Borderlands 4 preview pulled over big Amara spoiler, reuploaded with Conan O'Brien's crash intact

An early preview that backfired

A flashy preview of Borderlands 4 starring Conan O'Brien lit up YouTube, then vanished, then came back with a clean cut right where fans spotted a major story spoiler. The re-edited upload kept the laughs and the chaos—including a full-on crash to desktop—but removed a cutscene that clearly jumped the line on what the studio wanted out there before launch.

The moment that triggered the do-over centered on Amara, the Siren brawler who headlined Borderlands 3 and returns in the new game. In the original cut, a cinematic showed Amara losing an arm just before a boss encounter. Conan brushed it off on-camera, assuming it was a robot limb. Fans didn’t. Within hours, clips and timestamps flagged the scene as a heavy spoiler for an early narrative turn, and the video disappeared for a quick edit.

The irony writes itself. Conan opened the segment by riffing on whether story beats even matter in a loot-chasing shooter, then accidentally revealed one of the most dramatic early twists. The re-upload trimmed that sequence but kept everything else—his off-the-cuff lines, the messy firefights, and the head-on look at the new big bad, Vile Lictor.

Team Coco producer Aaron Bleyaert, who’s long been the steady hand in Conan’s gaming bits, sat next to him during the session. When Conan got swarmed and frustrated, Bleyaert tweaked a few settings to lower the sting. Seconds later, the game hard-crashed and kicked them back to the Steam library. Bleyaert sounded as surprised as anyone, saying he hadn’t seen that crash before. The moment stayed in the final cut, and honestly, it’s the clip people will probably be sharing regardless of the spoiler drama.

That choice—cut the story spoiler, keep the technical hiccup—shows where the priorities are. Story is a one-and-done reveal; glitches in a pre-release build are a risk worth showing if it keeps the preview authentic. Pre-release code fails sometimes. That’s not flattering, but it’s normal, and studios typically patch these things before a day-one build goes wide.

What the footage shows and why it matters

Even with the redaction, the surviving footage says a lot about the tone and pace of the opening hours. Conan plows through early grunt packs and a nasty flying pest he describes as "just shitting, constantly"—classic Conan, crude but visual—before the path funnels into a first showdown with Vile Lictor. The boss looks like a cocooned bat with too many teeth, a health bar that never seems to end, and a couple of immunities that force you to shift tactics mid-fight.

The arena where Conan takes on Vile Lictor is a maze of red-lit steel and catwalks. He compares it to "any West German club," which gets a laugh but also tells you something about the visual direction: industrial, grimy, claustrophobic. Borderlands has always leaned into big, loud villain reveals—think Handsome Jack’s swagger in 2, the Calypso Twins streaming their cult energy in 3—and you can see the series keeping that tradition. The cinematic that opens the segment, pre-crash and post-edit, clearly positions Vile Lictor as the main antagonist.

Amara’s presence, even with the key scene cut, will be a hot button for the fanbase. Sirens are a small group in the Borderlands universe—a handful of women with reality-bending powers—and their arcs tend to anchor the main story. Amara came into Borderlands 3 as a punch-first Siren, a streetwise bruiser with supernatural reach. Showing her in harm’s way this early signals higher emotional stakes than the series usually advertises in its marketing. That’s exactly the kind of thing publishers try to protect until players can see the context themselves.

The comedy still lands. Between the asides about clubs and bodily functions, Conan also does his usual "I have no idea what any of these buttons do" routine, which weirdly helps highlight the UI and the clarity of combat signals. New players often struggle with Borderlands’ visual noise—damage numbers, status effects, loot floods—and seeing a novice make sense of it is useful, even if he’s mugging for the camera.

The crash, unpleasant as it is for any developer to watch, doubles as a reminder that preview builds are moving targets. Publishers often ship media code weeks, sometimes months, before a final certification build is locked. That’s enough time for performance to change dramatically. Keeping the crash in the video helps set expectations without killing excitement. If anything, it’s a small vote for transparency: the team didn’t try to hide the hiccup with a hard cut and a joke.

There’s a balancing act in every pre-launch campaign. You need to show enough to get people talking, but not so much that big beats get spoiled by a stray camera. Embargoes usually spell out which missions, cutscenes, and menus are fair game. When those lines blur, the internet catches it fast. Here, the community flagged the Amara scene almost immediately, which likely explains how quickly the re-edit happened.

For fans, the episode raises the usual spoiler questions. What counts as fair marketing in a narrative-heavy shooter? Is a limb loss in the first act a spoiler or a hook? Publishers tend to err on the cautious side because context is everything. A single frame can give away a twist if you know the characters well enough. Amara isn’t a background face; she’s a lead from the previous mainline entry. Her body and powers are part of the series’ lore. That’s why a few seconds of footage turned into a bigger issue than anybody in the room probably expected.

Conan’s involvement also matters. His gaming bits—dating back to the old "Clueless Gamer" segments—pull in audiences who might not watch a typical walkthrough or a studio-led showcase. He plays like a tourist, which is the point, and he says the quiet part out loud: "I don’t care about min-maxing, I just want to survive." That perspective helps surface how readable the game is at a glance. You can see whether enemies telegraph attacks clearly, whether status immunities are flagged in the UI, and whether the arena design nudges you toward smarter positioning.

From a marketing standpoint, the clip still does its job. You learn that Vile Lictor doesn’t melt to a single damage type. You see that mobility and verticality matter in boss arenas. And you see that early mobs will punish tunnel vision. The footage suggests a start that’s more punishing than the jokey tone might imply, which lines up with how Borderlands likes to push players to experiment with builds and elemental combos once the training wheels come off.

It’s also telling what the re-edit didn’t change. The jokes about environments, the annoyed shout when the crash hits, the look at menus and settings—none of that was sanitized. That implies the studio is confident about the systems and the vibe. They just didn’t want a story pivot hanging out in the open a few days before launch.

If you’re worried the crash hints at wider stability issues, keep the timeline in mind. Preview code isn’t final, especially on PC, and both drivers and day-one patches can swing performance a lot. The fact that Bleyaert said he hadn’t seen the crash before suggests it wasn’t a known, repeatable bug. Annoying? Sure. Show-stopping? Probably not, or the clip wouldn’t be out at all.

Community reaction has split into the usual camps. Some fans want every scrap of new footage and don’t mind seeing early cinematics out of order. Others go full radio silence before release to protect the first run. This situation handed both groups a compromise: the gameplay and the villain intro stayed, the sensitive cutscene didn’t. If you want a taste of the tone and combat pace, the preview still delivers. If you want to meet Amara again fresh, you can.

For anyone trying to read tea leaves about the campaign’s shape, the big takeaways are simple. The game is willing to put a familiar face in real danger early. The primary antagonist is grotesque, loud, and introduced with a set piece built to stick in your head. And the opening hours aren’t shy about throwing dense crowds and resistances at you, likely pushing you to swap gear and elements rather than brute-force your way through.

That tracks with the series’ identity. Borderlands mixes slapstick with stakes, sprays loot like confetti, and then asks you to solve its combat puzzles by stacking the right tools. When a boss shrugs off your favorite element, it forces you to dig through your bag and think. Seeing that friction show up in a celebrity playthrough isn’t a bad sign; it’s a small stress test in front of millions of viewers.

One more thought about spoilers: studios are getting better at teaching influencers where the guardrails are, but live recordings with real-time reactions are messy by design. You can plan talking points. You can’t plan for the exact frame a camera catches in a chaotic room. The fast cut-and-reupload shows the pipeline worked. It wasn’t graceful, but it kept the big swing under wraps—barely.

Between the jokes, the crash, and the edited-out curveball, the preview still functioned as most people’s first substantial look at the new game ahead of its September 12 release date. It showed a villain you’ll be hearing about a lot, teased a returning hero with higher stakes, and proved, once again, that the Borderlands tone survives just fine under a barrage of Conan one-liners.

Here’s the short version of how it played out:

• The original upload showed a cutscene with Amara in serious trouble. Fans flagged it as a spoiler.
• The video came down, then reappeared with that scene removed.
• The mid-session crash stayed in, complete with a kick back to the Steam library and a reset.
• The gameplay still highlighted early mobs, a flying enemy Conan roasted, and the first bout with Vile Lictor.

Expect more official footage to focus on systems, co-op chemistry, and a cleaner slice of the opening act. The appetite is clearly there. The trick now is feeding it without giving away the next twist.