Saturday, July 12th 2025
Borderlands 4 Preview Shows Off Siren's Deadly Abilities and Summons
As the launch date for Borderlands 4 draws ever closer, Gearbox has started to reveal more information about the gameplay that we will see in the new looter shooter. The latest reveal comes by way of a short YouTube video showcasing the abilities and gameplay of the new siren, Vex. All of the abilities the new siren demonstrates are somehow related to the concept of death, and they add to the whole necromancer motif Gearbox has dreamt up for her. Overall, Vex's abilities seem to strike a balance between crowd control and 1v1 combat, and they seem to offer a decent amount of build versatility. Aside from showing off Vex's skills, the preview also gives us a glimpse at some of the enemy diversity that we can expect from Borderlands 4, and it certainly looks like there will be no shortage of different enemy types, from the typical ground-based foot soldiers to bullet-hell inspired bosses and flying minions that will harass you while you battle bigger enemies.
Incarnate gives Vex a pair of wings, increasing her movement speed and granting her the ability to cast energy projectiles at enemies, steal health, and buff her stats for improved survivability. Critically, the energy projectiles come from her off hand, meaning she can still use her weapon while the ability is active. Dead Ringer, summons a host of ephemeral clones of Vex, which automatically target and damage nearby enemies—this will likely come in handy when surrounded or facing off against a boss that needs your full attention. This ability has two versions—one that summons a single scythe-wielding clone that hunts enemies down with powerful melee attacks and can taunt thm as well, and one that summons multiple stationary clones that attack with ranged weapons. Phase Phamiliar allows players to summon a cat-like companion named Trouble that will seek out and attack enemies similar to FL4K's companion-based action skills from Borderlands 3. Trouble can blink to enemies and has increased critical hit chance. Vex can apparently also trigger the companion to explode on command for AOE damage. Some of these augmentations and ability variations will no doubt be locked behind skill points or even character-specific class mods.
Check out the full video below:
Source:
Borderlands on YouTube
Incarnate gives Vex a pair of wings, increasing her movement speed and granting her the ability to cast energy projectiles at enemies, steal health, and buff her stats for improved survivability. Critically, the energy projectiles come from her off hand, meaning she can still use her weapon while the ability is active. Dead Ringer, summons a host of ephemeral clones of Vex, which automatically target and damage nearby enemies—this will likely come in handy when surrounded or facing off against a boss that needs your full attention. This ability has two versions—one that summons a single scythe-wielding clone that hunts enemies down with powerful melee attacks and can taunt thm as well, and one that summons multiple stationary clones that attack with ranged weapons. Phase Phamiliar allows players to summon a cat-like companion named Trouble that will seek out and attack enemies similar to FL4K's companion-based action skills from Borderlands 3. Trouble can blink to enemies and has increased critical hit chance. Vex can apparently also trigger the companion to explode on command for AOE damage. Some of these augmentations and ability variations will no doubt be locked behind skill points or even character-specific class mods.
38 Comments on Borderlands 4 Preview Shows Off Siren's Deadly Abilities and Summons
I've played BL 3 thats on UE 4 with a RX 570 for nearly 800 hours and while the story part of the game was totally fine the end game raids and builds could tank my FPS down to 30 or so and that was unpleasant so to say and I don't want to experience that again in 4 if possible..To be fair it is actually called Corrosive element in the game but I've heard ppl calling it other names.
They are mainly used to deal with armored enemies so the corrosive naming sounds about right.
And because it runs on UE5, you can't run this on a 16 year old top end GPU anymore. Not even remotely - in fact, it will likely stutter on you and 144 fps locked is a pipe dream even on a recent midranger. IMHO... the whole attention span for this game should've stopped then and there... why are we even still talking about it? Its not just lazy, its plain mismanagement at the expense of our GPU prices and common sense.
The gameplay has similarly not changed over the last 1,5 decade either. Nor the cast. Nor the story in any meaningful way, really.
And they have the gall to ask more than 15 bucks for this crap?!
And people actually BUY IT at 4x that price?! Oh hang on, that's without the endless stream of DLC of which historically we know Gearbox has a habit of making that a complete cesspool of misery.
Gamers deserve every piece of shit they get I guess. I can't even get to grips with the amount of cognitive dissonance (or plain addiction to loot shooters, I guess) you need to have peace with paying serious money for this product. I'm not joking here. Everyone paying for this junk is straight up funding its own shitty products going forward. Its plain encouragement for bottom barrel effort turning into good cash for companies. I bet Randy P spent more time thinking up his fantastic social media PR strategy.That's all CPU, and secondary to that, server performance and client interaction. Its not graphics related.
When I've upgraded to my GTX 1070 with everything else all the same in my system it fixed it and my 3060 Ti ran the game with zero issues too.
570 was simply too weak to handle all of that chaos in those raids.
The game can be CPU limited but not at that point, even my 12100F was capable of playing the game smoothly once I've put a better GPU in my system.
FIRE!
Right, fire... what else is there?
ELECTRICITY!
Electricity... slag, fire, electricity, corrosion's coming up next -- what am I forgetting?
CORROSION!
Corrosion... yeah, I remember that one... Come on, what is left?
Oh, now I remember! EXPLOSIIIIIIVE!
Can't believe we lost Handsome Jack to the Calypso Twins.
So far only UE5 game I own is Everspace 2, since I wait for games to get patched before buying. But I'll inevitably end up with more over time, already plan on getting Stalker 2 during Christmas sales. Probably a few others that slipped my mind. Not to mention RE engine sucks too, so still haven't bought Dragons Dogma 2 or new Monster Hunter.
A man can only wait so much... probably no GPU until UDNA/RTX6000 either. I'm sure Mr. Vanguard is happy to be getting the money I'm not spending :laugh:
Slag was such a bad mechanic in BL 2 that even Gearbox admited that it was a mistake so it was removed from BL 3's development.
Yet again, this only affects the players who actually play the game further than finishing the story.. 'Good luck playing UVHM with no slag at all..'
Btw there will be a dual wielder in BL 4 called Amon but hes only summoning dual melee weapons as far as we know atm.
@razaronExactly, good luck avoiding UE 5 at this point and onwards if you want to play new games.
Even some of the biggest dev teams are switching to UE 5 like it or not and this engine was in fact developed with upscalers in mind so theres that. 'Personally I have zero issues with DLSS so I'm all good..:)'
Dear God, please just make it stop!