Borderlands 3 Won't Have Co-op Players Fighting Over Loot

By Tom Marks

We still don’t know a ton of hard details about Borderlands 3, but one new piece of info that came alongside its release date reveal was a pretty significant change to the way loot drops while playing co-op.

In Borderlands 3, every player will have their own loot drops that only they can see, a post on the PlayStation blog revealed. Traditionally, everyone can see all the loot in Borderlands, meaning other players could nab a tasty looking gun from you before you had the chance to pick it up, but that will be a thing of the past.

Now loot is player specific, meaning you only see the loot you can take, and other players will see entirely different guns than you do. It’s unclear how that will work with things like chests, but presumably they’ll have unique contents waiting to be taken for every player. Excitingly, if this all sounds like a drawback instead of an improvement to you, you’ll still be able to switch back to the traditional co-op loot drop settings of Borderlands 2 as if nothing happened.

The blog post also details some of the changes coming to that loot, specifically with new additions for each gun manufacturer. It explains that “Atlas now offers guns that fire tracker tags and Smart Bullets; DAHL weapons feature alternate fire modes; and the Maliwan range now incorporates firearms that can toggle between two elements and deal guaranteed elemental damage.”

The co-op loot changes also come alongside the potential inclusion of cross-platform co-op, but that’s according to a Microsoft Store listing that could still potentially only be referring to the usual Xbox-PC crossplay that other Microsoft Store games use.

Borderlands 3 is set to release on September 13 with a whole bunch of different editions and bonuses available to pick from.

Tom Marks is IGN’s Deputy Reviews Editor and resident pie maker, and he wants all his guns to have legs. You can follow him on Twitter.