Borderlands (1, 2, 3, The Pre-Sequel, TftB)

Another one being (timed) exclusive to Epic Store is just like telling the same joke over and over again.
To be fair, Epic is being pretty smart. They probably aren't paying much to these devs anyways. The cut of the profits that Epic gives these devs is worth the missing sales to them alone. Plus Valve needs to work on fixing issues like Store Curation and just improving the user interface in general. Epic is just the only one who's actually tried to push Valve with any success at all.
 
Can we just take a moment to appreciate how uninspired the cover is?
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Literally spoonfeeding the fact it's gonna have a religious theme; way too colorful for the Borderlands aesthetic, even taking into consideration what we've seen of BL3 so far, and then just.. The whole fucking thing. Why roses? Why the Jesus pose and halo?

What bothers me the most is how they always end up portraying a random psycho as the mascot or symbol of the game. Unless they introduce a unique one now; they are literally filler enemies, and not to the point of the typical "aww, a cute enemy" kind of mascot, as we've seen in other games. Everything about this cover just screams colorful for the sake of attention-grabbing kids used to browsing rainbow Fortnite videos on youtube. I mean fuck sake, look at this in comparison; a copy-paste shill:
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Obvious 1:1 take on a religious painting, but even disregarding that, it implies relations as well as the focus of the game. The BL3 one conveys nothing but "Eyy, remember this guy? And all these? And guns? Hell yeah Borderlands!". It's as if their whole sales campaign is based on "Remember our past games" as opposed to "look at this new shit". Autism rating but fuck sake. Everything about this game is just done poorly.
 
Gearbox finally officially revealed the newest Borderlands game not written by Anthony Burch.
After being fired from Riot, Anthony Burch now holds a non-specific job at 2K, Gearbox's publisher. Strangely close to the only thing he's ever contributed half a shit to.

Kind of agree, but for me the standout is Moze (confirmed name for the trooper-class character).
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There's just something about her design I really, really like. It's like if someone put a Road Warrior filter on a marine from Aliens. She really stood out to me in the trailer, moreso than the other three. Also apparently her ult is jumping into that mech for a duration.

She appears to be literally Sgt. Hammer from Starcraft 2/Heroes of the Storm.
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I also hate the "1 billion guns" gimmick too.

Sure, there's statistically likely 1,000,000,000 guns that could get generated, but realistically it looks like it's the same 6 gun types (Pistol, SMG, Rifle, Sniper Rifle, Shotgun, Rocket Launcher) with random stats. This number will be whittled down further based on your characters "weapon preference" (most characters have skills tied to specific weapon types, such as Rifles for Soldiers and SMGs for Sirens) meaning that you'll be dealing with ~1/5th of those guns (or 200 million). Of that 200 million, 99.5% of it will be white/green/blue quality vendor trash and you'll replace purple quality weapons with higher level purple weapons (and occasionally, a good specific blue tier one from a quest reward). You may find a legendary or two during normal play and hopefully it's a "good" one, because there aren't many.

Out of a billion guns you'll likely use ~20 and remember 3 of them by name. It's garbage.
 
Thinking about playing through the first game after almost a decade. Anyone know how much of an improvement the QoL stuff is, and which character is the most fun solo in that game?
 
I also hate the "1 billion guns" gimmick too.

Sure, there's statistically likely 1,000,000,000 guns that could get generated, but realistically it looks like it's the same 6 gun types (Pistol, SMG, Rifle, Sniper Rifle, Shotgun, Rocket Launcher) with random stats. This number will be whittled down further based on your characters "weapon preference" (most characters have skills tied to specific weapon types, such as Rifles for Soldiers and SMGs for Sirens) meaning that you'll be dealing with ~1/5th of those guns (or 200 million). Of that 200 million, 99.5% of it will be white/green/blue quality vendor trash and you'll replace purple quality weapons with higher level purple weapons (and occasionally, a good specific blue tier one from a quest reward). You may find a legendary or two during normal play and hopefully it's a "good" one, because there aren't many.

Out of a billion guns you'll likely use ~20 and remember 3 of them by name. It's garbage.
I really don't like having to defend a shitty company like Gearbox but some of the stuff you posted is just wrong
it looks like it's the same 6 gun types (Pistol, SMG, Rifle, Sniper Rifle, Shotgun, Rocket Launcher)
You can see Lasers (from tps) and what looks like grenade launchers in the trailer, I can understand how you'd miss it since it's really fucking hard to see what's going on because the mongoloid who edited the video decided to show the gameplay in millisecond-long clips
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This number will be whittled down further based on your characters "weapon preference" (most characters have skills tied to specific weapon types, such as Rifles for Soldiers and SMGs for Sirens)
That's really only a thing in Borderlands 1, in BL2 with the exception of Zer0 the rest of the characters have no more one skill and/or class mod that gives them a boost to a specific weapon, and have viable builds that make use of most weapon types. And since you used the soldier and the Siren as examples: Axton has one (almost completely useless) Assault Rifle skill and one (even more useless) class mod that boosts ARs, Maya has one (really good) class mod that boosts SMGs and no skills at all. There's really no reason to restrict yourself to one or two weapon types unless you choose to build your character that way.

In the end you are right with most weapons not being worth using but it has more to do with the fact that certain Manufacturers+Weapon Type combinations are better than everything else, but isn't that the case in every loot-focused game?
 
Just a heads up, but didn't the first 2-3 games have LAN capability? So if anyone goes the route of piracy to avoid the Epic launcher, MP might still be viable.
 
To be fair, Epic is being pretty smart. They probably aren't paying much to these devs anyways. The cut of the profits that Epic gives these devs is worth the missing sales to them alone. Plus Valve needs to work on fixing issues like Store Curation and just improving the user interface in general. Epic is just the only one who's actually tried to push Valve with any success at all.
I suppose you are right I mean I'm all for knocking Valve from the pedestal that people annoyingly put them on but in terms of the Epic Store people sort of expected it to be 10 times better than Steam right out the gate. The store is in need of its own fixes and the better idea instead of ransom exclusives would have been timed exclusives like this game. At this point I can't say I'm with the drum up hate club for Epic I just kind of expect them to yank games and go "HA! See now you gotta use out shop if you want to play it!" as at the end of the day it's about how much these guys are gonna get for the missing gap of sales for games which is what appeals to them with the Epic Store

Can we just take a moment to appreciate how uninspired the cover is?
715080

Literally spoonfeeding the fact it's gonna have a religious theme; way too colorful for the Borderlands aesthetic, even taking into consideration what we've seen of BL3 so far, and then just.. The whole fucking thing. Why roses? Why the Jesus pose and halo?

What bothers me the most is how they always end up portraying a random psycho as the mascot or symbol of the game. Unless they introduce a unique one now; they are literally filler enemies, and not to the point of the typical "aww, a cute enemy" kind of mascot, as we've seen in other games. Everything about this cover just screams colorful for the sake of attention-grabbing kids used to browsing rainbow Fortnite videos on youtube. I mean fuck sake, look at this in comparison; a copy-paste shill
Well they've sort of been doing this with the Psycho enemies as they are usually the more comedic enemy to do "wacky" things in trailers and openings for the game (Remember the Borderlands 2 opening that is shot from the perspective of the midget psycho on the bandit truck climbing around it and acting crazy). It's less of them being a "cute" enemy and more of them just being sort of a weird mascot for the franchise (Borderlands 2 lets you play as one for god's sake and he can be easily broken with the right skills).
 
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I feel like borderlands is a boomer game, the sort of simplistic gameplay your 50 year old uncle could pickup and play. No complex shooting mechanics or cool things to learn just one skill and the same old shit for 50+ hrs.
Compare borderlands to r6 or csgo and i don´t get how ppl can put more then 10hrs in to borderlands. It gets so repetetive and the writing isn´t good enough to save it. The only saving grace is the coop.

If you look back to 2012 the market for fps games wasn´t as competetive for lootershooters and fps games, cs:go had a really rocky launch and nobody liked MoHWF, dont even get me started on halo 4.
Bl2 might have been good enough for 2012 but now the lootershooter market is so saturated that i wonder if unless bl3 makes some serious changes to the formula if it will even sell well. Just off the top of my head we got :
Anthem (lol)
The division 1&2
Destiny 1&2
Warframe

Even tough nobody likes anthem it has better mechanics then bl2.
Divison 2 has pretty cool pve and pvp, lacks endgame content.
Destiny 2, has awesome pvp, pve is meh. Ok endgame.
Warframe, from what ive heard is incredible.

If i know gearbox right, bl3 will have jackshit for new mechanical changes and probably a some minor streamlining and will rely on its writing.
 
I really don't like having to defend a shitty company like Gearbox but some of the stuff you posted is just wrong

You can see Lasers (from tps) and what looks like grenade launchers in the trailer, I can understand how you'd miss it since it's really fucking hard to see what's going on because the mongoloid who edited the video decided to show the gameplay in millisecond-long clips
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That's really only a thing in Borderlands 1, in BL2 with the exception of Zer0 the rest of the characters have no more one skill and/or class mod that gives them a boost to a specific weapon, and have viable builds that make use of most weapon types. And since you used the soldier and the Siren as examples: Axton has one (almost completely useless) Assault Rifle skill and one (even more useless) class mod that boosts ARs, Maya has one (really good) class mod that boosts SMGs and no skills at all. There's really no reason to restrict yourself to one or two weapon types unless you choose to build your character that way.

In the end you are right with most weapons not being worth using but it has more to do with the fact that certain Manufacturers+Weapon Type combinations are better than everything else, but isn't that the case in every loot-focused game?

Fair points, but I'd still keep my larger categories because of how the weapons handle (I didn't play a lot of TPS, like most people). I would imagine that Grenade Launchers function similarly to Rocket Launchers (low ammo, high damage) and that Lasers function similarly to ARs (medium clip/damage/rate of fire). I could be wrong, obviously, but I'd be shocked if either of those weapons dramatically changed how the game was played.

I didn't want to get hyper autistic but you're right that you don't have to restrict your weapons per class, but you likely will do so indirectly because of how the game is played. Early Maya will prefer high rate of fire guns with elemental damage/effects and those will statistically more likely be Maliwan SMGs as those always spawn elemental. Salvador would prefer pistols because of the damage bonus he gets with them (15%) and then the bonus for having a pair (30%) means it's a pretty rigid setup early on and so on.

This also gets worse at high level play because of how powerful some of the legendaries are with certain skills, you move away from "Zero prefers pistols and sniper rifles" to "Zero is farming for that one pistol that has 1 bullet and unlimited ammo" or "I'm farming that one gun that shoots in that bird pattern because it's good but I want a specific mod on it".
 
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I feel like borderlands is a boomer game, the sort of simplistic gameplay your 50 year old uncle could pickup and play. No complex shooting mechanics or cool things to learn just one skill and the same old shit for 50+ hrs.
Compare borderlands to r6 or csgo and i don´t get how ppl can put more then 10hrs in to borderlands. It gets so repetetive and the writing isn´t good enough to save it. The only saving grace is the coop.

If you look back to 2012 the market for fps games wasn´t as competetive for lootershooters and fps games, cs:go had a really rocky launch and nobody liked MoHWF, dont even get me started on halo 4.
Bl2 might have been good enough for 2012 but now the lootershooter market is so saturated that i wonder if unless bl3 makes some serious changes to the formula if it will even sell well. Just off the top of my head we got :
Anthem (lol)
The division 1&2
Destiny 1&2
Warframe

Even tough nobody likes anthem it has better mechanics then bl2.
Divison 2 has pretty cool pve and pvp, lacks endgame content.
Destiny 2, has awesome pvp, pve is meh. Ok endgame.
Warframe, from what ive heard is incredible.

If i know gearbox right, bl3 will have jackshit for new mechanical changes and probably a some minor streamlining and will rely on its writing.
Borderlands is barely a FPS, it's not about fast twitch skills, it's about the RPG stuff and itemization. You wouldn't play borderlands looking for anything similar to CS GO, or if you did, you'd be sorely disappointed.

I mean, I dunno, I played countless hours of Diablo 2, and the combat in that is much more simplistic than in borderlands. Making the numbers go up can be fun.
 
Can we just take a moment to appreciate how uninspired the cover is?
View attachment 715080
Literally spoonfeeding the fact it's gonna have a religious theme; way too colorful for the Borderlands aesthetic, even taking into consideration what we've seen of BL3 so far, and then just.. The whole fucking thing. Why roses? Why the Jesus pose and halo?

Oh boy.

Here's a list of jokes that I can personally guarantee will be in Borderlands 3:
-Catholic priests molest kids
-"Save me, Jebus"
-Televangelists are kooky and scam old ladies
-Crazy people claim to hear from God
-A villian will say gay people are bad

Brought to you by the same franchise with this line:

But I'm sure they'll totally rip on Islam in the same fashion, right?

...right?
 
Borderlands is barely a FPS, it's not about fast twitch skills, it's about the RPG stuff and itemization. You wouldn't play borderlands looking for anything similar to CS GO, or if you did, you'd be sorely disappointed.

I mean, I dunno, I played countless hours of Diablo 2, and the combat in that is much more simplistic than in borderlands. Making the numbers go up can be fun.
Well it was a diffrent market in 90´s and from what i read diablo had competetive aspects to it. Aswell as being able to sell items for irl cash on 3rd party platforms. I just don´t get putting hunderds of hours in to an fps without getting some kind of payoff. In the semimmo world of destiny and division you can flex on your friends with gear, but in borderlands you have nothing. No showoff of great skill or gear.

Even if you take it as an rpg its an husk of game. No interactive dialog, no choices and character development is minimal. The story is okay and maybe a 1/4 of the cast is memorable (tiny tina ftw). Your own growth is pretty much the stagnated after a few levels, you feel as powerfull level 10 as 20 (atleast i did).
 
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Borderlands is barely a FPS, it's not about fast twitch skills, it's about the RPG stuff and itemization. You wouldn't play borderlands looking for anything similar to CS GO, or if you did, you'd be sorely disappointed.

I mean, I dunno, I played countless hours of Diablo 2, and the combat in that is much more simplistic than in borderlands. Making the numbers go up can be fun.

Is the combat in Diablo 2 much more simplistic than Borderlands?

  • Diablo 2 had much better class differentiation (Barbarians felt substantially different than Sorceresses) compared to BL2 (where every character is nearly identical save for thier one "ultimate" skill).
  • Diablo 2 had much better specialization differentiation (Poison/Bone Necromancers looked and played different compared to Summoning Necromancers) compared to BL2 (where there is virtually no difference between a "Guerrilla", "Gunpowder" or "Survival" soldier in BL2). Diablo 2 also has better and more meaningful skills (and those skills provide synergy to other skills).
  • Diablo 2 had much better itemization that allowed a much greater level of control over your character, in paticular through sockets, set items, runes, and runewords.
  • Diablo 2 had substantially better team synergies (Summon Necro + Paladin, Ice Sorceress + Amazon, etc) compared to BL2 (Siren + anyone else for some short crowd control).
  • Diablo 2 had a larger enemy variety and those enemies would have multiple resistances and immunities (including Physical) forcing you to change your strategy or lean on teammates. Borderlands 2 has only a few enemy types and one "main" strategy (Crowd Control powerful enemies, use "correct" elemental weapons and slag whenever possible).

I would ague that Diablo 2 has much deeper gameplay/combat than BL2.
 
I feel like borderlands is a boomer game, the sort of simplistic gameplay your 50 year old uncle could pickup and play. No complex shooting mechanics or cool things to learn just one skill and the same old shit for 50+ hrs.
Compare borderlands to r6 or csgo and i don´t get how ppl can put more then 10hrs in to borderlands. It gets so repetetive and the writing isn´t good enough to save it. The only saving grace is the coop.

If you look back to 2012 the market for fps games wasn´t as competetive for lootershooters and fps games, cs:go had a really rocky launch and nobody liked MoHWF, dont even get me started on halo 4.
Bl2 might have been good enough for 2012 but now the lootershooter market is so saturated that i wonder if unless bl3 makes some serious changes to the formula if it will even sell well. Just off the top of my head we got :
Anthem (lol)
The division 1&2
Destiny 1&2
Warframe

Even tough nobody likes anthem it has better mechanics then bl2.
Divison 2 has pretty cool pve and pvp, lacks endgame content.
Destiny 2, has awesome pvp, pve is meh. Ok endgame.
Warframe, from what ive heard is incredible.

If i know gearbox right, bl3 will have jackshit for new mechanical changes and probably a some minor streamlining and will rely on its writing.
I get the same vibe, Borderlands is a game for your fat comp-sci teacher in his late 40s/early 50s so he can appeal to the chilluns. I actually like the pre-sequel a little bit better in terms of the characters and wish they had released it as an add-on to BL2 would have been way better that way.

Thing that always bothered me is how alien every non story character behaves. Its just plain bizarre to be standing in a room full of filler-characters that seem to be occupying a completely different reality from me like everyone in town is just conked out on downers.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZl13vnNmt0

So gearbox in their infinite wisdom decided to remove the old borderlands 1 from steam and instead add the new editon for 30 dollars, here is the kicker tough they basicly look the same. I would much rather buy the shity visuals for a third of the price rather then to have this tuned up version.
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Gearbox just hates keeping old things around do they? They did this with Duke Nukem 3D because fuck anyone who wants to play the original version of the game.

This is even worse though because at least they added new levels to Duke 3D (still lacks the content of the Megaton Edition but it's something). Yeah, they "remastered" the game and overhauled it, but it's not worth paying $30 more.
 
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