Gearbox Studios has been testing their streaming and social media features on Borderlands 3, and gamers are only just catching on.
We know that Borderlands 3 is going to have some fairly nifty social media functionality, specifically for streamers. A Twitch extension was showcased earlier in May that allowed viewers to go through and see what a streamer was using. That meant going through their inventory, exploring their skill tree, and even taking a look at their character’s stats in their profile.
It looks like Gearbox is still doing some work on this extension since some eagle-eyed Twitch viewers spotted a channel that was testing it out in a live broadcast of Borderlands 3.
The fact that anyone caught this under-the-radar stream, which was online for roughly 4 hours, is somewhat surprising. The account is just a random string of characters ("0i0ziesklofy4skgvi49if7xy", in case you’re really wondering), and the only video is titled "Today, we make stuff work! Hooray!"
This seems clearly made by Borderlands 3 devs, which was confirmed when the stream showed off the first few hours of Borderlands 3 while testing the ECHOcast Twitch extension.
We didn’t get to see a whole lot, but someone was able to grab a few new screens of Mose and Fl4K’s skill trees, as well as Lilith in hologram form. There’s also the character select screen, which shows all four new vault hunters at once.
The ECHOcast Twitch extension is a really cool addition to the Borderlands franchise and will let new players find out what the “pros” are using without needing to even ask in the chat. An event on May 1st even allowed folks to download the extension to see how it works and even take part in a bit of random loot generation.
Whenever a streamer opened a rare chest on screen, folks watching that streamer with the ECHOcast extension had a chance to get some rare loot of their own. It would be scaled to their level, and since Borderlands 3 isn’t out yet, this presumably means that the gear would arrive at level 1 when the player actually starts their first character. Deliveries are made via Gearbox’s SHIFT network.
Borderlands 3 arrives on September 13th on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and to PC via the Epic Games Store for a six-month exclusive period.
(via Combo Breaker)