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cruddyborderlandstheories · 5 years

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oh? Typhon?

hell yeah

Here’s some transcripts and speculation

i want you guys to imagine these with a very thick new york accent.

Recording 4: “I remember the day I arrived on Promethea. Those buildings looked so majestic! I was so busy sky-gazing that a thief stole the pants right off my keister! Promethea’s no Pandora, but a city is still plenty dangerous! I knew this was the sorta place I would either find my destiny or die in a gutter! And thanks to my partner slash nemesis, Azlan DeVega, Promethea was almost both!”

Recording 5: “I thought a city like Promethea would be crammed full of opportunity. But, actually, it was a tinderbox of violence and greed. Corporations were pulling out, calling the joint a dead end. People were starving! Eating stone soup and boiled rats to get by. But, somehow, I survived. It was a real wrong place at the right time type of situation. You know, sometimes the trick to being successful is just staying in the game longer than the other guy.”

Recording 3: “Azlan DeVega: my partner slash nemesis. He talked a big game, but there was a reason why he was down on his luck. He was lazy! But I was hungry to prove myself. Then, one time, we were wandering through the Quazmarian Quarry and I fell through some brittle rock! Azlan calls down: “Nice knowing ya, Deleon!”, grabs my stuff, and splits! Well, I had to find another way up. And, bam! That’s when I found the Vault! I guess the moral is: sometimes you gotta fall before you make it big.”

Recording 1: “I saw the key just sitting there in front of the Vault. Good thing I didn’t open it! I gave the Vault Key to Atlas, got a butt-load of cash and the rest is history! Anyway, as soon as I made my money, who shows up at my door but Azlan DeVega? Sayin’ that I owe him half of the cut! Baloney! I was on my own, and after that, whenever someone wanted to find Eridian ruins, they called me! Typhon Deleon! The first Vault Hunter!”

Recording 2: “So I found that Vault! Atlas was lagging behind those other guys! They almost got wiped out during the corporate wars and were looking to rise from the ashes, like the, uh, what’s it called? The fire bird. Anyway, the Atlas CEO was getting desperate just throwing explorer(s?) at ruins. Now, I never thought growing up on Pandora would do me a lick of good, but I spent my childhood hunting Eridian ruins and that gave me the edge! How about that; Pandora is good for something!”

(I got REALLY distracted while writing this and started analyzing all the Sanctuary 3 footage we got lmao so expect a post on that soon)

So to start, I find it really interesting that Promethea already had a city on it before Typhon arrived. I had assumed the city popped up because Atlas got rich from the discovery of Eridian ruins on Promethea, but that doesn’t seem to be the case! It looks as though a bunch of different corporations all had their hands in the city, but pulled out once the going got tough.

Wild.

Ah, Azlan DeVega.

Azlan apparently means “Lion” and DeVega means “of Meadow”. This is kinda important for 2 reasons.

1. A very important lion in greek mythology is the Nemean lion, which had golden fur that was impervious to physical attacks and was the child of Typhon.

2. “of Meadow” didn’t really turn up anything of note within Greek Mythology directly, however! it did return the Epimelides, goddesses of meadows, which translates to “Protector of Sheep”. Sheep and Lions in general are usually associated with Peace, which I thought was a pretty neat connection. I wonder if Typhon is lying...

3. There’s also this neat bit of mythology here: “When a lion attacked her father's sheep, Cyrene wrestled with the lion” and “when Eurypylus was still ruling Libya, a monstrous lion was created, which was a great terror to the citizens. So Apollo sent Cyrene to kill the beast. After she succeeded, she was made the ruler of the city Cyrene”. I don’t know if this has anything to do with this story tbh but Cyrene is suspiciously similar to Tyreen lmao. Her name even means “Sovereign Queen”... Supreme queen... god queen...... I wouldn’t be shocked if Tyreen goes after Azlan DeVega and/or his descendants

So we’re 100% definitely visiting Quzmarian Quarry, right? This is somewhere on Promethea, so we’ve got a few options. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where the abandoned research base is.

I say that mostly because it looks as though there’s a door in the floor here. It’d make sense if Typhon fell somewhere and found the Vault there, that Atlas would rush on top of that and ensure nobody else was getting in.

Also, this confuses me, because in TFTBL, its mentioned that Gortys was “Atlas’s last ditch effort at opening a Vault”, but they had the opportunity here! What gives?! I imagine there was resistance, but it sounds like Typhon escaped with the Vault Key just fine, which is weird to me. I suppose if we’re considering opening the Vault being the be-all end-all then Atlas had opened a Vault on Pandora, too. It’s just that they never killed the Destroyer... since, well, y’all know what happened to Steele. And if we’re not considering the Destroyer’s Vault to be a tally in favor of Atlas, then perhaps something attacked those who 'opened’ the Vault and they could never actually access the things inside. It’s likely then, that their technological advances were due to basic Eridian treasure troves, like the one in Captain Scarelett’s DLC (y’know, just, without the Leviathan).

Furthermore, we can be certain there are at maximum 3 Vault Keys at play in BL3, and minimum there’s only 1.

The one used to open the Vault on Promethea.

The ‘Vault Map’ we see in the Holy Broadcasting Center.

And the Vault Key Lilith had in Sanctuary.

Personally, I was of the theory that the Vault Key we see in the HBC is the same Vault Key from Sanctuary. It’s literally described as a map of Vaults on other worlds, which is what Lilith discovers at the end of BL2 and obviously something happened to Sanctuary before the events of BL3. Of course, its possible this is also the Vault Key used to open the Vault on Promethea, which could mean there’s only one Vault Key (weird considering it takes 200 years to naturally charge, but considering there are Sirens about that can charge the Vault Key forcibly using Eridium, not too weird. Let’s not think about the fact that Eridium only started appearing after the opening of the first Vault for now cuz im super tired lol)

“Sometimes you gotta fall before you make it big”.

100% this is foreshadowing for the game’s story somehow and you can’t convince me otherwise.

“Whenever someone wanted to find Eridian ruins, they called me!”

I find it kinda interesting that Tannis never mentions Typhon in BL1 in any of her ECHO logs detailing her time spend on Pandora trying to find ‘evidence of alien life’, however if this is due to DAHL not wanting to use an Atlas schmuck’s info or because the writers created his character for BL3, I’m not certain. Let’s pretend it’s the first one and move on because it really bugs me that Tannis is forced to look for evidence of alien activity on Pandora when apparently Typhon grew up there and “spent [his] childhood hunting Eridian ruins”.

A reference to the “fire bird”. I know, I know, its a reference to a phoenix, but honestly? how fuckin’ cool would it be if this was actually a reference to the ‘Firehawk’? the mass murdering bounty hunter like the Lilith Firehawk? like if the Firehawk was actually a mythological thing in the borderlands universe. I mean, there’s a pistol called Firehawk in BL1 (y’know, before Lilith starts her cult), so I wouldn’t put it past them to pull that shit. It would kinda make sense for the bandits (who are usually DAHL workers in the first place) to start worshiping the Firehawk as a god if there was a precedent for it already. Even better if it was a dude god, which, outside of Jack not knowing Lilith was alive, could explain her usage of the voice changer.

As for my shitpost? Because you all knew it was coming....

Tannis, Tyreen, and Troy are all descendants of Typhon Deleon in one way or another.

Look at that poster. You tell me it doesn’t look like he’s wearing that giant-ass feather collar Troy’s got going on.

All their names start with T (oh, such compelling evidence I have here, I know!)

Tannis and Typhon both have yellow goggles

Typhon is basically known as the father of all monsters lmao and he worked with Atlas and baby you KNOW im in love with the Atlas and the Calypsos theory. maybe perhapeth they used Typhon’s dna or his cryo-frozen body to create the twins and thats why they believe the vaults are their birthright, hmmmm?

but hey maybe that’s just because he helped lead to the opening of the first Vault which, y’know, lead to the opening of all the other Vaults. all of which house Vault Monsters

#borderlands #borderlands 3 #bl3 #typhon deleon #typhon

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theroadtofashionhell · 4 years

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Got myself 3 Golden Keys in Borderlands 3 for me to use over the weekend - these codes cover all platforms and expire April 20, 2020

#bl3 #bl3 golden keys #borderlands 3 golden keys #borderlands 3 shift codes

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marc-norris · 4 years

Video

youtube

5 Golden Keys for Borderlands 3 Shift Code - Expires April 15, 2020.

The shift code can be found in the video description.

#borderlands 3 #borderlands 3 shift codes #borderlands 3 golden keys #BL3 #bl3 shift code #bl3 golden keys

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lccb-blog · 5 years

Video

youtube

I woke up this morning to the opportunity to get 10 golden keys in Borderlands 3.

Hell yeah!

Seriously gave me reason to come back and play the game. It’s been awhile for me, but with the possibility of new guns and new DLC that was released this week, I’m looking forward to playing this weekend.

Thank you Gearbox Software :)

#borderlands 3 #borderlands 3 golden keys #borderlands 3 shift codes #bl3 golden keys #bl3 shift code #bl3 loot #borderlands 3 loot

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lonesomealley · 5 years

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Borderlands 3 Review

*Writer’s Note: I played this game when it came out and have based my review on the version of the game that I played then. Some of this information may become outdated with time.

DISCLAIMER: This review is going to contain a lot of spoilers for Borderlands 3, if you don’t want that then this is not the review for you. My overall opinion of this game is that it’s… okay. It entirely depends on what you value out of a video game. Borderlands 3 is, at heart, just another Borderlands that’s been somewhat dumbed down, and if you don’t like the Borderlands series’ base mechanics (i.e. farming, constantly throwing away weak gear, getting stomped on for being underleveled) then this is not the game for you. If you value storytelling in your video games, this game is absolutely not the game for you. However if you’re someone who just wants to shoot some guys and already like, or think you’ll like, Borderlands’ looting systems then this game is going to range anywhere from okay to good. It should be kept in mind that this review is meant to take into account many of the different aspects of the game, hence why this review is going to have a far lower score than many other reviewers/media publications seem to be rewarding it.

I don’t really know if Borderlands 3 is worth the $60 asking price, and I would ultimately say to either wait for the game to go on sale or at least wait for it to go up on Steam. This is because the game really is just a dumbed down Borderlands entry, you could easily just go buy the Handsome Collection for $60 (if you haven’t already) and have just as good, even better, of a time. Also that Steam has more laid back refund policies than the Epic Store (which can be blamed for this review existing in the first place). But this is where the spoiler free section ends, anything past this point will contain heavy spoilers for the sake of in depth discussion. You have been warned.

When the Borderlands 3 reveal trailer came out back in March I was entirely skeptical that the game would be anything good. The story looked like a mess, the guns looked like complete shit, and overall it appeared that a lot of the things they were promising on were too good to be true or would end up simplified. Also, at the time I had just played through the entirety of the existing Borderlands series (excluding Tales From the Borderlands), so this new game was going to have to spike a certain chord with me. This definitely wasn’t helped by the “additions” that they tried to make to those games such as second game’s graphics enhancements, and the Borderlands 1 remaster. The former, while making the game look prettier, had the problem of cutting off cross platform play (across PC, Mac, Linux, etc.) which left a small crowd of people very disappointed. And the latter had the issue of being a complete load of garbage with many of the same bugs, new performance issues, clunkier menus, new menus not working, and of course Gearbox’s patented golden chest. They pulled a BL2 and just gave you OP guns at the beginning of the game as to make the beginning area more trivial than it already was. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they suited you out with 75 golden keys for connecting your shift account, meaning that you could destroy any sense of value the guns originally had.

There was also the new BL2 dlc that was meant to tie the game into BL3’s story. However I can safely say that after having played through BL3, this dlc’s campaign in no way whatsoever connects these two games together. I guess at best it explains how Sanctuary fell, but that in of itself has a lot of problems. You get attacked by some Dahl commander (who has never been brought up in the story before) where he infects Sanctuary, and by further extension Pandora, with this plant virus. Your job is to kill this guy and stop the plant virus. There is no motivation established for this guy besides that he wants to make Pandora into some paradise, and the story has absolutely no effect on BL3 at all. The crew was already set on going to outer space, this invasion only served to speed up this process. To further this claim, there is no mention of this dlc’s events in BL3 and Pandora is still the same sandy hell scape that it normally is.

Which finally brings us to Borderlands 3. A game that feels surprisingly devoid of passion and love despite how much effort went into it. A game that feels like there wasn’t enough time to flesh out ideas. A game owned by a company who sold out to Epic for money- let’s get a couple of things out of the way first. 1. Borderlands 3 isn’t an entirely bad game per se. 2. I have relatively no issue with the game being an Epic exclusive and my opinion is not biased or soured due to Randy Pitchford’s constant fuck ups.

However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t outright despise Gearbox and 2K for their actions. They take an exclusivity deal with Epic which actively disrupts consumer convenience and confidence in purchasing their product (not a big deal). But then they have the audacity to push this game out in the buggy, unpolished, and unoptimized state that its currently in (kind of a big deal). The menus are buggy on a basic, functional level, the performance tanks constantly, and items would quite literally disappear out of thin air from my inventory. All of these made Borderlands 3 just that much more of a painstaking experience to play through.

It was the unpolished game and the Borderlands’ trademark shitty introductory area that made me want to refund the game. And believe me, I tried to refund the game. Unfortunately I got denied my refund because I had accidentally played over 2 hours of the game, when the Epic client doesn’t even show your playtime. So ultimately I had no choice but to play this game in order to get my 60 dollars worth. In that time I learned that this game is exactly like the other Borderlands games. Right down to the pacing and the disappointing endings. The beginning of Borderlands 3 is a complete slog. You’re just slapped down on Pandora and have to suffer through Clap Trap’s “hilarious” writing and get formally introduced to the mechanics of a Borderlands game for the 4th time now. Gearbox has apparently never figured out that people really hate playing through the beginning of their games because it refuses to give the players a skip tutorial option or a way to just outright bypass the introduction. Now I will say that this introduction isn’t as bad as BL2 or The Presequel, but it's certainly nowhere near good either.

The problem with these introduction areas is that they aren’t engaging or really even play into the story in any meaningful way. In BL3, you arrive out of thin air on Pandora and are forcefully met up with Lilith and the Crimson Raiders so that you can prepare to take off into space. Between meeting up and going into space you’ll be doing menial tasks such as fixing Marcus’ shops, getting a basic vehicle, and doing some really boring boss fights. Your motive for killing these bosses is because Lilith is on the hunt for the vault map. That thing that they had in BL2, how did they lose it? Nevermind that because it’s just sitting with Mouthpiece, a painfully easy boss that expects no brain power out of you other than just avoid the giant speakers that go boom. Apparently it was in Vaughn’s possession before he was betrayed by his Sun Smasher clan in return for good boy points from the Calypsos. Why the Crimson Raiders thought it would be a good idea to leave the map with Vaughn beats me, but I can safely say that this theme of Vaughn being a complete fuck up is consistent throughout the entirety of BL3.

Vaughn at best feels like a comedic relief character, and at worst feels like padding. This character has no important role throughout the story, just plainly isn’t a funny character, and comes across as a complete waste of space. He could literally just disappear from the entire game and nothing would change. You (luckily) don’t even see him for most of the game because his ass is left back on Pandora to do… something. I’ve heard that Vaughn is a far better character in Tales from the Borderlands, however as I haven’t played that game I cannot say for certain whether or not Gearbox really just dropped the ball on this one. Vaughn also isn’t the only character I have this opinion of, however as I am still discussing the game’s intro I feel that I should hold off until later.

So after you acquire the vault map and experience a “high stakes” encounter with the Calysos, Lilith loses her siren powers. I feel like this was supposed to be some big, “Oh shit,” moment but I have to express that I simply don’t care for Lilith’s character and people who are new to the Borderlands series won’t care either. Lilith is not necessarily a “good guy” in Borderlands. She has done some fucked up things that have drastically changed the overarching plotline and a lot of people’s perception of her both in the story and by players experiencing it. In The Pre-Sequel, she is framed as being the reason for Handsome Jack’s insanity as Lilith literally branded a vault symbol onto his face. In the epilogue of TPS she actively commands a firing squad to gun down Athena after she tells her story in its entirety, completely against the judgement of her colleagues. And she makes incredibly rash decisions in BL2 that causes detrimental results for the crimson raiders such as being captured by Handsome Jack after being explicitly told not to come to Angel’s prison that greatly changes the dynamic of the story. These are only a couple examples, and I could keep going, but the point is that I don’t value Lilith as an entirely productive or a beneficially proactive member of the Crimson Raiders. And new players who have never played Borderlands before literally won’t even know who Lilith is or why she is even important. Hence when Lilith loses her siren powers after a pretty pathetic fight with the Calypsos, I can really only roll my eyes and just go with it.

From here the story relatively picks up and becomes a bit more bearable (but not really), however I don’t want a couple thousand words of this review to be about the story. Overall it’s trash, and I’m going to try my best to summarize just why it’s trash. Firstly is that the Borderlands writers might be writing for way too many characters. Seriously you have: ProZ-oh I mean Flak, Amara, Zane, Moze, Vaughn, Lilith, Brick, Mordecai, Tiny Tina, Ellie, Tannis, Marcus, Zero, Rhys, Lorelei, Aurelia, Hammerlock, Typhon Deleon, The Calypsos, Katagawa, Bosses also have some writing with them, Ava, Rhys, holy shit I could just keep going. This isn’t to mention that the the only returning vault hunters from BL2 are Zero and Maya. And then factor in that the writers had to write up a ton of audio logs, some Typhon logs, Eridian logs, side quest dialogue for meaningless bosses, etc. and you have just this disaster of a story that churns everyone out to be really shallow characters. There aren’t any truly good characters in this game. Some of them are passable but that’s because they either aren't main characters or they have some somewhat funny writing and redeeming qualities.

Characters like Ava and Maya (and Vaughn) are completely devoid of any purpose within Borderlands outside of being fuel to the drama fire or just outright being an obnoxious brat. It’s pretty obvious that Ava is just a spoiled teenager who has no idea what she’s getting into, but even in the context of Borderlands her character doesn’t fit at all. For example, after the player kills the first vault monster (Rampager) and returns from the vault, you’re suited to a cutscene where Ava and Maya go pants on head retarded. Ava, a defenseless, tiny, teenager with no powers whatsoever, tries to tell Maya that, “We should be kicking [the Calypsos’] asses!” after the Calypso twins show up to absorb the powers of the vault monster. Mind you, this is after her and Maya debate about how Ava is a piece of shit that’ll get herself killed if she sneaks off to more vaults. Ava then has the audacity to tell the vampire sirens that eventually she’s going to be a siren and she’s going to, “Mop the floor with assholes like you.” These actions ultimately gets her put in her place, and Maya killed. Bottom line: She’s an obnoxious character that makes playing through the story of BL3 worse the more you’re exposed to her. And speaking of Maya, her character in Borderlands is completely useless. She introduces Ava, and then gets killed so that the players can go grrr at the big baddies. Her only significance to the story is that Maya is a siren so that the Calypso twins can steal her powers. Otherwise she is an absolutely useless character that now we’ll never get to see again without Gearbox pussying out on their own writing.

I’ll be completely honest here in saying that Typhon Deleon was the best written character in the game, and you hardly get to hear anything from him outside of backstory and the final couple hours of the game. If Typhon Deleon was a main star of BL3 I think the story would’ve went in a much more favorable direction. However I can’t discount the good writing moments within the story. Even though I absolutely hate Flak’s character even down to his voice, he does have some lines that made me chuckle. Rhys’ entire gag about Rhys ball had me laughing for that entire section, especially the line, “Suck on my big ball, Katagawa.” In fact I think most of the jokes that I laughed at were sexual jokes. I frankly don’t think a lot of these sexual jokes make the cut in a lot of games nowadays outside of obvious fanfare or really out there stuff like Grand Theft Auto 5. This was really unexpected and pulled off well in BL3 as weird as a compliment this is.

I also just want to express my disappointment for how the old vault hunters were treated in this writing: Axton, Gaige, Krieg, and Salvadore aren’t present in this game outside of some echo logs. It could be plausible that Axton and Gaige will come back for a future dlc, but I’m not holding my breath. We ultimately got Maya and Zero, and oh god these characters are bad. Maya dies only a couple hours after you meet her and Zero is comparable to a boomer dad trying to be hip with the kids. Maybe that’s the joke, in which case all I can say is, “Wow, they pulled it off really well and I’m not laughing.”

And finally, the Watcher. What the hell happened to this dude and why isn’t he in BL3? He appears at the end of TPS and is like, “You’re gonna need all of the vault hunters you can get,” however, not only do we have a very restricted roster of vault hunters, the Watcher is literally never mentioned again. Unless the Watcher is the Eridian that left all of the audio logs laying around, but what a disappointment.

I could keep going a good while if I wanted to, but that’s reserved for my videos. The next part of the game that should be brought up is the world design. Most of the world design is okay, I wish Pandora wasn’t just set in desert hell ala BL1, but other than that they seem to have enough content and discoverable areas to make them interesting to explore. My ultimate problem with the world building comes in when considering the planetary system in the game. Now this point can be entirely perceived as me just being an ass but when I think “planets” I expect a lot more than the world hubs in BL3. The planet’s levels are relatively small scale for being on, you know, a planet. And this isn’t just a problem with BL3, many other games that have incorporated planets like this, such as Destiny and Warframe, ultimately fail at capturing the scale of planets. A planet is often scaled down to a simple level within a video game, and it’s somewhat shameful to see a game boasting, “tens of planets to travel to” and then those planets have the same (and even less) scale as their previous title entries that were based on a singular world. Now I perfectly understand that this is a hard request to answer to, and having to build and construct one world is difficult on its own. Despite this, if a development/marketing team wants to promote their usage of a planetary system in their video game, it’s implied that the levels are going to be gigantic. It’s not at all impressive to see planets being used in BL3 because BL2 had the same, if not more, level variety and the same, if not more, amount of levels without the pseudo use of large scale.

This isn’t to say that the levels contained in the game are bad, just that I wish they weren’t pushed into a planetary system. Generally speaking, the levels aren’t bad. I hadn’t ever reached a part of the game where I thought, “Wow this level is trash,” or found levels that were broken. In fact, the gameplay and level design seem to be the real highlights of this game. Gameplay this time around has been modernized and sped up. Players are suited with a slide, ledge grabbing, barrel throwing, and melee slams. Sliding in of itself is important because of how non-committal it is as you can cancel a slide instantly by jumping. These additions ultimately make combat faster and more varied in how you approach the game. See Borderlands 1, 2, and TPS (while it tried) suffered from each fight encounter being basically the same shootout with basic cover systems. This time around, while you can still use the basic playstyle from the older games, you’re provided the methods to really make your gameplay interesting. Personally I never used the melee slam or the barrel throwing, and the new ledge grabbing system only serves to add verticality in map exploring from my experience. However I did use a lot of the slide, and given the right gun (especially shotguns) it became very satisfying to slide into an enemy and pop them into the air with a shotgun.

On this note, I feel like I have to express how much I disliked the feel of the guns. And clearly I am on the contrary opinion here because I have heard everyone on the planet say that, “Wow the gunplay is soooo good omg!!!” but I’ll be honest in saying that I didn’t see it here. Sure, the gunplay now feels more weighty and the new animations and stuff are nice to making the player character good gameplay feel. But the guns themselves, despite apparently having tons of funding behind making the guns sound good and being completely reworked, still have the chronic floaty-ness issues of the previous games. Some guns (primarily early game Hyperion SMGs, Maliwan guns, and some shotguns) just felt so awful to play with that I put them down and never touched them again. I’m not too sure what I was expected as I slid into an opponent and shot them in the face with my shotgun, only for them to fly away a couple feet and just get right back up only having lost about half or less of their health. Jakobs guns were consistently the best weapon, feel wise, despite me always wishing they had a bit more of a kick to them.

One of my major issues with the guns is that they are way too sci-fi and not enough like guns on wastelands and battle driven hell hole. Seriously for how terrible a place Pandora is, you don’t get weapons that reflect this attribute, Instead you get these futuristic Hyperion smgs that will project a shield out in front of you or a Torgue gun that will home into your target when thrown. This is a consistent theme throughout the game where guns won’t aesthetically match the environment. I could understand if you found futuristic guns on Promethea, or even that you find technologically advanced weaponry in the form of Hyperion leftovers on Pandora(given that they’re consistent with the styling of BL2). This would 1. Appease me, because I am the only person worth pleasing, and 2. Would allow the Gearbox developers to create more variety with their weapons so that the game actually feels like it’s hitting its promise of, “Billions of guns.”

Another issue I have is the sound design for these guns, which is probably the point I’ll get absolutely grilled for but: Using actual sampled gun sounds apparently does not work for video games. Seriously every time a game tries to improve the sound of its guns, the new sounds somehow turn out to be worse. This can easily be explained off as having a bias against change, but let's talk about it. Firstly, the guns are way too quiet in Borderlands. And they seem extra quiet in BL3, like worse than BL1 quiet. Maybe it’s a difference in subtlety, because let’s face it: It’s not like a microphone was stuck right next to an actual gun. In reality the sound designers probably had the microphone a good many feet away. This gives the gunshot more of a subtle popping sound rather than the huge blast that the person holding the gun actually experiences (hence why you wear earplugs when shooting guns in real life). But I’m going to put in my take on this matter: Guns need to have an impact in their noise. Now this doesn’t mean that guns sounds even need to be based on real guns or realistic in any shape or fashion. Borderlands is a game with a unique artstyle, so why can’t Borderlands have unique sound design?

It seems that every game nowadays wants the best sounding or most realistic guns to boot, however what happened to all that stylistic choice? Some of the best examples I can think of are Counter Strike’s western inspired whiff sounds for its older titles, Enter the Gungeon’s wide arrangement of different gun sounds, the cartoony gun shot effects for Wasted, and even Borderlands unique sound designs such as The Bane and the beam guns from TPS. These unique sound designs are missing for BL3’s guns and, despite Gearbox making an algorithm to suit one gun sound to thousands of guns, they all really sound the same. Not like you can’t tell the difference between what you’re shooting but in that all snipers sound like a generic sniper, all pistols sound like pistols. Of course you have to discount certain weapons like the Occultist that don’t even shoot the bullets respective of its weapon type. But the point is: this is a missed part of the game. I don’t necessarily like or dislike the realistic approach to the sound design of weaponry, but in a game that feels anything but realistic, the sounds aren’t doing it for me here.

But let’s reel it back to the game again, and get into the basic looting mechanics for this game. Upfront: It’s dumbed down, and takes little effort to get good gear. This is the part of the game where I fall out of my element (if I haven’t already), because I don’t really appreciate Borderlands for its RPG mechanics. It feels nice, and the act of finally getting something you grind out for hours if exhilarating (4 times magic missile), but it is far from how I prefer to play my games. Given this though, even I feel that legendaries drop way too often. Over my playthrough of just the main game content (I did 6 side quests on my first playthrough, and we’ll get to this) I collected tens of legendaries. When I was finished with the game I had 10 legendaries just sitting in my inventory that I was either actively using or keeping as a memorial item. This isn’t to mention that you literally get a chest at the end of the game that contain 4 legendaries in it. The loot dropping system is no longer satisfying at this point. And this isn’t just a matter of, “Oh they buffed the loot drops a little bit,” it’s a matter of the looting system becomes a complete joke when bosses can literally drop multiple legendaries without Mayhem, and will consistently drop multiple legendaries with Mayhem.

Assemble this with a forgiving leveling system, and now it’s just a dumbed down Borderlands experience. In previous Borderlands games, you couldn’t just do the main quest from start to finish. At some point you would eventually become underleveled, and paired with Borderlands’ trademark unforgiving and shitty rpg mechanics, meant that being 3 levels beneath an enemy granted you 10% damage reduction. This is no longer a worry, you can now play the main quests from start to finish with zero leveling hiccups. Or at least from my experience. Some reviews that I indulged in have said that they did have troubles with the leveling system, to which I rolled my eyes and had to immediately question what the hell they had done wrong. On normal mode I finished the campaign having only completed 6 side quests in total. One of these, to tie back to the looting system real quick, gave me a legendary elemental pistol that melted enemies for the next couple of zones. I also asked someone about their experience playing Borderlands 3 so far, only to learn that he had been doing every single quest that he was given and was massively overleveled come time for the first vault boss (he was level 21).

The bosses of Borderlands, this time around, were the best and the worst that the series has ever gotten. They’ve been massively revamped from the older system of AOE insta-kill moves to having actual attack patterns that you can skillfully avoid. To compensate for this, the bosses have been relatively tuned up to be more aggressive, throwing out more attacks. These new bosses range from very good to very, very bad. Some of my favorites were the Graveward, the Penn and Teller styled boss (Pain and Terror), and Troy Calypso. The bosses that I ultimately ended up hating were Katagawa, the Rampager, the Warden, and the Anointed. These bosses either suffered from boring attack patterns, bullet spongy-ness, or a lack of direction on what you’re supposed to be doing to beat the boss. Katagawa and the Warden fit into this last category. For Katagawa I was confused by him taking inconsistent damage (he loses a ton of health on shield break) and the Warden I couldn’t figure out whether or not I was allowed to kill him early. This is because the Warden is styled around the Goliath from BL2, so whenever he kills one of his teammates he gains all of his health back and then levels up. It turns out that you can kill this boss early, I just had garbage guns for this fight. So to answer your question, yes I did get the Warden to max level, and what pursued was a 20-something minute boss fight where you run the boss around in circles and turn around to deal damage when you can, and then he would kill a minion and level up. The only way I managed to kill him was that when he did eventually hit max level, he would stop focusing his minions when on low health.

The bosses that were truly good were the ones that kept the player busy, while not being too spongy or time consuming. It should be noted that the spongy factor of a boss can be easily biased by what type of weapons you enter a boss fight with. Some of the bosses I thought were easier may have actually been harder for you or another player, and vice versa. However, I will speak more of a general design philosophy and less of a, “This guy had too much health,” philosophy. I loved the Graveward (while admittedly being underwhelming for a vault monster) because of his unique battle area and clear attacks that would make his weak point exposed. Having the entire floor tilted to the side while you’re spamming jump to save your life was a fun mechanic to work with, especially when you factor in dodgeable acid balls. This was a simple boss fight that had a unique spin on an FPS boss. Terror and Pain I loved for stylistic reasons and the meta-humor around putting characters themed around Penn and Teller in a game made by a company with a CEO who is super into magic. This boss is comparable to Mouthpiece, but actually just a straight upgrade. The arena you fight Terror and Pain in is far more interesting, the boss itself looks cool, and while I have honestly forgotten the attacks that the boss had, it was still a fun encounter. One of the attacks I do remember though is the floor lighting up to indicate that fire was going to shoot up to incinerate you, and felt far more fitting than getting blasted by a speaker turned up too loud.

Something that I disliked across the board with these bosses, and this is a massive opinion piece, is that the bosses were too easy. Sometimes I honestly wished I was playing Borderlands: The Bullet Hell. I really wanted a boss that wasn’t just going to engage my attention, but make me feel like, “Holy shit, holy shit, oh my god, I am going to die.” Actually, the entire game was pretty damn easy. Although this can come down to a lot of reasons such as ally NPCs now being able to revive you, and the upped pacing of the game causing players to need to rely less on cover.

And I mean, it’s not like the game stays easy forever right? After you complete the campaign on normal mode you then unlock True Vault Hunter Mode (TVHM) and the brand new, super cool, “Badass-,” oh whoops I mean, “Guardian Ranks.” The end game is perhaps the most disappointing thing is this game for hardcore veterans of the Borderlands series. Firstly, that “reworked” end game comes in the form of the new badass ranking system, only this time you can’t disable it (This pieceo of information has become outdated with time, a future update has included the option to turn off these gaurdian perks and the passive bonuses). I mean, this time you get some rewards for using the guardian ranks? Meh. Otherwise the game still revolves around making you play it multiple times in order to get to the level cap. The only real reworked thing here is the new mayhem difficulties, annnnd they’re bad. So what the mayhem system is supposed to do is make the game more difficult while incentivizing you to play it by giving you consistently better loot rewards (more blues, purples, and legendaries). This system would otherwise be okay if not for just one problem: Mayhem 2 added no difficulty to the game, while Mayhem 3 felt typical to Borderlands end game difficulty (It should be noted that the Mayhem system has been revamped to include 10 Mayhem levels). Again, this may be because of my own personal experience with the game, see apparently Flak is outright broken when it comes to crits (Future updates have severely nerfed Flak). So this could be influencing my opinion greatly on this difficulty switch. But I’ll say that I had no reason not to play Mayhem 2, because for essentially no difficulty increase, the game started commonly dropping me blues, purples, and legendaries, while rarely spitting out a green.

At this point I had essentially had enough with the game, as my terrible, clunky inventory was constantly filling with valuables, and I had to make constant stops to dump stuff out of my inventory. Given this, the fact that Mayhem gave you a ludicrous amount of XP for very little difficulty on Mayhem 2, and a quick Google search about the raid bosses in the game, I’ve ultimately put the game down. I went from level 39 to 44 in the span of an hour, was being drowned in good loot, and the biggest sting of all: There are no raid bosses in the base game of Borderlands 3.

This is a massive review for a game that probably doesn’t deserve it. Borderlands 3 has a lot of ups and downs. It’s not a game that many people will enjoy for the story. Veteran players may have a distaste for the lack of an interesting end game. All in all, if you’re playing Borderlands 3, you’re probably playing it for the gunplay and the loot, which still, somewhat, hold up. I didn’t see how the game had a billion guns, but you know what, that’s alright. And after all of the controversy, and now that Gearbox is releasing patches, performance fixes, and balancing to the game, it’s not that bad of a game. The game just doesn’t strike me as the godlike triple A, return to Borderlands that many had hoped for. Overall, I would give the game a 6/10.

EDITOR'S NOTE: There used to be a video here demonstrating a supposed XP glitch that had occurred to me while playing through True Vault Hunter Mode while using Mayhem. It turns out that, at the time, this was an intentional mechanic for Mayhem to give you massive XP gains. To correct for this error, the video has been pulled from Youtube and this paragraph has been written, as well as all mentions of the XP glitch being pulled from this article.

-Count_

#borderlands #borderlands 3 #critique #review

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stillwinterair · 6 years

Text

I’m gonna have to put the brakes on the BL3 hype train for a minute just to talk about the BL1 remaster because boy

I’ve been saying for YEARS that I’ve wanted a remaster of BL1 with heads and skins. Not only am I pumped we’re getting that, but also it sounds like they reworked a LOT of stuff. With golden keys entering the mix, necessitating a golden chest, and the necessary addition of an appearance change kiosk, I have to wonder if they’ll be updating Fyrestone and New Haven to serve as more of a suitable base of operations like Sanctuary or Concordia.

Normally I wouldn’t speculate that hard on this sorta thing but the note that they reworked the final boss fight to make it more interesting is REALLY getting my head going. Like... what does that mean?? How much are they updating it? If they’re going to change the way the final fight works, what else are they tweaking?

This sounds like a lot of really necessary updates to bring BL1 up to speed and I’m so, so fucking pumped to see it in action

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jjnonken · 5 years

Link

Updated 14 Mar 2020: The above link is broken. PC Gamer has gone on to the next thing; as of this update, clicking that will get you to an article about golden keys for the game. At least some other companies haven’t conveniently forgotten.

https://screenrant.com/gearbox-randy-pitchford-controversy-weirder/ http://socialbarrel.com/randy-pitchford-video-game-industrys-most-controversial-figure/121218/ https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2019/06/19/randy-pitchford-legal-drama-shows-gearbox-president-diverted-funds/

And then there’s the stuff about Supmatto getting shut down. https://gamerant.com/borderlands-3-boycott-explain/ https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-08-08-take-two-investigating-streamer-over-borderlands-3-leaks https://www.newsweek.com/boycottborderlands3-trends-twitter-controversy-youtuber-supmatto-1453013 https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-08-16-borderlands-3-youtubers-channel-disappears-amidst-take-two-investigation-over-leaks

Some of those are redundant, but hopefully it will preserve the information if other sites throw away history like PC Gamer did.

My original posting follows.

---------------------------------------------

Here’s why I’m not buying Borderlands 3. Not yet; possibly never.

TL;DR: Randy and his goons are hurting people and I’m not OK with that.

My stats: across all my accounts, according to Steam, I’ve got 323 hours playing the original Borderlands (including both the GOTY and the new Enhanced edition); 687 hours playing the Pre-Sequel; and a whopping 3413 hours on Borderlands 2. Total: 4413 hours playing the Borderlands franchise, not including a partial run-through of Tales of the Borderlands. (Nothing wrong with it per se; it’s just not the type of game I usually like to play, and I lost interest before I finished.)

(Why BL2 more than BL? Probably because I started with BL2, so that’s the one I love. I could go on about the details, but I think it boils down to familiarity. I think that typically happens to people who started on the first game: they prefer it because it’s where they started, and what they know. I can’t say that’s the only reason, or that it’s everybody’s reason, nor that all people who started with one cannot prefer the other. It’s just what I think happens typically. And it’s speculation, at that. So please don’t read more into it than is there.)

Needless to say I’m a little burned out Borderlands; but I’ll still be happy to play any of the (non-Tales -- which is single-player anyway) games with a friend, and I expect that I’ll probably be working on finishing my first BLE playthrough soon-ish, though I’ve been distracted by another game (7 Days to Die, in case you’ve not been following my blog. Which you probably haven’t; I don’t think anybody is).

So when they announced BL3 and said you’d be able to pre-purchase the super extra plus edition online and get some nifty exclusive skins, I already had my credit card out and drool all over the carpet before the echos died.

The first news came through: it wouldn’t be on Steam. It would be an exclusive on Epic for six months; after that, presumably it would show on Steam.

What the fuck?

I put my credit card down and mopped up the drool and considered their stated reasons and the ins and outs of this development, and decided I could live with it. They had their reasons, and the main one was money (of course; it always comes down to money). As long as it worked, and as long as it came back to Steam eventually, I would be OK. In fact I’d probably survive even if it was always on Epic. It’s not like I’m married to Steam or anything. And I’m on other platforms (at very least, Blizzard and Xbox). So after some soul searching I picked up my credit card and...

...now these aren’t necessarily in the correct order... ([edit] yeah, in fact, apparently Baker came first, then Eddings, and that’s just these two, though it’s possible I’d simply heard them out of order...)

...heard that David Eddings wasn’t doing Claptrap’s voice. According to him, he’d offered and been rebuffed. According to Randy Pitchford, they’d offered and he’d turned them down.

OK, well, he-said-she-said. Hard to know from the peanut gallery whose story was accurate, if either, or if it was something between or some third option. Still, it left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. David Eddings not doing Claptrap? That’s like, like, like Ted Cassidy not playing Lurch.

At least the Addams Family movies have an excuse, seeing as how Cassidy died in 1979. Anyway, I’m being silly. While I was hesitating some more, I heard that Troy Baker wouldn’t be playing Rhys -- and his story sounded a lot like Eddings’.

Two actors with essentially the same story? Once is happenstance; twice is enemy action? It’s certainly starting to look like a pattern. Either could be he-said-she-said, but each of the two lent credence to the other.

Still something I could live with. And then I started hearing controversies about Randy Pitchford.

Former Gearbox Lawyer Accuses CEO Randy Pitchford Of Taking Secret $12 Million Bonus

Claptrap voice actor accuses Randy Pitchford of assault

Then there’s the alleged USB stick of allegedly underage porn. Just type “Randy Pitchford controversy” into a search engine and stand well back.

Last month we started getting word about superfan Youtuber Supmatto having his channel shut down and having thugs appear on his doorstep and question him. After restoring his channel... they shut him down for good. Think what you will, but from what I can tell, he’d merely reported information given to him, and Take Two and 2K abused Youtube’s copyright system to deprive one of their biggest fans of a living. Even if they were in the right -- and that’s not clear -- there are a lot of ways they could have handled it better. Instead they went for the full nuclear option and did it the easy way (easy for them, that is -- didn’t take him to court, simply threw paperwork at Youtube) and threw physical intimidation on top of that.

So 2K and Take Two and Randy Pitchford are pissing me off, and from what I can see, pissing off a whole metric fuck-ton of other now-former fans of the franchise. I’m in good company, at least.

But even that isn’t all. There are two other personal reasons that I’ve been kind of ambivalent about BL3. One is that in a lot of ways, the content seems like... more of the same. I guess there’s always going to be a certain amount of that; it’s a continuation of a story that’s been running across ten years and four games which, yes, includes Tales. It’s set in the same universe and is based on the same characters. But each part of the franchise has been pretty decent at presenting fresh content. Yes, even the Pre-Sequel had a lot going for it, despite innumerable flaws. I have a lot of complaints about it, but I also think they came up with some cool stuff. And it advances the story.

Of course, I’ve not seen much, so maybe I’m just viewing this through a lens of disappointment. Don’t take that point too seriously.

The second and more important one is that, all I feel when I look at the new Vault Hunters is... detachment. Again, maybe I’ll feel more immersion and engagement when (and if) I start playing the game. But none of those Vault Hunters particularly appeals to me. I look at the four of them and feel no pull, no preference, no reason to pick any of them. No “Oh, that’s neat! I want to do that!” They almost seem like cardboard cutouts to me.

And now some more weirdness is happening. Borderlands 3 pre-order pulled from Epic Games store, and there are reports of the strange way 2k is handling the prerelease testing. Apparently they’ve discounted the crap out of the game... why? Are they hoping to bribe back all the former fans they’ve pissed off? Frankly, it looks like a desperation move, and attempts to manipulate me that way are much more likely to piss me off more than lure me back.

What’s this? One of the actors has apparently been abusing his girlfriend and... Pitchford just blows it off. *sigh* It just doesn’t end.

I won’t even address the microtransactions stuff and Pitchford’s gaff other than to say: as long as there’s no pay-to-win aspect (or even pay-to-shortcut), I don’t mind them. I’ve happily bought many skins in Payday 2 and Killing Floor, and weapons and skins in Team Fortress 2, and I own all the DLC for all the Borderlands games (multiple copies of most of it!). A lot of that is skin and head packs. And then there’s Overwatch. Some is direct (”Here’s some cash for that skin”) and some is indirect (”Here’s some cash for loot boxes, because dammit, I want those skins, and I have more money than brains”), but yeah... paid a lot of money over the years.

I’ve been saying that I would probably buy BL3 when it goes on sale on Steam. But now the question is... will I ever? BL3 may be the Alien³ of the Borderlands franchise for me; as far as I’m concerned, the Aliens franchise stopped after the second movie. I refuse to even watch the third or fourth. (Yes, I’ve watched Prometheus. More than once.) I may do the same here, refusing to acknowledge any legitimacy of Borderlands 3 and boycotting it completely.

We’ll see.

So, thank you, Randy Pitchford, for making the announcement of a new installment in what is arguably my favorite game ever into bitter, angry, ugly disappointment.

I’m on the horns of a dilemma, because I love the franchise, and some of my best and oldest gaming friends will be playing it while I sit on the sidelines. But what I’m seeing from the companies just makes me want to walk away.

I guess I didn’t want those exclusive skins that badly after all.

#borderlands 3 #bl3 #boycottborderlands3

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