Borderlands 4's creative director has responded to certain concerns about the looter shooter's Ultimate Vault Hunter endgame mode, noting that "endgame is supposed to be earned/tough, so we like the challenge."

After you finish Borderlands 4's main campaign, you're able to unlock the Ultimate Vault Hunter mode, which allows you to start with a new character – already at level 30 – and skip the campaign. Additionally, completing the campaign for the first time unlocks the new Specialization skill tree, providing you with even more perks.

However, not everything carries over with the Ultimate Vault Hunter mode – namely, the map is wiped of things like fast travel points and landmarks. That's not to mention the fact that you're thrown into the mode with an unfinished character build. These are two concerns raised by Forbes writer Paul Tassi, and echoed by others on Twitter.

"The trade-off for skipping the story and 30 levels but still starting with basically nothing is kind of off-putting," one player writes. "I started with Rafa as well and then started a Vex and was kind of disappointed when I realized the task that lie ahead of me."

"The start at lvl 30 feels very underwhelming," another agrees, adding that you may as well "just burn through the campaign again" if you have to unlock things regardless.

Responding, creative director Graeme Timmins explains that "our goal was to provide a canvas for you to re-explore the world (and earn SDUs [Storage Deck Upgrades] while doing so), level to 50, do your UVH [Ultimate Vault Hunter] ranks challenges, and use your campaign mission rewards to jump start a build to try/experiment with."

Replying to the suggestion that perhaps the experience could be improved if fast travel points carried over into the endgame mode, as well as the question of why Specialization points aren't shared across different characters, Timmins continues: "Any fast travels that are unlocked as part of the campaign (HUBs, a couple safe houses) are unlocked, but they need to be revealed from beneath the fog. We're still looking at other options.

"For Specializations, we wanted players to really specialize their individual characters. We got feedback in previous games that the account-wide stuff gave power boosts to players who wanted natural playthroughs. And now all characters get that Level Up moment more frequently."

Although Timmins argues that "end game is supposed to be earned/tough, so we like the challenge," he still appears to suggest that adjustments could potentially be made if players are seriously unhappy. "We're always watching the community's reaction to the game," he adds. So, who knows, perhaps Gearbox might make some changes in updates to come.

Be sure to check out our Borderlands 4 review if you've not picked up Gearbox's new looter shooter yet, as well as our Borderlands 4 tips to help you get started.

The big theme in the first week of Borderlands 4? Whether you're talking about technical issues or character builds: it's busted. There are so many broken builds it's untrue, and players are running around with "infinite damage" builds that nuke bosses in under 10 seconds… which is either great or terrible, depending on your mood.

But it's probably why, in the first week of release, players have fought bosses 63 million times and defeated 55 million of them. Pretty good hit rate, and the numbers come from developer Gearbox itself, which has released a loot package for all players to celebrate… erm, all the looting.

The rewards come in the form of a Shift code, Gearbox's little data-hoovering service that it uses because it can, and is called the Break Free Pack. It includes a vault hunter skin, a legendary ripper shield that scales to your level, and two ECHO-4 drone skins: the code is JS63J-JSCWJ-CFTBW-3TJ3J-WJS5R.

More interesting were the stats Gearbox released alongside the code, which include the enlightening fact that four-and-a-half million players have managed to kill themselves with grenades so far, while around two million of you shot exploding barrels while just being a tiny bit too close.

More to the point, in the archetypal looter-shooter players have now, excluding items of common quality, looted precisely 764,733,586 items. Presumably that statistic was rendered irrelevant the second it was issued, but until Gearbox starts a live tracker we'll go with it. It also offers a rather granular breakdown of where some loot has been obtained:

• Items looted from Outhouses–1,530,794
• Items looted from a grill, beer cooler, or boombox–1,811,970
• Items looted from Trash Cans–487,585
• Items looted from Red Chests–14,814,296

Okay, who's been rooting through the bins. There are some less interesting stats about miles driven etcetera I'll spare you, beyond the fact over 16 million vehicles have been blown up.

The rewards in question are available now, and initially I thought you had until the end of the year to claim them. It turns out that the cutoff for redemption is actually December 31, 2030, so there's really no excuse. I've just told Google to remind me to do a reminder post in five years: hey, surely someone will still be rustling around in the trash.

It was easy to think when Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor was first announced that it was a cynical project. A spin-off of a popular game from a different developer, jumping on a new genre bandwagon, and seemingly built mostly with reused assets.

But over the last few years I've played a lot of different Vampire Survivors imitators, and all the way through DRG:S's run in early access, I think it's been the king of the pack. It's creative, it's charming, and it genuinely bridges the gap between two wildly different games.

For anyone who's been following that early access journey, the 1.0 release won't come as any startling reinvention. But it's a really confident fleshing out of the structure and features around that excellent core gameplay loop, and the result is that a roguelike I already lost nearly 100 hours to before this final update has its claws firmly in me all over again.

The core action of DRG:S is deceptively simple, and familiar for Vampire Survivors fans. Your dwarf miner is dropped onto an alien asteroid (alone—unlike original DRG, there's no co-op) and tasked with mining for resources and surviving against escalating hordes of bugs. Your weapons fire automatically, and as you level up you're able to add new guns (up to four) and fine tune them with stat upgrades and overclocks—modifiers that more dramatically change how a weapon functions.

DRG:S's special sauce is its environments. Each stage is its own randomly generated cavern, and your dwarf's pickaxe allows them to burrow through the rock walls, creating their own tunnels and arenas. This is where combat gets tactical, because most bugs don't have that ability. As the swarms chase you, you're able to shape the landscape around you against them, escaping down tunnels, creating bottlenecks, or leading them in circles around pillars.

Different biomes add further wrinkles—from lava flows to skirt around or lead bugs through, to bouncy mushrooms that allow you to leap right over swarms, to thorny vines that regrow after you mine through them.

It all contributes to the game's wonderfully inventive feel. Whether you're luring an elite alien into being crushed by a falling supply pod, or dancing towards and away from a horde to trick explosive bugs into blowing up prematurely, it always feels like there's ways to get one up on the enemy.

And you need to, because the pressure is always on. Bugs swarm relentlessly, and though weapons upgrades do feel impactful, you never become the kind of screen-clearing god you do in many survivor-likes. Often, the genre rewards careful build-crafting with a finale where you don't need to do anything at all other than stand there and watch the fireworks. In DRG:S, things only get more and more frantic, demanding faster decision-making and increasingly risky tactics as you dodge around the horde to grab valuable resources.

Elite enemies—from ranged acid spitters to relentless juggernauts—demand a different approach to defeat, and the climactic dreadnought boss fights have all the drama of a proper action-RPG battle.

Drill ride

The 1.0 release spices things up further with a whole new mission type—Escort Duty—which sees you accompanying a huge mobile drill across the map. It's a fantastic twist on the formula. The more narrow passages and the need to stick close to your charge creates tense, claustrophobic battles without the luxury of simply fleeing to a different area when things get tough. At the same time, following behind the drill as it plows through rock and enemies with equal ease is a lovely little power trip.

A second core mission type is exactly the shot of added variety the game needed to feel complete. Add to that all the modes introduced during early access such as daily runs, mastery challenges, anomaly dives with weird new modifiers, all playable with 12 different classes, and DRG:S really squeezes every single drop of fun that can be had out of its simple premise.

Wrapped around that offering is a now incredibly robust set of progression systems. Playing through missions and meeting specific objectives unlocks further missions along a lengthy campaign track, and there's one for both the basic Elimination dives and the new Escort Duty ones. Resources mined during dives can be spent on permanent upgrades, and gaining achievements unlocks new gear, modes, and more. Mastery challenges reward you with buffs to specific weapons, classes, and biomes that can be improved by beating them on higher and higher difficulties. It's a lot, but it ensures every play session offers its own dopamine rush of rewards, and there's always something new to try.

The release version has rounded that out with one last addition—loot. Gear now drops during missions, and can be equipped to grant permanent bonuses across runs. It hooks into existing progression neatly—more difficult missions reward better loot, and new achievements can upgrade the level loot drops at.

It's a fun new thing to fiddle with, and I like that seeing a juicy bit of gear appear during a dive can tempt you into yet more dangerous risks to grab it. But managing the loadouts of 12 different dwarves after every run can feel like busywork, and a fully-equipped miner can seem a bit pigeon-holed into particular builds, narrowing some of the possibility space of your in-mission levelling.

Grindset

There's definitely a fine line, too, between enjoying the multitude of ways to push the numbers up, and feeling the weight of a long grind ahead of you. DRG:S doesn't really lock meaningful content behind any task too onerous, but for completionists ticking your way down every checklist it has to offer will certainly take over 100 hours. And given that the 1.0 update recommends wiping your save progress to start you out with a clean slate, veterans may not relish having to put that time in all over again with the new, but not that new, progression systems.

Still… it hasn't put me off yet, and even as one of those veterans, I'm happily trundling my way through this second expedition with no desire to put down my pickaxe yet. To me, DRG:S is the survivors-like genre at its most engaging and tactical—not just an exercise in picking the right level-ups, but a proper sprawling challenge with new surprises every time.

Instead of finally growing bored of its formula, I find myself just imagining yet more things developer Funday Games could add in new updates to come. This release makes the game feel complete and ready for a broader audience, after over a year of public development. But at the same time, it feels like it could be only the beginning.