Hey gang,

If you've listened or watched any GB content this week, you probably haven't been able to avoid the BL3 talk. I, for one, bought it the day it came out, and boy howdy have I been REALLY dissapointed by it.

I played a LOT of Borderlands on the 360, then even more BL2 on the PC, which was fantastic. Then I played TPS...

That game was diabolical. Nevermind the annoying Australian accents, the game was just straight up boring. Maybe I should have seen that, and been a little more turned onto how BL3 would turn out.

Everything I saw about BL3 had me questioning what it would be about, even parts of me downright thinking "Well...it can't be THAT BAD can it?" Let me tell you: it is. I didn't play too much, but what I did play had me absolutely bored to tears. The gun variety early on is downright painful. I don't know if I feel this because I heard Jeff say it, but I have also been completely inundated with sniper rifles, and really heavily scoped SMGS. Bear in mind I'm playing the Operative, who seems to specialise on run and gun shooting.

I wouldn't say that the gameplay is downright BAD, because it's not. The feeling of shooting your guns feels GOOD, there's weight behind them that feels satisfying. It's just everything around it that...kinda stinks. The fact that you can't cycle through your quests while on the map. The fact that the minimap is pointless. The fact that there's no waypointing, in a 2019 quest based, loot based FP-RPG. The fact that, on a PS4 PRO, it took THIRTEEN seconds to load into the menus to look at my skills. The fact that on a 4K TV, the UI defaults (I don't know if you can change this) to fucking miniscule.

And I don't think I need to say anything about the writing. I've heard the guy in his underpants say the same diatribe about 5 times in 30 minutes. The characters just aren't funny. Maybe if I was a teenager, I'd find this writing funny, but as a thirty-something, I just find myself rolling my eyes at the "jokes" in the game.

If you're reading this, and you feel the same way, please share your problems with the game. Looking at the MC, I feel crazy that I'm the only one who seems to be finding faults with it

I've bee having a ton of fun with it but beyond that while the map is pretty garbage I'm fairly certain that you CAN cycle through your quests on it. I definitely remember using it to rotate through waypoints to find the closest one because I was having a weird map bug where it kept snapping back to the fast travel point.

Best game of 2019 so far.

I'm really enjoying it as well. Humor is awful but I enjoy the gameplay enough for it not to be too much of an issue.

What really saddens me is how the humor in Borderlands has devolved. It was juvenile and fairly childish, trying to masquerade as cleverer than it was with the use of referential humor. But BL3 really just digresses even further. It's almost on a similar level as David Jaffe's Drawn to Death, but with less teenage misanthropy, yet more... infantility with extra swearing.

They went backwards.

I think the frustrating part for me is that BL3 is merely a good game, rather than a great one. Which maybe sounds like a minor thing except that the stuff holding it back from being great is stuff they rightly should have nailed: A crappy map system, dialogue bugs (i.e. quest dialogue repeating in areas you've already completed the quest for), generally poor performance, and the worst inventory management system I've seen in a long, long, time.

Also, for the OP, if the performance is getting you down and you don't mind playing the game alone, turn off the social stuff in the menu. Once I did that, the menus actually load in an acceptable time frame and I don't need to stand around in a new area for 15 seconds waiting for assets to load.

I think what happened is that in prior games, I always took their humor as some sort of ironic commentary on what people think is funny. Kind of like they were giving a winking laugh to the rest of us who weren't that stupid. Then BL3 comes along and you realize that, no, they aren't actually laughing at people who find this humor funny, they genuinely do think this humor is funny.

Plus, so many of the references are out of date. Did you know there is actually an Office Space reference in one of the areas? I mean, that movie is 20 years old and was never more than a cult classic. How much of the younger audience is even going to get that reference (and it also wan't funny)? The people who wrote this remind me of that kid who was the football captain in high school but who now works at the local McDonalds and can't stop telling people about that one time he scored that touchdown in the big game.

I remember thinking the original borderlands being pretty boring, until I played co-op which made it pretty good.(it maye have been because of better loot or something) Didn't care for BL 2 that much and didn't bother with the other one at all. I did like what I played of into the borderlands (or whatever that telltale game was called).

People seem to down the humor over and over, but you pretty much know what you get and to me it was never that great (or that annoying either). Basically these types of games(diablo, destiny, etc) are about gameplay and loot, story really doesn't matter. IMO

Have you tried any other characters besides Zane?

I dunno, I think it has had some pretty funny moments. The story and writing hasn't really been noticeably bad either. It has been serviceable enough to be the driving force in a game about killing lots of things and collecting loot.

Which is all I really ask of this genre. Much like I don't ask for more in Diablo, PoE, or Destiny.

came across a pic of the 'Randy covered in Ectoplasm' joke they did. That episode is more than 11 years old by now!

@therealturk:

“The people who wrote this remind me of that kid who was the football captain in high school but who now works at the local McDonalds and can't stop telling people about that one time he scored that touchdown in the big game.“

Do you actually know people like that? Because I don’t. Honestly, most people who are successful high school athletes go on to do all right in life through a combination of confidence, support, and good work ethic established at a young age. To be fair, I used to make that exact same reference 20 years ago, as well, but I was really just referencing Married with Children.

I was not aware there was an age cap on media references. I still see people referencing Nosferatu, The Great Escape, Sanford & Son, Airplane, and the band Wham! Easter Eggs are included for the people who get them, not for the people who don’t. That’s the point. When Stephen King references Randolph Scott it largely goes over my head because I don’t care about black and white westerns, but when he encourages someone to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut, I get that, because I also like Kurt Vonnegut. There are 31 flavors at Baskin Robbins for a reason. Fuck, is Baskin Robbins still a thing? I bet they have more than 31 flavors now.

There are plenty of current references, too, many of which I probably don’t get because I’m old. And I’m okay with that.

It may be you're right.

Regarding whether one should overlook this I say no. I can't overlook an aspect of the game that is hammered home at almost every interaction you have, and often when you're just running around.

It's as if a writer's room spent a lot of time shooting the shit, and taking their mutual love for specific references too far. Somewhere the audience was forgotten, because nowhere did they seemingly wonder if it was actually impactful, moving, clever, or just plain funny to anyone else. It's just stuff.

Borderlands 3 is the game that makes me realize that I dont think I'm a borderlands fan anymore. I love the gameplay, but playing through the game is making me really frustrated at how short of the goal line the game falls and how it seems like they just phoned so many things in. Good loot and gunplay is one thing, but there are so many games that I can go explore that do that well and have story content and characters that dont make me cringe constantly.

It's a low hanging fruit to complain about at this point, but it's pretty obvious they dont know how to make a diverse cast of characters that stay away from the joking psychopath trope. There are a few here and there, but the amount of time the game gives to characters who act like they're pitching their latest tweets to see which one gets the most laughs is ridiculously annoying.

Borderlands 2 had some bad humor as well, but I at least feel like it had a better sense of comedic timing and awareness of itself. Borderlands 3 is like the writers sat in a room and threw shit at the wall constantly hoping that something would stick (haha, i referenced poop, get it, cause that's funny according to the game right?). It feels like a game of D&D with people who don't know how to role play so they just focus on being the funniest character instead. As a result none of the characters are believable people at all. Hell, something major happens with one of the characters and when asked about it shortly after they're just like, "oh that, I'm good."

Theres so much more they could have done to build character development through the major events happening in the story, but instead they just shit on anything that happens with the villains to the point that it's hard to care about anything that happens since the game sure doesnt seem to.

Ultimately it feels like a game written by people who liked borderlands 1 and 2 but cant recreate that humor on their own without it seeming really hokey and overdone. I hate that I hate it so much, but after spending all weekend playing and waiting for it to get better I'm not sure I want to keep playing a game that I'm only playing to pick up loot when there are other loot games out there I could be exploring.

I'm sure this will sell well, so they won't learn anything. What a bummer of a game.

Haven't played it yet but after hearing the bombcast I can already tell I'm going to love everything about it. Including the writing.

i already finished it once as a siren and now i'm in mayhem mode with her and i'm starting 2 more characters as the gunner and beastmaster the different skills feel real good.

always loved the dumb humour and the shooting feeling so good now makes me wanna try every gun.

You say "Most disappointing game of 2019", I say "$5-$10 impulse buy of 2022".

@glots: Nice job, guys, Randy really needed another mansion.

I don't have much nostalgia for prior Borderlands games, but the Drawn to Death comparison is spot-on. I just can't with this type of "humor". I'm all for dumb stuff, and I don't necessarily get offended at crude things, but man, this bums me out. Given all the Randy nonsense and an assumption that people had generally outgrown this puerile shit, I had figured this game would flop like Drawn to Death. Instead, it's apparently breaking sales records. Ugh.

Finished it on the weekend and now I just really on't feel like touching it. Previous Borderlands I was right back into it for the loot and to max the character out, but I just don't have that pull to get back into it.

I loved the first Borderlands when it was new, put a few 100 hours into it. The last few games just seemed like more of the same and the older I got those kind of games just seemed less appealing to me.

Can't fight you on this one. I still prefer the first game.

@notnert427: “ Given all the Randy nonsense and an assumption that people had generally outgrown this puerile shit, I had figured this game would flop like Drawn to Death. Instead, it's apparently breaking sales records. Ugh.”

Because it’s genuinely nothing like Drawn to Death. It’s not high comedy, either, but bad jokes and random curse words are not the same thing.

And Drawn to Death was an attempt at a new IP too. Whereas Borderlands has 10 years of solid games, with 2012-2015 being the most active period. So I'm not surprised it sells well.

Market the crap out of something and it'll likely sell a lot. It's not until the game following this one do we see if its drawbacks were significant.

PS: I'm not comparing Drawn to Death and Borderlands 3 by the merits of their gameplay. I am only interested in the writing they have, and how they portray themselves to the player. Liberal swearing can be funny, if used in a clever manner.

@glots: Happy that a good game is doing very well. Hopefully it benefits the many people working on it who have to put up with Pitchfords bullshit way more than any of us.

There are some disappointing things About this game but none of it outweighs the disappointment that was Anthem.

Always wanted to like Borderlands but as someone who solos games, I find it boring.

I agree that the minimap (and the map as a whole) is awful. Seriously disappointing that there's not a driving line or something like that. And the UI should definitely be able to render more than one quest at a time. But still, once you get to a certain point, things do kind of turn around and the game starts to be kinda fun. I found that finding a high-capacity shield was a real kickstarter for me, and also just looking for purple guns in the vending machines in the hope that something awesome pops out. Got a neat shotgun. From my progress I suspect the game is just a bit too long to really have much appeal for me (I'm only level 20 and it feels like it took forever to get here), but we'll see.

The writing and dialogue are whatever, same as all the other Borderlands. The thing that really sticks out to me, and is what is going to carry this game through the myriad of DLC it will get in the next 2-3 years, is the gameplay. There is a tightness and weight to every action you take, shooting, sliding, running, jumping, moving. For me, all the other Borderlands have been much too floaty and loose. Not enough to ruin the games for me, I put many, many hours into BL1&2 (TPS was the floatiest of them all, fuck that game), but it was always this thing that was dragging it all down for me. I am talking about my experiences on the PC when I say this, I should note, so M & KB.

The Jakob weapons in particularly are so much fun to use, they really exemplify everything about the shooting that improved over the other games. I'm honestly at a point where I feel like this game plays better than Destiny 2 in the shooting. The thing about Destiny 2 that bothers me is how bullets magnetize to weakpoints/headshots, making it a tad too easy. Headshots are harder to hit in comparison, so it feels like I earned it more, thus making the shooting more rewarding.

I definitely get why people are disappointed in the narrative/writing/dialogue. It's not good, and outside of some occasional story beats in Tales from the Borderlands, I don't think it ever has been. It's not why I come to these games, and never will be. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be better, or they shouldn't be expected to have improved over the years, but I think the leaps and bounds they've made with the gameplay holds this thing up on its shoulders, above and over all its flaws.

Different strokes for different folks and all that...

But I'm having a hard time understanding map complaints. The minimap does exactly what it's supposed to do - help you quickly and easily pinpoint nearby enemies, collectibles, and waypoints. I think the main map is fantastic - it allows for fast travel from anywhere (even back to your vehicle), it shows multiple elevations clearly, it fills in locations that have been explored, and it allows zooming/rotation for whatever you might be looking for. I have not felt lost or confused even once during the whole campaign.

Writing is of course subjective, but I think it's fine. I'm glad that it doesn't take itself too seriously. I like the characters and I'm interested to see what happens as the story progresses. As somebody else noted above, I don't play this game for some kind of artsy, high-brow take on the human condition.

It's fairly clear that I'm in the minority here, but this is my game of the year. I love everything about it.

"Nevermind the annoying Australian accents" The game was made in Australia and features Australian actors.

Yeah, it's hard to take someone seriously when that is one of their complaints.

I think what is actually disappointing about BL3 is the lack of progression in game mechanics. For example, after they introduced the gun grinder in TPS I thought the logical progression would be actual gun crafting or modding. It just seems like there is more that could have been done to build on the BL formula.

I'm gonma give this another go this weekend. I think I just hated playing Zayn, as I like to do long range combat and methodical gameplay, whereas his gameplay seems to revolve around run and gun upclose gameplay.

Plus I hear the first 4/5 are the worst bit, so I'm gonna retry as Fl4K after DND and give the game an honest go.

I tried to sell it on ebay, but the buyer backed out after winning, so I guess it's a sign

Right, I've dived back in, and it's better!

I think I was just playing a boring class. I was playing Zayn, which was all run and gun get in and blow dudes up. I tried to be contrarian by not picking Fl4K cause everyone was playing them, but I've gone back as them, and I'm really enjoying it. I also think that people are saying the first section is the worst, and I get it. I've just got to space, and I can see it being much better.

Please don't judge a book by its cover people

@sombre: I've read or heard on some podcast that Zayn is apparently not balanced properly for later game content to the point where folks are saying he is kind of broken to play at length.

My buddy plays Zayn and said he's unplayable on the endgame higher difficulty stuff.

The worst part about Zane is that he doesnt have any specific setup that unlocks an easy melt bosses in 5 seconds mode. He is fine for doing endgame content provided you have the gear load out to do it. But it is a different experience than the other characters who can demolish everything relatively easily to acquire gear because they have skills and action abilities that take care of a lot of the work.

And I'm still feeling pretty bummed out by this game. The only fun I get out of it is playing with a friend or farming endgame content. Getting characters up to there has been an eye rolling chore for me. It does make me wish there was a diablo styled adventure mode where I can just kill stuff with friends from lvl 1 to 50 and never interact with any npcs outside of vendors. If it weren't for co-op potential I wouldn't still be playing, but I'm pretty close to just deciding I've had my fill until they add some dlc to (hopefully) fix issues and add content.

I got to the bit on the ship last night where Claptraps ass got used to stuff a hole, and I rolled my eyes so hard I went blind