Borderlands 3 and Greedfall Quick Looks?

Two big games and no quick looks? I'm not premium anymore, but has any of the team said anything about videos for those games?

Just curious, I really want to see what Jeff has to say about Borderlands, aside from the Bombcast.

Thanks

@darkjohnny477: Borderlands they didn’t receive codes because of their “negative” coverage of the game at E3 so they weren’t able to have a quick look ready right away.

Vinny said on the Beastcast he would do a quick look of Greedfall since he was playing it. But he also said he had found it a little dull.

@haneybd87: i heard that too but i thought they said they would do something with it towards the end of last week.

Wouldn't be surprised if a QL for Borderlands 3 just pops up outside the schedule.

@darkjohnny477: I’m assuming they started in on it towards the end of last week and will likely have something up this week.

Just in general, there still isn't all that much coverage of Bordlerands 3 outside of the dozen or so sites that Gearbox/2K deemed worthy to play the game early.

There will probably be something on the site this week.

LOL fuuuuuuuuuuck that

I was watching some Streamer on Twitch playing it. It looks like all the other Borderland games and from what Jeff said that's about it, it's another one of them, you either like them or don't. I also think the whole shitty situation around Gearbox is putting people off.

been playing Borderlands 3 since launch, Waited in line at midnight for Borderlands 2 in 2012. The Borderlands series is one of my faves.

I dont give a shite about whatever is happening in the background. and i would say that i am supporting the hundreds of other people that worked on the game.

That aside, just wanted to see Jeff play it.

@darkjohnny477: I downloaded it on Friday on PSN, and immediately dropped the voices down to nothing and turned the subtitles on.

It is very much more Borderlands, with it's terrible humour but they seem to be trying to dial back a bit. Claptrap is pretty non-existant and they are really downsizing the remaining Vault Hunters in terms of story.

It's got some real jank and slowdowns, particularly with the menus.

I intensely dislike my character's dialogue (Moze, the mech driver), but her Mech skill is pretty fun and the shooting is pretty fun. I basically needed a "shut off brain and play while listening to podcasts game" and this is fulfilling it pretty well.

I've been playing every free moment since it came out, and I love it. Currently level 31 as Amara and have been playing most of the time duo co op.

Gunplay and moment to moment action feel real good, vastly improved from BL2. What has really surprised though is variety of locations, and even settings within those locations. Again, vastly improved from 2 where Pandora started to look the same after a while.

There seems to be a lot of build variety with Amara, as i switched trees a few times and it completely changed my playstyle each time. First tree I went down was brawl and it felt like playing Doom 2016 when I reached the capstone melee ability.

Your take on the humor obviously will vary, but I was expecting it to be very meme heavy... but it's not. It's just most of the time dumb fun with some physical humor that I genuinely laughed out loud at.

My only downside is the game needs some polish technically though. Plying on a PS4 in performance mode and dips are noticeable sometimes, not always. Also turning off social notifications solved the hitching I was experiencing on day one. If they clean that stuff up it will go down as a much better experience to BL2, which I played so many hours of and adored.

The single good thing about borderlands is that your shotgun feels real good. Like, crazy good, its a lot of fun to shoot dudes up in the air randomly, though random is the key word. It's not really clear to me why sometimes a guy will get blown up into the air, but it's fun. Less fun than 10 year old bulletstorm, but fun.

The storytelling is present, but horrible. Most of the time I can't believe that someone was paid to write it.

Basically ever other thing about borderlands 3 can be summed up with it's another one of those. There are what I can only assume are bugs with how sidequests are dealt with, in that the npc will literally never stop trying to give you hints about how to complete it, even if you're doing the main quest. If you even pick up a sidequest, the relevant npc will, every 30 seconds, tell you a helpful hint about some hole to smash through, pipe to shoot, coffee shop to clear out, etc. It doesn't matter if you're anywhere near the sidequest goal. You now have a quick selector for your quest you're tracking using left/right, but you also can't cancel sidequests, so all of the sidequests from the previous planet show up when you're trying to cycle through them. It's really bad design, trying to actually cycle through this is infurating, but possible.

Basically across the board they tried to make token effort to improve on previous systems, but didn't think through any of it really. I 100% regret my purchase.

There was another thread about this but it appears to have disappeared. Anyway, the game is great! Shooting is great, and they seem to have actually put some thought into how to make the different gun manufacturers stand apart from one another. At least it seems that way to me, because I am using Jacobs guns almost exclusively at this point.

The story is good, at least in Borderlands terms. Every time I start to think “this seems like a bunch of 50 year olds wrote a video game episode of CSI about streaming...” I’m reminded of actually streamers who have said or done the exact thing happening on screen and realize the game got it “right,” no matter how disappointing a commentary that might be making on our society.

Everything from the map (It’s 3D now, and as corny as that sounds, you can easily navigate now because you can see on the map different elevations and how they connect, which was a problem with both of the previous games), to traveling (I don’t remember being able to fast travel on the fly from anywhere using the map before), to driving (the bigass wheel motorcycle is unbelievably fun to drive), the sounds (vehicles and guns sound real and more fleshed out than previous games), to shopping (backpack and ammo spaces are cash now instead of trying to farm for ore), mission selection (there is a quick select now that works wonderfully)...and, well everything in between. Everything seems to be improved from previous games.

I’ve hit a few minor bugs - my vehicle stuck to a wall like Spider-Man and wouldn’t come off at one point - but nothing major and nothing that kept me from playing the game or having fun. I was even surprised when I had an NPC walking me through a walk-n-talk get stuck because I started screwing around and ran off for a minute, and after 30 seconds she figured it out and kept going.

I was going to skip this until it got cheaper, but it’s filling a hole in my game lineup until zelda comes out late this week. Very glad I bought it.

FYI, playing on XboneX here.

Watch the very unbiased Jim Sterling video on Borderlands 3 - it’s a delight.

I feel like the controversy around the game and Pitchford being a dull rusty tool has caused this game to be held to a higher standard than would typically be the case. Especially in how severe a negative is being placed on it just being another Borderlands game. As though it were the only franchise in video games to find its formula and stick to it for several iterations.

The story has been whatever, to be sure, but I dunno.. I think it's been pretty funny in a loud and stupid kind of way.

It'll happen when it happens I guess. I never finished Borderlands 2, so, I'm personally in no rush to see any coverage of it.

I am now reading you posts in the voice of either Idris Elba or British Optimus Prime.

I have been having good time with the game so far. The humor isn't great sure but I don't find it too stupid or offensive. I think the story itself is great, they are really going quickly through everyone they have and kind of telling you what they been doing for 5 years, I don't know the timeline too well. To me it seems like you are actually doing more quickly than some of the of the other games.

i have had some bug problems on PS4, but nothing that was game breaking. My biggest issue so far has been some of the one shot kills that have taken me down, sometimes without me even knowing what hit me. I also hate that the NPC and my pets can revive my but almost never do, and sometimes they just stand over me and can't seem to find the button to push.

I would like to see a QL at some point but it really doesn't matter for me. I like borderlands and this is more borderlands. If you don't know what that means than go watch some of the old borderlands QLs. I don't disbelieve that GB didn't get early release copy cause of their coverage of gearbox, but I hope they don't ignore the game cause of it.

Here's the short version - It's more Borderlands with a slightly fresher coat of paint.

Here's the slightly longer version:

1. The performance is capital T-Terrible. Texture pop in is regular and I've had the game lock up in menus on me several times. This is on a PS4 Pro. It isn't quite Control levels of bad, but it's also way less visually impressive.

2. The terrible humor is still there - it's just not as obvious and now buried in item descriptions and voice samples. Get ready for lots of references to magic (i.e. I'm pretty sure Penn Jillette is a voice on the radio).

3. Speaking of the humor, it's moved from just "bad" to "in bad taste." For example, you can get a shield where you "healgasm" over yourself when it depletes and the item description is literally "Want to see a magic trick?" Maybe I'm just a prude, and if Randy Pitchford gets off on barely-legal squirt porn, then hey, that's his thing. But I don't need overt references to it in the game.

4. Overall, the game kind of feels like it missed its window by 4 or 5 years. The references are extremely dated for the most part and the gameplay improvements might have felt natural if this had been released a reasonable amount of time after BL2, but now they come across as "That's it? That's all they improved?"

After playing through both (Greedfall on Extreme difficulty and 100%) and Borderlands 3 (normal mode quests 100%), I would give both a 7/10.

Greedfall: This game starts out pretty strong, albeit there is a ton of dialogue its well written and all voiced, giving an overall slow start (took me like 8 hours to get outside the first 2 city maps). Early on the skill tree looks impressive, the loot options and quest options are plentiful, there is just a ton of options and it all looks impressive. Queue to 16 hours in and multiple maps (the world is split into zones like Baldurs Gate where you get to another by going to the cardinal exits of the one you are in) and a lot of the luster is starting to look worn. Exploration is heavily unrewarded as the vast majority of explorable areas require future quests to access or complete. Queue to 30 hours and you realize while there are numerous builds a single build changes little over the course of the game and loot / combat is overall pretty limited in what you get, enemy types, and what you do. Also at this near end game point the game has started to drag on, with an additional twist that adds a 3-4 unnecessary hours repeating content. Quests, while still well written, start to break down with the multiple routes, instead becoming, Go to V, Go to W, Go to X, Go to Y, Ok turn in at Z, with a choose between Faction 1 or 2 at one or two points of that traveling list that does affect the writing and the rep, but doesn't really change the what you are doing with the quest.

Overall Greedfall has a slow, but strong start, with great options, multiple ways to do quests, etc. This strong start slowly devolves to a pretty standard RPG with a lack of enemy variety and quests that lack real options and require a lot of traveling around for little payoff.


Borderlands 3: I mean, its basically more Borderlands with a shinier coat of paint. The gunplay is at the best of the series, the classes all feel unique and powerful, there are a lot of improvements. The story is pretty bad and repetitive, with numerous high and low humor spots and little consistency. While people will say they aren't here for the story and humor, its a large part of the game and helps break up the monotonous killing. The performance is also highly suspect on console (especially splitscreen) and PC, with midrange and lower PCs entirely unable to reach a steady 1080 60. There are numerous technical problems (menu lag, ADS lag, load in lag, etc) that really marred my time with the game. Also loot drops feel so unrewarding, namely at end game, where you unlock Mayhem Mode. Legendary items drop constantly and its less, "oh I got a Legendary" and more, "Lets see how cool, but totally ineffective my 100th Legendary in an hour is".

Overall BL3 has a lot of QOL improvements and a shinier coat of paint. If you have a good PC and want to play more Borderlands, well here you go. If you have never played a BL before and are looking to get in, I would advise playing the older titles as they are A) cheaper, B) run better, C) BL3 has a lot of references, D) 90% of the game is the exact same.

Unless a BL3 QL appears in about three and half hours, the Bombcast will probably reveal when it’ll happen.

@gerrid: bit surprised at this, Vinny being a story guy. Normally I pay little attention to story as I'm really just a gameplay person but the story stuff in Greedfall has my full attention! I'm not that far in though.

I’m interested to hear their take. I’m conflicted about buying because a) all the bullshit surrounding the game b) the god awful humor is more than grating to me and c) what seems to be a lack of innovation from 2.

I am, however, I sucker for a good loot shooter, so if the gameplay is still good I might pick it up and play it on mute.

Or maybe I’ll just wait for Shadowkeep.

Its another borderlands which is what I wanted. The humor is hit or miss as always. Surprised by the variety on environments in a good way, the changes from past games are good and its just a pretty fun looter shooter.

@daveydave: maybe I’ll get it then. I’ll probably hold off for a sale (hopefully Target does a 20% off store pickup again soon)

I’m getting Zelda on Friday anyway

@chaz934: Yeh it can be a tricky one. Its not reinvented anything and they could have improved things in more ways than they have. If you hold off you can hope for some quality of life and performance patches so not a bad thing to do so :)

@sarcasticmudcrab: Vinny is tough to read. Sometimes a game you'd think would be perfect for him he just doesn't click with at all. Which actually can be really disappointing if it then means no discussion of a game or no videos on it!

I get it though, especially as someone also time-poor, I find that my mood when I start a game can really affect what I want out of it at that moment, and I don't have the time to plough through that initial distaste. Could be he was after something with visceral instant impact and Greedfall required too much reading and attention.

Definitely has happened to me on multiple occasions. Divinity Original Sin is one example - tried to get into it and it was just not the right game at that time. When the sequel came out I was hungry for something which required patience and investment, and loved it.

Borderlands 3 its more borderlands. If you like that it's more Borderlands then you already know what to expect. It's not a good or bad thing, its just what it is.