Borderlands 2 has a ton of the annoying early 2010’s hallmarks of “we’re slowly becoming more self-aware about cultural issues in games, but we’re just going to do them anyway and point it out in a tongue-in-cheek way”.
The one explicitly gay character is killed offscreen in an audiolog. You can’t get a more Manic Pixie Dream Girl than Tiny Tina. Ellie is great representation of a plus-sized character (that even today we’re still severely lacking), but the writers just leave her characterization at the 10-yard line.
(If we include The Pre-Sequel, one of Torgue’s lines in an early sidequest is the most cloying type of Male Ally character)
But most of the time, the jokes landed and rarely overstayed their welcome. And occasionally you’d get genuinely hysterical gags like the Face McShooty quest. Borderlands 3 just hasn’t come close to hitting that bar, unfortunately.
The joke is as stupid as Scooter hating her because she doesn’t like pizza, not because she rejected him (that’s why you got the porn mags - in case she said no he’d have a back up plan). It’s established he at least expects rejection and would be fine moving on if that happened this time.
I’ve been having a pretty good time with Borderlands 3 so far, at least in terms of the core loop of the looting & shooting. It feels very similar to the rest of the series, in a way that I can only assume was afforded to them by the sheer success of the franchise. For better & worse it manages to look pretty different from the current landscape of loot-driven action games, more resembling its predecessors with some little tweaks here and there.
It is definitely the Most Borderlands of any of the games, I think, just in terms of the variety of the loot I’ve gotten and the diversity of potential character builds. The individual skill trees for each character in BL3 almost feel like they would have been their own unique character classes in previous titles. The room to experiment with different synergies & loadouts is really impressive and is absolutely where I feel this game is at its strongest. As much as I enjoy the likes of Destiny it has been a breath of fresh air to experience a loot game that has no qualms about you finding a ridiculously overpowered build and running with it.
Where it is leaving me cold is definitely in the writing/character department. I haven’t been a particularly big fan of this series’ tone from the beginning but I also think I have a higher tolerance for the crass and occasionally referential humour that it became known for by Borderlands 2. With that said, a lot of this new game just comes across as pretty flat. It’s supposed to be an “everyone is here!” celebration of the franchise but very few of the characters stand out as memorable (or likeable) and as much as I didn’t care for the infatuation this series had with Handsome Jack for the longest time, he was still a better villain than what we’ve got here. The parallels they’re trying to draw between the villains and streaming culture is neither particularly funny or biting. It’s ‘satire’ to the extent that a Banksy work is.
I’m honestly not sure why they even needed a big, Far Cry-esque villain to be omnipresent in the plot. I think I would have preferred something closer to the original game, with more emphasis on mystery and dark humour as opposed to an overly dramatic series of events stuffed full of obnoxious characters like we have in this new game. I’m trying to give it a fair shake but thus far there has been little to convince to not just turn off the dialogue on subsequent playthroughs. Though maybe it’ll be the case that the DLC campaigns they release later will benefit from getting away from the stakes of the main narrative, much like they did in Borderlands 2.
All that said, I think this might be the first game in the franchise that I play all the way to level 50. I usually fall off after beating the story but there’s enough here that I like about the mechanics that it might keep me going, or even get me to try out the other characters (I’m currently playing Amara, the rad, buff siren lady).
Amara is the best. I never played a siren in the other games and I am having an absolute blast. I plan on continuing well past the main campaign (progression spoiler ahead no plot spoiler though). Once you finish the story and activate mayhem mode the entire world jumps to your level. I plan on doing a good chunk of the side quests then so that the rewards and enemies are at an appropriate level.
One thing I hope they do a better job with on subsequent NG+ playthroughs is not making every enemy a health sponge monster who can put you into FFYL with a single blink. A ton of builds become useless when you can’t quickly down enemies.
My friends and I played all the way through 2 on the Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode they added later on, and it was such a miserable experience that we never wanted to even touch the game again.
Or they could have done a Pre-Sequel and make the antagonist sympathetic and tragic, then use that for more Tales style character writing. That’s what I was hoping for with some of the usual wackiness, but it’s sounding like that’s not where they decided to take things. I really hope they let another studio make a solo RPG spinoff one day.
Ultimately I don’t feel comfortable putting $ in Randy’s pocket. I won’t hold it against any Borderlands fans who buy the game, I just personally can’t. And it’s frustrating because one of my friends wants to play with me. Ultimately I may buy it used and get around to it. But definitely not day one. But it’s a bummer. There’s an alternate universe where this series was goofy and fun and harmless and the exact looter shooter we wanted in 2019.
Ultimately this is my response to BL3 as well, the slightly unfair sense of confusion that there are a) hardcore Borderlands fans; that b) care enough about the series that awareness of all the Gearbox/Pitchford bullshit isn’t enough to turn them off this game.
This verges on a old man yells at cloud thing for me, except the cloud was the hottest shit 7 years ago and now just another media property in 2019.
UVHM is kinda unfortunate since it almost requires specific build. I had a Maya with a Moxie SMG and would farm a bee shield every 3 or so levels and just melted everything with Maya slagging things with her abilities and then the SMG healing her as well. You really need reliable ways to slag things for UVHM
UVHM isn’t that fun in BL2 for me simply due to the reliance on slag, almost regardless of build. I hope it’s better in BL3 simply because you don’t have to apply damage amplification literally any time you want to kill anything.
If anything, UVHM stings more in BL2 because it’s such a big jump up in difficulty from TVHM in BL2. TVHM on its own is actually pretty fun because it’s still a little more difficult than a first playthrough but it’s not entirely outrageous, and you get to experiment a little more with your build thanks to the extra skill points you get.
It’ll be interesting to see how Gearbox will handle NG+ playthrough in 3.
I don’t want to give specific spoilers if you haven’t already learned about the systems but NG+ is tuned differently this time around. So far it seems pretty fun.
