Borderlands 3 Ultimate Edition: what's in it, which to buy

Gearbox sells Borderlands 3 as four different things, and the Borderlands 3 Ultimate Edition is the one the store pushes hardest. It is also the one with the least obvious value case, because the base game is one of the cheapest big-budget shooters on PC and has been for years, while the bundles that wrap the DLC around it hold a floor they refuse to go below.

That is the actual decision here, and almost nobody frames it that way. Here is the number that reframes it, read from our own record on 4 October 2026: across 107 days of tracking, the Borderlands 3 base game sat under $5 on 104 of them and under $3 on 74, with a tracked floor of $1.34 on 28 August 2026. The Super Deluxe Edition, tracked over 102 days in the same window, never once went below $8.43.

Promethea's corporate warzone is the best-looking stretch of the game and arrives early, which flatters the opening hours. (Official Steam screenshot)

What the Borderlands 3 Ultimate Edition actually includes

2K's own announcement of the package lists it precisely, and it is worth having the list in front of you rather than the marketing summary. The Ultimate Edition is the base game plus all six content add-ons plus the cosmetics:

• Moxxi's Heist of the Handsome Jackpot — a casino heist campaign, and the best of the four story packs
• Guns, Love, and Tentacles: The Marriage of Wainwright & Hammerlock — a Lovecraftian wedding, and the funniest
• Bounty of Blood — a western-styled campaign on a new planet
• Psycho Krieg and the Fantastic Fustercluck — a trip through Krieg's head, and the weakest
• Designer's Cut — the Arms Race mode plus a fourth skill tree for each Vault Hunter
• Director's Cut — a raid boss, extra story missions, behind-the-scenes extras and three Vault Cards
• 30+ cosmetic items

The first four are Season Pass 1. The last two are Season Pass 2. That distinction matters because the cheaper bundles split along exactly that line.

The Director's Cut trailer, from Xbox's own channel. Director's Cut is the piece that separates the Ultimate Edition from the Super Deluxe, and this is the clearest look at what it adds.

The ladder, and the two rungs worth standing on

There are four listings to choose between, and our tracked behaviour for each sorts them faster than any feature comparison. All figures below are tracked lows as of 4 October 2026:

• Base game — tracked low $1.34 (28 August 2026). The campaign, four Vault Hunters, no add-ons.
• Deluxe — cosmetics and a few early-game boosts. No campaigns. There is no version of this that is worth paying a premium for.
• Super Deluxe Edition — tracked low $8.43 (17 September 2026). Base game plus Season Pass 1. The four story campaigns, not the skill trees.
• Ultimate Edition — everything above, both season passes, all cosmetics.

Two rungs are defensible. The base game is defensible because it is priced like an afterthought — our record has it under $3 on more than two thirds of tracked days, which is less than a coffee for a seventy-hour shooter. The Ultimate Edition is defensible because the Designer's Cut skill trees genuinely change how the characters play, and buying them separately later costs more than the gap.

The two middle rungs are where money goes to die. Deluxe sells cosmetics at a campaign's price. Super Deluxe is the trap that looks like the sensible compromise: you get the four story packs and miss the one piece of DLC that alters the actual build game.

The gun generation is the series' real engine. Borderlands 3 raised the drop rate so far that the loot filter became a necessity rather than a nicety. (Official Steam screenshot)

Why waiting for a Borderlands 3 Ultimate Edition sale is the wrong instinct

The standard advice on this site is to wait. On this game, that advice does not apply to the base game and applies differently to the bundles, and our record is unusually clear about why.

In 107 tracked days the base game spent 104 below 70% of its own tracked peak. A discount is not an event on this title; it is the resting state. The cheap listings come from the key resale market working through stock bought in bulk years ago, and that stock is deep. There is no sale calendar to wait for because there is no non-sale price to wait out.

The bundles behave like a different product. The Super Deluxe Edition's tracked low of $8.43 is a genuine floor — in 102 days of observations it never broke it, and it never came close to the base game's territory. The DLC-bearing listings are scarcer, resellers hold them at a margin, and the arithmetic does not collapse the way the base game's does.

So: if you only want the campaign, buy whenever. If you want the add-ons, the gap between the rungs is the thing to watch on the Ultimate Edition page, not the headline percentage. Check the live figures there rather than any number in this article.

Which Borderlands to actually start with

If you have never played one, Borderlands 3 is not the entry point, and the reason is a number rather than a taste judgement. On Steam it sits at 81% positive across more than 164,000 reviews, with a Metacritic of 81. Borderlands 2 sits at 90% across over 312,000 reviews, with a Metacritic of 89, and its tracked low in our record is $0.63.

Borderlands 3 shoots better. Borderlands 2 is written better, and in a series whose entire appeal is tone and villains, that is the larger half. Handsome Jack carries that game; the Calypso twins do not carry this one, and the writing is the most common complaint in the reviews that drag the 3's score down.

The practical route for a newcomer: start on Borderlands 2, which is tracked low enough to be a rounding error, and only come to Borderlands 3 if the loop grabs you. The Handsome Collection bundles Borderlands 2 and The Pre-Sequel with their DLC and has a tracked low of $8.72, which is the most content-per-dollar in the series.

Borderlands 2 is fourteen years old and still the series' high-water mark for writing. It is also the cheapest thing in the franchise. (Official Steam screenshot)

And what about Borderlands 4

Worth knowing before you spend, because the newest entry changes the case for the older ones. Borderlands 4 released on 11 September 2025 and sits at 58% positive across more than 84,000 Steam reviews — "Mixed", and the lowest-rated mainline game in the series by a wide margin, despite a Metacritic of 81 from the press.

That gap between press and players is the signal. Our record also shows Borderlands 4 behaving nothing like its predecessors: it dipped below 70% of its tracked peak on only 11 of 102 tracked days, with a floor of $19.55 on 22 September 2026. It is a recent, still-expensive game that most buyers have not warmed to.

Which makes the Ultimate Edition's case stronger, not weaker. The complete Borderlands 3 package, six campaigns and all, is tracked in a region the newest game has never visited. If you want the series at its most generous, this is the entry that is finished, patched and cheap.

The 2019 cinematic launch trailer, mirrored on GameSpot's channel rather than 2K's. Still the best three minutes of marketing the series has produced.

Before you buy

Two checks. First, the cheap listings on this game come overwhelmingly from the key market, which is where the $1.34 figure comes from — are keyshops safe covers what to verify before you hand over a card, and region locked Steam keys covers the one failure mode that actually bites on older 2K titles.

Second, understand what a tracked low is and is not. It is a record of one moment, not a promise that the moment returns. We set that out in what is a historical low price, and the same edition-ladder reasoning applied to a different publisher in the Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition price.

If you are buying to play with someone, note that Borderlands 3 does two-player local split-screen on PC as well as online co-op, which is rarer than it should be. The best co-op games to play with friends has the rest of that shortlist.

Borderlands 4's Kairos is the series' first properly seamless open world. The reception suggests that was not the thing players wanted fixed. (Official Steam screenshot)

Bottom line

Buy the base game if you only want the campaign — our record has it under $3 on two thirds of tracked days and as low as $1.34, so there is nothing to wait for. Buy the Borderlands 3 Ultimate Edition if you want the add-ons, because Designer's Cut is the only DLC here that changes how the game plays and the cheaper bundles leave it out.

Skip Deluxe and Super Deluxe entirely. And if this is your first Borderlands, buy Borderlands 2 first — it is better written, better reviewed and cheaper than everything above it.