Eh, Borderlands 3 successfully ruined the series for me and put interest at 0 for any following releases.
For me the last nail that shut that coffin off was Tiny Tina’s Stupid Mess.
And quests. God I hate unskippable questa in Borderlands series. I don’t care about hearing the same or boring jokes for the nth time.
I noted the issues with gearbox near the end of the borderlands 2 cycle and put them on my ‘I’ll buy it when it drops down to under $10 for everything’ category.
I have posted a fully compiled list for 2 that put me off further first day spending posted somewhere. I’m sure I could find it if needed.
I played hundreds of hours in 1, 2 and the pre-sequel so you could say I enjoyed the games. I paid £3 for number three and I still feel ripped off!
Same. I loved 2 but the DLC started to get… dicey. Pre-Sequel was fun, but then kind of a let down and made me realize how stale the gameplay was and how dev practices at Gearbox were shifting. I ended up never playing 3.
I’d be curious to see your list, and how it matches up with my own half-remembered gripes.
Instead of going to find it… I’ll just do my best to list it from memory (and it’s not going to be complete)
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ammo economy in general was ruined from the first game. The entire ‘guardian’ legendary weapon set were removed, and most class mods no longer have any ammo regeneration unless certain characters. Lots of guns now shoot multiple bullets per shot, making this problem even worse.
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Backpack space was lowered from the first game, while equippables was increased. Overall space was increased with the bank included… but not by much. I think the difference is 2.
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The rock, paper, scissors health types first introduced in the general knoxx DLC were really leaned into really hard, which means it’s very handy to have a weapon of each element type on your person.
These three were my major issues. It’s a LOOTER SHOOTER. I need to LOOT and SHOOT. These three points made it more of a chore to do the base game loop at higher levels, especially considering that most characters had only a couple preferred weapon types. Combining all three points meant I was usually balancing 3 weapons of different types so the ammo didn’t overlap with different elements so I could effectively shoot fleshy, shielded, and armored enemies… and then sometimes slag.
There are some other gripes about the skill trees being overall worse than the first game, the DLC’s eluding to the best fights from 1 and being really disappointing (looking at you Crawmerex), and the lack of any real changes in the enemies from the first game. Sure there were plenty of new skins, but the actions didn’t change at all.
I’m sure there were more, but these points were enough to show me that the dev team was moving in a direction I wasn’t particularly excited to play. The story and most boss fights were way better than 1’s. So there was some positive growth, but in terms of overall gameplay I felt that the game was a massive downturn from where I would have liked to see the game go.
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Randy Pitchford being a walking PR problem and a condescending prick towards gamers isn’t really helping the situation. He alone doesn’t want me to play any of the games in the series.
I’ll wait until it’s $8 on steam like I did 3. Epic Games sellout MFs.
This seems like a nothing burger. All it talked about was lack of a top down minimap, but it still has a map and has other things to help navigate instead.
I haven’t played borderlands since 1, so I’m maybe a bad person to judge it, but I like the removal of mini maps in general. It helps me focus on the 3d environment in front of me.
2 is a good game. Builds on the first, good Antagonist, nice shooting. 3, meh
2 vs 3 vs the pre-sequal, what do you think and how do they compare
2 is peak borderlands. I couldn’t bring myself to finish pre sequel or 3 because the stories sucked. Honestly I’m burnt on the looter shooter gameplay too, so I’ll probably hold off on 4 till it’s dirt cheap on a key site.
I concur
2 < 3 < pre-sequel
I distinctly remember playing co-op and having the second player open the map in borderlands 1 while driving around as a pseudo mini map. As much as ‘those were the days’, I don’t yearn for them back.
Now, having various UI elements as toggles I could totally get behind.
I kind of get the thing about the map even without seeing the world design of the new game, because even Borderlands 1-3 (especially 3) already had a lot of vertical aspects to many of their maps. The prevalence of paths looping over other paths, hills, tunnels, holes, inexplicably impassable ditches dividing the map, and generally the entire path to anywhere being designed like the queue at an amusement park ride made using the 2D minimap to actually navigate anywhere basically impossible. (And the main full screen map wasn’t much better.) Showing your local terrain, such as it even did, was not really very helpful because even if you tried to use it to proceed in a straight line to your target you would inevitably find yourself blocked by an invisible wall surrounding waist high pile of rubble, and that the actual way to get there required looping all the way around the map anticlockwise, with nine switchbacks, four gates, and a one-way cliff jump in between.
At the end of the day it’s a fancy radar only useful to help you snout out nearby enemies, especially in the ever-so-many instances where your current mission objective outright requires you to find where each and every one of those stupid red diamonds is hiding so you can murder them all to proceed.
So I hope there is at least still a local enemy radar. They need to either make their map usable and 3D (like e.g. Doom 2016 did) or fix their level pathing so it’s not like a tornado just tore through the spaghetti factory.
It’s a 7. 7 and a half.
