All of the gameplay videos and streams I've seen so far have been mostly the competitive MOBA aspects of this game. But I'm more interested in the single player that they've been advertising (to a very small degree.)

I was wondering does any single player story, gameplay progression, character development and world building exist in Battleborn, and how fleshed out that stuff feels? I hope it's not just a bunch of scattered one off skirmishes that can be finished in an afternoon.

Otherwise I can't justify spending $60 on this.

Not sure if I'd use the word coherent, but it definitely feels like a game from the people who brought you Borderlands. There are two missions in the open beta--I'm guessing you don't have a PS4--and each took me around an hour to complete. The game actually feels a lot like Borderlands, only the emphasis is on character abilities rather than gun abilities, and the game is divided into pieces rather than having an overall game world. There are only eight missions in the menus, though, so my guess is that the full campaign will take between seven to ten hours. Probably not a great value if you don't enjoy multiplayer, or replaying the game with the many different characters.

I played a bunch of campaign tonight and certainly enjoyed it, but it'll take enjoying the multiplayer to really sell me on this game. I'll probably check that out tomorrow.

Based off of what I've played, you'll find little in the way of character development or world building. As far as player characters go, seems to be just a bunch of random ass dudes killing shit who don't ever seem to actually talk to each other...at all. You pretty much just listen to the npcs ramble on about not much of anything. It's like 75% jokes, 24% "go do this" mission dialogue, and 1% world building. Nothing really feels fleshed out at all during gameplay. You can unlock more information for each character by completing character-specific challenges, but it appears to be stuff you just read off the menu. That 12 minute trailer thing they put out recently told me a billion times more about what's going on in that game than actually playing the game has told me.

That said, if it means anything, I did find the gameplay itself fun. Encounters are pretty straightforward, but still varied just enough that I didn't feel like I was just walking down a linear path and depending on the character, you may take a slightly different approach each time which helps switch things up. There are multiple difficulties too. Normal isn't really hard at all, but still requires at least a tiny bit of teamwork to avoid turning into a total clusterfuck. Not sure if the hardest difficulty is available and/or if it even changes anything other than giving enemies more health.

There are a ton of unlocks it seems. Characters, colors, taunts, titles, and loadout perks.

Now, with all that said, I still don't think I would recommend it solely for the single player. I think it's fun, but not that fun. If you were interested in both the single- and multiplayer (or even just the mutlplayer) then I would say it's absolutely worth it

@babychoochoo: @spaceinsomniac: Thanks for the insight!

I'll be picking it up on PC, so I can't get into the open beta right now :(

7-10 hours for a repeatable single player campaign seems reasonable. If I can grind out all of the unlockables in the competitive modes, is there any reason to redo the single player missions? Are there raid-tier enemies that drop rare unlockable vanity items or something?

I am also interested in the multiplayer, but unless this has more to offer than Overwatch does (with its pure focus on multiplayer), I'll be spending most of my time with Overwatch and picking Battleborn during the Summer sale.

@spaceinsomniac: I'm curious as to how you completed the first mission? Were you truly playing single player, as is on your own? I just played for an hour and a half as Oscar Mike, got to Isic, and died with his health at 50-60 percent because I ran out of time. I have no earthly idea how I could have done better/taken less time and the experience has really, really, REALLY put me off the game. And I LOVE Borderlands 1 and 2.

Yes, I was really alone my first time playing, and I was also playing as Oscar Mike. It took me nearly your time at 80 minutes. I've also seen it done on you tube by a couple of people playing for the first time ever in about 50 minutes.

That mission doesn't appear to be timed for any story reason, so it's my guess that they added the timer for server space reasons. When I saw it the first time in the pause menu--87 minutes of server time left, or whatever it said--I kind of wondered if anyone would get screwed over by that. I'm sorry to hear that you did.

@spaceinsomniac: Thanks duder. I'm hoping the server thing is only for the beta, because there were things I liked about the game and could see myself having fun with it, but that's a real killer if you're heavily incentivized to play story missions co-op. And there were some other things I didn't dig, like there being little explanation of what credits were and if they had any use in mission, or how to use shards, the bullshit boss that turtles up, regenerates health, and then appeared to be immune to most of my shots? 90 minutes of Battleborn was probably the hardest I've swung between "Man, FUCK this game" and "This seems really cool!"

I got to a point in the campaign playing by myself that it seemed to pretty much require me to have multiple people. The campaign seems to be just fighting your way to different bosses with someone telling you why over a radio.

The movement and abilities feel... hollow? If that makes sense. I don't like how the combat and movement feels. I'm wondering if that stuff comes together better when playing with other people.

Right now I'm unimpressed. I'm not a fan of "hey look, we're being quirky!" thing in games. It wasn't great in Borderlands but it was tolerable. The characters in this don't seem interesting enough to justify the level to which it's trying to be weird. In Borderlands the jokes were never good, but there were strong personalities in a strange universe to justify that. It feels forced in Battleborn. You know those weird fucking cartoons on the back of a Pop Tarts box? That's what Battleborn feels like to me. Like, okay it's weird. Was that the joke?

Credits just allow you to buy gear packs outside of missions. They have no use in missions. Shards I just explained in the other Battleborn thread, so I'd suggest reading that. But yes, I agree they could have done a better job explaining things.

And you might want to try the single player mission again, and then check the pause menu when you start for the server time info. Perhaps they increased the limit, because I know I saw the timer at over 100 minutes today, and I didn't even check it at the start of the mission.