At the Gearbox panel at PAX today, company president Randy Pitchford told a Borderlands-loving audience that the level cap for that game will be going up from 61 to 69. For zero dollars.


"The level cap will now be 69," Pitchford said. "That's the magic number." He said the cap will come out close to the late-October release of the Borderlands Game of the Year edition.

Pitchford said that the studio felt that they couldn't go up a full 11 levels, as they did through the paid downloadable content, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, because they didn't want to put another level cap increase in paid DLC. The way that Borderlands DLC is structured, he said, would have required that anyone who would want to get the new level cap from new paid DLC would have had to buy all of the previous Borderlands DLCs as well. No good. Pitchford said Gearbox wanted all players to enjoy this raise of the level cap.


The studio also decided that a cap raise of just five levels would be too small. So Gearbox settled on eight, which gets the level up to 69, for all those who have the Knoxx DLC. "69." The crowd laughed.

The eight-level increase will be offered in a free patch for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 players. The patch will also included some re-balancing tweaks to the game. Expect it this fall.