Borderlands 4 DevCast Roadmap: Free Takedown, Vault Card 3, Vault Hunter Loveless, and More!

The DevCast was effectively a zoom-in on everything still left on the Borderlands 4 content road map, and there’s a lot of it. The headline beat is a free Takedown built around the child of Teramorphus, but it’s followed by two cosmetic-and-gear drops, two more bounty packs, a second story pack with a brand-new Vault Hunter, and the cross-platform saves players have been waiting on. Here’s the whole timeline before we get into the details of each piece.

What the DevCast revealed and when each drop lands

The free child-of-Teramorphus Takedown, Mayhem levels, and Hardcore mode

This is the centerpiece, and the best part is the price: nothing. The Takedown, its nine new legendary items, and the one new pearlescent weapon are all included in the base game for anyone who owns Borderlands 4 — there’s no DLC required. Once you download it, you don’t even need to stay online to run it if you’d rather play offline. It’s built around the child of Teramorphus plus a mini boss, and it’s pitched as a real challenge for players who’ve found the game too easy without being so brutal that everyone else gets shut out.

Mayhem levels are back, but only for this Takedown, and they’re fully optional — a difficulty dial for people who want it. Climbing the Mayhem tiers gets you more loot chests the higher you go if you clear it. As for whether anything is locked behind those tiers: there’s no gear hidden behind the Mayhem levels and that they have no effect on the boss’s drops.

There’s also an optional Hardcore mode for this Takedown that turns it into essentially a one-life challenge: if you’re running it with a team and one player goes down for good, the whole team wipes and you restart from the beginning. Like Mayhem, it’s a challenge toggle and doesn’t change the loot. One thing worth committing to up front — the mid boss and final boss won’t be farmable through the big encore machine, so if you want to fight either of them, you’ll have to run the entire Takedown over and over, exactly as the Maliwan and Guardian Takedowns worked before it. There’s also been community hope for a boss rush mode like the one Wonderlands eventually got, but that’s wishlist talk, not something Gearbox announced.

Vault Card 3 and Bounty Pack 3: cosmetics, gear, and the arcade

Vault Card 3 was teased with four new re-rollable legendaries and 24 new cosmetics, plus a fresh shield, pistol, shotgun, and sniper rifle on the card. If you’ve skipped Vault Cards so far, they’re worth a look — past cards have handed out some of the strongest items in their classes, and you earn the points just by playing, the same way you bank normal and specialization XP. To use one, tab over to the Vault Cards in your menu, activate the card you want to gain XP on, and redeem an item once you’ve saved enough points. You can keep redeeming the same item as long as you have points left, which is the easiest way to roll for the parts you want. (Vault Card 3’s exact contents are reported from the DevCast and could still change.)

Bounty Pack 3 got a quicker pass. It’s set inside an arcade machine, and that machine sits in a playable arcade you can mess around in — which has people hopeful for the return of slot machines or a Borderlands “science”-style machine, though neither has been confirmed and that’s purely speculation for now. The more concrete note is that each zone in the pack is getting its own color theme, the kind of subtle visual separation older Borderlands games used to keep areas from blurring together. Given how seamless and same-y the open world can feel at times, breaking the zones up by palette should help them read as distinct places.

Bounty Pack 4 and Story Pack 2: new story, bosses, and Loveless

Next on the road map, around the end of next month (one source pins it at July 30), is Bounty Pack 4: Murders & Acquisitions. It’s a meatier drop than the cosmetic packs — new story content, new bosses, more legendary and pearlescent gear, cosmetics, and more.

Then in early September comes Story Pack 2, teased alongside a new Vault Hunter named Loveless, listed as “the hacker,” arriving with new story missions, pearlescents, legendary loot, cosmetics, and new bosses to hunt. A couple of important caveats here: Loveless’s name, role, and September timing are DevCast teases, not finalized — official channels currently confirm C4SH the Rogue, the Vault Hunter who shipped with Story Pack 1: Mad Ellie and the Vault of the Damned, but don’t yet verify Loveless. So to be clear, C4SH the Rogue is already out and is a different character; Loveless is the as-yet-unconfirmed Story Pack 2 hunter. Don’t conflate the two. Also landing in September is a final bonus bounty pack for everyone who bought the bounty pack bundle — Gearbox’s original plan was four packs (the first free), and this fifth one is a thank-you on top, so bundle buyers still get the four they paid for plus the free one everybody receives.

Cross-platform saves on June 25 and the balance work still coming

Beyond that, the DevCast pointed to ongoing performance improvements — described as a continuous effort — along with Vault Hunter and gear balance adjustments. A handful of other things came up as community asks rather than confirmed features: a dialogue skip, fixes to the infamy scaling that can make enemies wildly outscale you, and better starting gear for the level-30 story skip (right now it drops you in with greens and whites that nobody’s actually using at level 30). Those are on players’ wishlists and were raised in the conversation, but Gearbox hasn’t committed to them — so don’t pencil them in yet.

How much each pack costs on its own versus the bundle

Splitting the Vault Hunter and the narrative out at $9.99 and $19.99 mirrors how the Story Pack 1 release combined a DLC Vault Hunter with story content, and those figures line up with what past Borderlands DLC and Vault Hunters have cost. Buying à la carte is there if you only want certain pieces, but the bundle remains the stated best value if you plan to grab most of it.