Battleborn's 25 playable characters will fight in three multiplayer modes and earn points to spend in a persistent progression system, developer Gearbox Software and publisher 2K Games announced today.
The MOBA-inspired first-person shooter's modular story mode will be playable alone or with up to five teammates. Battleborn will let players choose which missions to play and replay to earn more loot.
Battleborn's multiplayer component will pit 10 fighters against each other in five-on-five matches. Gearbox designed three modes:
- Incursion: Teams of heroes defend their base from waves of AI-controlled minions while working together, alongside their own minions, to destroy their opponents' base.
- Devastation: Teams of heroes face off in a fast-paced death match and must capture and hold objectives on the map to win.
- Meltdown: Teams of heroes protect their minions as they march to their death at the center of the map. Points are scored for minions who throw themselves into the incinerator, and the team with the most points wins.
While in multiplayer and story mode, players will be able to level up their characters with the MOBA-influenced Helix System. All experience players earn goes into a ranking system divided between two components:
- Character Rank: Each hero can permanently rank up from 1 to 10 outside of missions and matches, allowing players to swap out augments in their helix skill tree, as well as unlock skins.
- Command Rank: Players can rank up their own player profile, unlocking badges and titles to impress friends and loot that can be used to benefit any hero the player chooses to command.
Best known for creating the Borderlands series, Gearbox unveiled Battleborn last July.
"As a genre-fused, hobby-grade, co-operative and competitive FPS exploding with eye-popping style and an imaginative universe, Battleborn is the most ambitious video game that Gearbox has ever created," Gearbox president Randy Pitchford said at the time.
Battleborn is in development for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows PC and set for release sometime this winter. You can see the game in action above, in a trailer released today to mark the game's upcoming appearance at E3 2015.
For more on the game, be sure to read our coverage of a presentation in which Pitchfork said that, "Every kind of character trope you've imagined in an FPS, we want a representation of that in Battleborn."
