There's a an obvious tell bad comedians have when trying to compensate for material that they either haven't thought through enough or don't even understand. They talk too loud and hit the punchline too hard. The vast majority of those guys wind up on morning commute radio. This is the tenor of the game and it's an albatross that hangs heavy over nearly every minute of it. It's not the worst written game I've ever played, that crown belongs to the ultimate flavor experience. But it has fallen hard since Bl2 and the prequel.
Borderlands 2, to me at least, was written by folks with a decent sense of humor. I love that game to death and it's with a heavy heart I condemn the entire crew of BL3 to comedy jail. Because they just don't get it and their desperation is exhausting. If you don't get the joke the first time they will beat you over the head with it again and again. I will totally understand people who play the first couple hours and walk away for good. That's a shame.
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| To be faiiiiiiiir, there are some rock solid side quests out there. Childhood's End in particular. |
That's a shame because mechanically and visually this is everything I wanted and more. The last week has flown by in a glorious blur of gun fire and loot'splosions. The shooting has never been tighter. The weapons have never been more useful and varied. The skill trees have never been more clear and immediately impactful. This is Borderlands perfected and I god damn love it. If you never got on the Borderlands train in the past this definitely won't change your mind. What this game does best is a laundry list of tiny tweaks and improvements that slowly, but inevitably, bowled me over.
Your class mods now share the icons of the skills they affect so you don't have to remember all their convoluted names. The map lets you know when a quest icon is above or below you by making them obviously bigger or smaller. Like, when you're right under a marker it will take up a third of the mini map. It's great. You can fast travel at any time to any FT station or to your vehicle which, on pc at least, is near instantaneous.
There's more I want to say about it's magnificent end game grind, but you should find that out on your own. The single best improvement to me is the loosening of the loot drop purse strings. In Borderlands 1 through the pre-sequel you would go hours without seeing anything purple and nearly entire campaigns without seeing anything legendary. It was an insultingly brutal grind meant, I think, to encourage co op play. What happened instead was that people cheated like hell. Strangers would vomit waterfalls of legendaries at you just so you could keep up with them. So I learned to cheat too. The loot tables for 3 are more generous than even I ever wanted them to be and it works. It works because you need to read closer to what weapons you actually like rather than the color. There may be blue sniper rifles more suited to your needs than gold smgs and it never stops being fun to experiment. Mostly because there are so many GD gunz.
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| A rifle most dashing. |
That assault rifle may not look like much from it's bare stats but if I never gave it a spin I wouldn't have discovered it's cryogenic rocket alt-fire. Being able to switch on the fly between 2 different elements on a maliwan pistol was a godsend. Flipping a sniper barrel and turning it into a shotgun gave me so many ideas I cackled out loud. A revolver with homing bullets that lets you see invisible loot crates in it's scope was the only mission based weapon I've ever been sad to see whisked from my backpack. I haven't stopped being surprised for 30 hours and I probably won't for a year or 2.
And to finally throw the writers a bone, they made a damn good campaign. The story beats work, a handful of new characters hit (frikkin' loved Clay), the base idea behind most of the levels are fantastic. I also appreciated how the endgame discussions on how to save the universe were between 3 women. If you decided to play as Amara or Moze, it would be between 4 women. That was pretty neat. I'm not happy the entire ending of the pre-sequel was retconed out of existence but I did like fighting my favorite vault hunter to the death. I always thought she'd make a hell of a boss and I love being right.
All that and bunch of other showstopping fights save Bl3 from it's obvious shortcomings. But Anthony Burch should have still been there, David Eddings should still be claptrap, and Randy Pitchford should have stepped down. Pitchford is a pox on an otherwise talented studio. Eddings did damn good work on clappy for 7 years, for free apparently, and was let go when he wanted actor's scale. His replacement is insultingly sub par. Burch was a fun writer who gave the series it's best villain and if his sister Ashley's vanishingly small cameo as Tina is any indication; the parting was not amicable.What kind of self destructive jerk is responsible? The same genius who picks a legal fight with his own accountant.
I love this game but it cut off it's nose to spite it's face in the service of one man's ego. That's a tragedy and it infuriates me to think about what kind of good work we lost because of it. If you love this series, you're gonna get your money's worth, lord knows I'll be playing this sucker well into 2021. The galaxy map is suspiciously empty and I look forward to what this team comes up with even if they don't tighten up the dialogue. But seriously... they need to.
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| Never met a photo mode I didn't like. |
