The season pass for first-person tween DM simulator Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands advertised that it would include four expansions, so we knew there was DLC coming for the Borderlands spin-off, and now we know a little more about it. The first chunk of DLC is called Coiled Captors, it’s about fighting a shark god, and it’s out on April 21.
The Coiled are the snake-women of Wonderlands, serpentine cultists who draw their power from elder gods. One of those gods is a shark deity called Chums, who turned out to be so dangerous they had to trap him in the body of a seawarg, which is what Tiny Tina calls her landsharks. (It’s a better name than D&D’s “bulette”.) In Coiled Captors, players will have to fight their way through a dungeon full of Coiled and angry underwater beasts who are already fighting each other, then free Chums, then defeat Chums. Why? I guess we’ll find out when Tiny Tina gets around to reading the boxed text.
Coiled Captors will come with new gear and cosmetics, gained by spending lost souls earned by killing its enemies to spin a Wheel of Fate, as well as a frozen dungeon accessed via a Mirror of Mystery in Dreamveil Outlook. Enemies will be scaled to match your level, with a minimum of level 13.
Chums gets a new form every time he’s defeated, though we’ll have to wait a week before each one becomes available. The first form will be available at launch, the second from 9.30am PT on April 28, the third on May 5, and the final form from May 12. If you play Coiled Captors after those dates you’ll still have to fight him in each form to unlock the next one and apparently that’s how we’ll get to hear the “full story”.
It doesn’t sound like a real narrative-heavy add-on, which is a shame given how excellent the stories have been in the best Borderlands DLC. Given that Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is a kind of sequel to a particularly story-first Borderlands 2 DLC, I was hoping for more in that vein. Instead, Coiled Captors seems designed to feed into the endgame loot chase, adding more level layouts as well as Chums himself to the variables available in the replayable Chaos Chambers that Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands has instead of a new game plus mode.
The next three expansions are called Glutton’s Gamble, Molten Mirrors, and Shattering Spectreglass, and based on the similarity of their names they may well be of a similar scale to Coiled Captors. Presumably, increases to the level cap will be coming as part of future patches available to all players regardless of whether you bought the DLC, as was the case with Borderlands 3. And it’s extremely likely that level-cap boosts are comings, since players are already finding guns so high-level they can’t shoot them.