There’s a moment in Loveless the Hacker’s character short where you realise Gearbox has stopped pretending its Vault Hunters are heroes. She’s an ex-corporate hacker who fused herself with a digital virus she wrote, and the virus talks back. That’s the pitch. That’s the whole character.
Loveless the Hacker landed on 10 September 2026 as part of the Version 1.10 update for Borderlands 4, alongside Story Pack 2: FL4K and the Last Resort and Bounty Pack 5: Amara and the Vile Shadows. It’s the biggest drop the game has had since launch, and it arrives almost exactly a year after Borderlands 4 shipped on 12 September 2025.
If you’re playing from Singapore, that date is the local one too. Everything in Version 1.10 is a digital unlock through the PlayStation Store, the Microsoft Store, Steam and the Epic Games Store, so it went live here the same day it did everywhere else, no staggered regional window, no waiting on a Funan shelf. The free play weekend that came with the drop ran to 2.59pm SGT on 14 September for Xbox players and 1am SGT on 15 September on PlayStation and Steam, which is the window that actually mattered if you were deciding whether to buy in.
An Ex-Anshin Hacker With a Roommate
Here’s the backstory, and it’s genuinely strange. Loveless used to work for Anshin, one of Borderlands’ in-fiction weapons corporations. She quit, became an assassin, and along the way achieved what 2K calls a “symbiotic fusion of biological and digital power.” In plainer terms: she wrote a virus, then let it into her head.
That virus is now a permanent co-tenant of her psyche. It can digistruct into a physical Wyrm form and go tear something apart on her behalf. The official character short, Uncontainable, is told as a shared recounting between the two of them, which is a neat trick for a looter shooter that usually communicates character through skill trees and one-liners.
What makes this land is that Gearbox didn’t soften her. There’s no reluctant-hero framing, no arc where she learns to be good. She’s chasing perfection and the virus agrees with her. For a series that has spent four games making its protagonists lovable murderers, this is the first one who reads as genuinely cold.
Crit, Corrode, Repeat
Her kit backs up the personality. Loveless specialises in Critical Hits, Status Effects, and Corrosive and Radiation damage, which puts her squarely in the “delete things before they notice you” camp. Her Trait, RAM, charges whenever she lands a crit or inflicts a status effect. Fill the bar and your next melee strike comes out amped.
The three Action Skills are where it gets fun. Plague Star is a shuriken that slices through mobs and leaves Contagion behind. The Visual Paradox Nexus (or VPN, which is the best joke in the update) cloaks her and drops a decoy. And the Malignant Construct sends the Wyrm out to handle a target with tail whips and toxic breath.
Anyone who found Borderlands 3’s Vault Hunters a bit samey will notice the difference immediately. That game famously skipped adding a new character entirely and sold fourth skill trees for the existing four instead, a call that frustrated a big slice of the player base at the time. Borderlands 4 is going back to the Borderlands 2 playbook, where Gaige and Krieg arrived as proper standalone Vault Hunters. Loveless is the second this year, after C4SH in March.
Crucially, she’s playable across all of Borderlands 4’s base game and DLC zones. Buy her and you can take her back through the entire campaign.
FL4K, a Volcano, and a Missing Skag
Story Pack 2: FL4K and the Last Resort brings back the beastmaster from Borderlands 3 for a rescue mission. The Tediore corporation has taken Mr. Chew, FL4K’s loyal skag, and five elite managers under Lieutenant Harmony are standing in the way. Corporate middle management as a boss gauntlet is a very Borderlands idea and it should have happened three games ago.
The new zone is Providence, a tropical island with an active volcano bunker to infiltrate. Gearbox has added ziplines for grappling across the jungle, and there’s a sequence where you upload directly into Tediore’s digiverse servers to fight enemy waves at the source.
The enemies are the part worth caring about. Tediore soldiers in exo-suits keep fighting after death. Mechs with swappable weapon attachments buff their allies and digistruct reinforcements mid-fight. And during dynamic world events, the volcano spits Ordonite-infused lava that spawns minibosses. Clear it all and you’re looking at two new Pearlescent weapons and 18 pieces of Legendary gear.
Story Pack 2 is recommended for level 13 and up, and reaching Providence means finishing the “A Lot to Process” mission in the Fadefields first. If you’d rather not dig out an old save, you can roll a fresh Vault Hunter that starts at level 13 directly into the new content.
Bounty Pack 5 Is the One to Skip First
Bounty Pack 5: Amara and the Vile Shadows sends you to Elpis with Amara to investigate Phase disturbances at Vile Lictor’s old laboratory, where dormant Order Synths are waiting. Finishing it unlocks a Vault Hunter Skin usable by every character, a Vehicle, and an ECHO-4 Drone Skin. There’s a new boss, two mini-bosses, new Vile enemy types, one new Pearlescent weapon, and six pieces of Legendary loot.
It’s good. It’s also a repeatable mission, which is the same shape as Bounty Pack 4’s Murders and Acquisitions in July. Vault Card 5 sells separately and drips out 24 cosmetics and four rerollable gear pieces through play.
If money is tight, the honest ranking is Loveless first, Story Pack 2 second, Bounty Pack 5 whenever. Loveless changes how you play every hour you’ve already put into the game. A Vault Card changes what you look like doing it.
The Free Bit Everyone Gets
Version 1.10 raises the maximum level cap by 10 levels for every Borderlands 4 player, taking it to 70, alongside Vault Hunter balance adjustments. That’s part of the free title update, so you don’t need to buy anything to get the extra skill points. 2K frames it as build flexibility rather than a loot reset.
Individual parts of Story Pack 1 and Bounty Pack 2 also went on sale separately from 10 September, which is useful if you bounced off Mad Ellie and the Vault of the Damned when it arrived in March. VG-Reloaded’s verdict on that one was mixed: the site scored it 7.0 and called it a nice piece of content that “feels overpriced.” Being able to buy the bits you want fixes some of that.
The real test is whether Loveless holds up past the honeymoon, because a character this sharply written can still fall apart if the skill trees are dull. Early signs say she won’t. A crit-and-status build that rewards aggression is exactly what Borderlands 4 was missing.
🗓️ Released: 10 September 2026, with the Version 1.10 update
🎮 Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store
🧪 Story Pack 2: New story content plus Loveless the Hacker, sold separately or in the Vault Hunter Pack and Super Deluxe Edition
👾 Bounty Pack 5: Repeatable mission plus Vault Card 5, in the Bounty Pack Bundle, Deluxe Edition, and Super Deluxe Edition
📈 Level cap: Raised by 10 to level 70, free for all players
🔓 Gate: Recommended for level 13 and up, after the “A Lot to Process” mission in the Fadefields
🆓 Free Play Weekend: Ended 13 September 2026, 11.59pm PT on Xbox and 14 September 2026, 10am PT on PlayStation and Steam, 14 September, 2.59pm SGT and 15 September, 1am SGT for Singapore players
Super Deluxe Edition owners already have everything here except Loveless purchased standalone, and Deluxe Edition owners have the Bounty Pack Bundle, so check your library before you spend. Everyone else can read the full breakdown of her Trait and Action Skills on the Loveless Vault Hunter page, or head to the official Borderlands site for what’s coming next on the roadmap.
Visuals courtesy of 2K and Gearbox Software.
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