Discord community are very friendly," he added. "Thank you to everyone who joined us in making history. We did it."
EpicNNG also mentioned in the video that Take-Two, the IP holder of Borderlands, has never contacted him or the revival team to request a halt to their work—he stated that he would certainly comply if officially asked. As for the future, he believes the game will "most likely" be taken down sooner or later. If he receives a cease-and-desist letter or faces other legal action, he said, "I will no longer assist in fixing the game or keeping it running." However, the modder has not kept his team's achievements under wraps—he even tagged Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford in a related post on Twitter, though Pitchford had not responded at the time of writing.
So far, the project has had a smooth start: the official team has pushed hotfixes to upgrade the servers, and players have even spontaneously launched a "Borderlands Online Cleanup Campaign" to remove debug items dropped by new players in the central hub city. Everyone is quite self-disciplined.