Battleborn winter update adds PS4 Pro support, overhauls new player experience, gives veterans more reasons to play and more

Battleborn will see a stack of changes over the winter as Gearbox polished up its multiplayer hero shooter.

Battleborn has had a bit of a tough time of it, launching so close to Overwatch and struggling to maintain players.

There's a lot to be said for the hero shooter, which has a bunch of different modes, lots of grabby progression, and more - but there's no denying Battleborn can be tough to get into.

About half of the changes Gearbox has announced for Battleborn's huge winter update directly address this problem:

• All 25 characters unlocked immediately after completing Prologue
• Character unlock challenges rebalanced, now award brand new skins
• Story Mode missions overhauled to be more rewarding and provide training for other modes
• Two new training modes - a PvP tutorial played solo or in groups of three, and a dojo for testing characters against AI

The rest of the update is all about rewarding existing Battleborn players by simplifying the economy, providing more reasons to check in regularly, and adding new features:

• User interface makeover
• Draft Mode character select system
• Daily quests across story and PvP modes
• Command Rank cap increased to 150, character rank cap increased to 20, with all new rewards
• Public PvP provides more credits, but early leavers will get none.
• Only Core Pack loot packs will be available for purchase on the Marketplace. Core Packs have a higher chance to unwrap rare gear, and can contain all content previously found in Faction packs. Other types of loot pack will be available in story mode.
• A bigger variety of Boosts will become sold for Platinum in the marketplace.

Finally, the winter update adds PS4 Pro support to Battleborn, allowing players to opt for 1080p at 60fps or 4K at 30fps.

To learn more about the winter Battleborn update, tune into Gearbox's Twitch channel from 2:00pm PT December 8.

Battleborn released in May and is available for PC, PS4 and Xbox One. I hope the UI overhaul, training dojo and character unlocks are going to make a lot of difference to how it feels when you first pick it up, because it's pretty fun when it finally starts to come together.