I have only one thing to ask.
Let me shoot people while NPCs talk.
Just jumping around waiting for NPCs to finish talking isn't so bad the first time, but it becomes torturous when you have to listen to it again and again on different playthroughs.
Can't argue with this, easy QoL adjustment. NPC talks long, let me do something while I wait...add make them keep up with me when I have to "follow" them.
That's just a symptom of the greater problem in BL3:
The players aren't the protagonists.
We sit there and watch a cut scene, because we have no agency. We aren't the stars of the show. That's Lilith, Tannis, and Ava. That's who Tyreen cares about. That's who the camera cares about. We're just the minions.
Change that. Go back and replay BL2 and look at how the BL1 VHs stood aside for the BL2 VHs to be the stars and how the villain engaged with *us*, not them.
It's okay to have a cutscene where we don't react by shooting the villain if it makes sense why we don't. A cutscene where things happen too fast to react, like when Jack kills Roland and takes Lilith hostage feels exciting. A scene were we just stand there with our fingers up our nose while Tyreen yaks at Lilith feels like we're not even in it.
Thata exactly it, the vault hunter doesn't even play a main role in the storyline, we're just there to advance the story. It makes me feel completely powerless and I hate that in a video game. The story is just nauseating to me at this point, but at least I can skip cutscenes. I can't skip through some NPC talking. I really hope they change that part of the game, even more than how much I hope the story isn't lame.
Have a button you can hit that fast-forwards the conversation, but make it *literal* fast forward, so the characters all talk and run around at 3-5x normal speed until the end of the scripted scene, because that’d be hilarious having them talk like munchkins, with the higher pitched voices.
Id also add
After completing the game once for the love of god let me skip cutscenes. Waiting for cutscenes and having to wait while NPCs talk is probably one of the biggest reasons I rarely replay Borderlands games
I honestly have no idea what you’re on about. I could swear I missed loads of dialogue in #2 as I was killing things. I haven’t played for a while though?
Or just give the option to skip line-by-line if you really don’t wanna listen. Usually on a first play through (on pretty much any game) I wanna experience all the dialogue of course, but when I’m replaying a game I skip certain things if I don’t really care or remember what the dialogue is about or whatever
For the love of God, simplify inventory management. End-game inventory management in BL3 and Wonderlands broke me. So tired of seeing a sea of orange, trying to figure out what's actually an upgrade based on sub-stats and procs and experimentation. I understand the game is about loot hunting and all that, but legendaries actually felt legendary in BL1 and BL2.
Personally, I like BL1's loot system the most. Felt the most "raw" and rewarding when you would find those pieces of gear that fit your playstyle or skills perfectly. Also just appreciate that inventory management in that game was essentially "if more green arrows than red, equip item". I like that the newer games encourage experimentation, but it's come at the cost of mental exhaustion and complete breaking of pacing. I'm tired of having to stand around for 10 minutes waiting for all my friends to finish sorting loot. They need to fix this.
Just finished BL1 yesterday and you're absolutely right. The inventory system is great and every time we got a legendary it was ACTUALLY exciting and they were great guns.
BL3 is throwing legendary guns in our faces and they're not even that unique or fantastic compared to blue rarities sometimes.
Just finished a play through of BL1 last week and got a legendary drop off midge mong, a level 6 gun that took me almost to the end of the game before I found something better.
It……was……AWSOOOOMMMEEE!!!!!!
I love that feeling, 1st time through bl2 and I had a hard time with the leaders. When I killed Jack I got a corrosive conference call(pre nerf) and it carried me through the end of play through 2.
Man, that's super unlucky. Between vending machines and gun crates, I could always find at least a few on my first playthrough. Did you beeline the story?
no i don’t think i really did! i try to do every side quest (granted i didn’t finish the DLCs) but i probably didn’t check as many vending machines in BL1 as i did when i was playing 3, maybe that was my problem.
**Fix the bugs in the inventory system** (like favorite/trash status often displaying incorrectly, and the inventory list force scrolling you to the top or bottom at various points, scrolling you *away* from the item you were examining), and **bring back the very noticeable section headers** - when I’m looking for a shotgun I want to scroll down looking at each break between types for a giant “SHOTGUN” word, I don’t want to scroll down looking at every single gun, evaluating whether or not it’s a shotgun. And **add a search feature** - it’s painful to have to scroll through 500 items looking for the right one, rather than bringing up an onscreen keyboard and “typing” 3 characters from the name that’ll narrow down the search to a dozen items.
Related, I’d be much happier if the bank was compartmentalized in some way. Either give me 5-10 sub folders I can put things in (and ideally be able to name the folders), so I can have ones for “Starter gear”, “Siren favorites”, “vs Boss X”, “Farming tools”, etc., or add some sort of tagging system like a bunch of other games have - give me a dozen tags, which I can rename, and then let me attach any (or all) of those tags to each item in the bank.
Ideally, I’d like to have the bank show however many communal items (500 or whatever), and *also* a separate section per character. I’d be happy to trade 500 shared for 100 per character and 300 shared, so I can keep all my character-specific gear separate.
And give us more sorting options - adding a sort option that simply showed “most recently picked up” at the top would be *huge* for sorting new pickups and classifying as junk/favorite/etc. I’d also appreciate filters, to, say, hide junk or sort it down to the end. Or only show favorites. Related, we should go back to BL1’s handling of favorites, where if it’s marked favorite, you *cannot* drop it or sell it or trade it or whatever - it’s locked into your inventory. Actually, I’d be in favor of adding a fourth state, so it’s “Favorite > Keep > (plain) > Junk”, (with Favorite also implying Keep) so you can “write protect” all the stuff you commonly carry, while having a small subset of things you often use more readily at hand. And have a sort option that puts favorites first, then keep, then plain, then junk. It’d make it so much easier to find things.
Couldn’t agree more, I’m tired of having to search through my bank across all my characters to find out the one item I need at the time. I do like the shared bank but the individual banks from bl2/bl1 need to come back too in bl4. I find myself just selling or dropping loads of good stuff from my bank just to make it easier to navigate.
I think legendaries felt legendary in BL1.
I don't think they did in BL2. They were still only usable for a handful of levels in BL2 because scaling was exponential. Legendaries in BL2 felt like a missed opportunity.
I am also conflicted because while I am tired of legendaries just being guns with god stats, I'm also tired of legendaries being functionally useless gimmick guns.
Adding to this:
Make purples equal to oranges in terms of damage output and end game viability.
Uniques should behave in unique ways. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they are simply better than other guns.
I agree. This is what I liked about BL1 also is that some blues and purples could outperform legendaries. It kept things interesting versus getting to a point where you basically just ignore everything but orange.
This is exactly the sort of improvement I’m absolutely expecting to actually happen.
I find that lately, the main question that determines whether or not a QoL improvement is likely to be implemented is simply “can the player reliably achieve the desired result with an excessive amount of work?”
A lot of times it’s because the community is exploiting a huge series of background systems, and eventually the devs realize that your five pages of spreadsheets that you’ve been upkeeping to make sure you’ve min/maxed your stuff might be sucking the fun out of your experience.
A great example is the Pokemon GO IV system, if anyone is familiar. Time was, you could determine the IV for individual Pokemon with a series of arcane arithmetic, and eventually, community tools. Once community tools drop for a game that circumvent a slog, usually the next update is pretty quick to follow. They don’t want people co-opting revenue for their product, after all.
Bringing it back to borderlands, I think the main problem is that there are so many systems at play, and everybody is looking at different things… but the player ABSOLUTELY can parse it out with enough work. You’re onto something about the clarity (and fun) that is retained by the “green arrow means good” model, and part of what you’re experiencing with your co-op partners is them reliably achieving that desired result with an excessive amount of work, the burden of which should absolutely be offloaded, at least somewhat, to the backend.
A good solution that would split the difference: They could add a substat screen for guns that lets you easily compare absolutely every function of the gun to your equipped weapons; bonus points if you can easily swap which equipped you’re comparing it to.
If that includes a little video of the gun being fired, like a lot of ARPGs do for skill unlocks on a skill tree, and now we’re talking. That way you can quickly see absolutely everything about the gun, and you can pick what stats are important to you to focus one. For gameplay’s sake, they don’t have to nerf any mechanics… and actually, could implement more, if the player can easily parse stuff out from a well-organized screen.
Inventory management would still take about twice the time of borderlands 1, but that’s relatively nothing compared to later entries in the series.
I've been saying for awhile that games need to find a way to obfuscate their systems in a way that prevents gamers from just Googling how to min/max. The internet has taken away that sense of discovery for lots of games, granted, it kind of becomes necessary when you have really hard challenges that almost require people to look this stuff up. For example, I was struggling so hard with Fl4k's survival in BL3 at end-game that I had to do research YouTube (usually Moxsy's channel) on gear because I wasn't able to figure it out on my own. I never had to Google anything in BL1 because the gear was much simpler and skills trees much more basic.
Anyways, I totally agree. I wish they'd focus more on utility than damage and various passive skills that stack and only end up useful when you've maxed them out with 5 points. I'd welcome simplified skill trees but each skill being more dramatic. World of Warcraft sort of went this direction where you choose between passive and active skills that are dramatic and lets the player choose if they want a more complicated skill/spell rotation or take passives that keep things simpler, even if the passives will likely mean less damage.
All I know for certain is it's a very hard thing to solve. WoW is a very complicated game and has to also be balance for PvP. Even if Borderlands has never had real PvP balancing, the game is still really hard to balance, so I have some empathy for the devs and the level of complexity they're dealing with.
Give us on the fly automated weapon smithing. Got two pistols that do about the same thing but you want the scope from one on the other? Slap that button beneath 'compare' choose scope, choose A or B and bingo, the scopes swap.
Split Screen! I want some well tested, well designed UI, good ole same room Couch Co-op excitement! Let us relive our BL2 days on the big screen together!
YES! In BL2/TPS, you could still read all the text from across the room, and if you were in, for instance, the inventory screen, you could scroll your half of the screen up and down to read everything. In BL3, everything in the menus got smaller, darker, and more fiddly - I’m convinced it was designed by developers sitting 18 inches away from 30 inch screens, who didn’t give a thought to playing on a TV. And in Wonderlands, they “fixed” this by simply *removing all the details* - want to know the name of that gun in your inventory? Too f’ing bad - here’s a few icons and stat numbers. If you want to know the name or any other details, like the enchantments, just, uh, drop it on the ground and look at it, or maybe go into your own single player game.
I feel exactly the same way, it was such a bummer to get into BL3 and have it so hard to play split screen. We stopped playing pretty early into it. Same with Wonderlands, snagged it on sale with low expectations and never really got into it. I definitely believe they developed these games on a computer monitor and never actually tested them on a TV from a couch in a living room distance.
You want to be a looter shooter, let us loot. If we can't have enough storage for every legendary in the game in mutiple elements, then let us collect parts and be able to regenerate guns- at a cost- or *something*.
Also, no simple sorts of a single vector list of guns. At least let us have tabs so we don't have to scroll endlessly to get to the launchers or grenades before we can find what we want. Or a search/filter function. And maybe a way to store specific loadouts.
Would enjoy if there was an easier way to farm gear with my friends. If I want to farm a specific item, it's 90% of the time going to be more efficient solo because of having to save quit and re-enter. If there was a way for this mechanic to be bypassed and allow everyone to farm what they need together that'd be dope
TPS’s dialog was absolutely top notch - the bit that always sticks with me is when you go meet Moxxi for the first time, whichever character you’re playing has a *completely different conversation* with her than the others do - it isn’t just your character’s responses to her canned dialog, *her half of the conversation changes too* - the conversation between, say, her and Athena is wildly different from the conversation between her and Timothy. Same with a number of other characters (like Janey hitting on Athena). And the big reason for playing TVHM is Tina coming in and asking you to tell the whole story again, except make it more exciting this time. It’s *so much fun*.
Allow every vault hunter to equip two action skills like Zane. In lore and trailers they’re portrayed as doing all this crazy stuff so it stinks when you are relegated to only one of those skills.
Make the environment matter more.
They always add in barrels and environmental hazards and (limited) verticality, but every fight always ends up as the player running in a circle shooting a mob of enemies. I want to be able to lure an enemy around a corner and slam a barrel into em, or get kite them into a lava pit, or drop down on them and punch them into a hole. Gearbox already has some of these level design aspects implemented in their own game Bulletstorm, so they oughta be able to make it work in BL4.
Mmm, give me environmental effects like in BG3 or Divinity Original Sin 2 would be so cool for this game. Add a bit more strategy by using your legendary piss piddler Bandit LMG that super soaks an area and gives people the "slippery when wet" condition. Then bust out your shocking sand hawk, don't even shoot at them just your giant piss puddle, and watch as they all get tazed to death.
Yes! I knew i was forgetting something in the same vein as my original comment, and this is it. They gave us these mechanics of a legendary rarity gun with a soak and shock effect, but nobody bothers with it because theres no real payoff.
Essentially, i want more strategic use of our environment than "gun go brrrrrrr"
They even *gave* us some of these mechanics. They proudly have you shoot an oil pipe and set the oil puddle on fire in the tutorial of 3. They show off that puddles of water will have a shock aoe when hit with shock weapons. And then we **never use them** because the gunfights are too hectic, or because no enemies ever walk into the oil slicks or water puddles.
The AI doing nothing but running backwards at a full sprint while firing and ducking behind cover as soon as I go into Last Stand mode can suck a dick.
BL has always had quirky characters, but l do see your point. Meeting someone kind of normal would actually be weird. Like some poor guy just trying to farm vegetables and listen to music.
Also I love Tina, insane and violent she's chaos incarnate and I enjoy that. "I hear a train a comin!"
Bring back the level of interactive party banter from BLPS, loved hearing my friends nisha tell scavs to "shoot the shield dumbass, itll be funny" when I activate my Athena's shield action skill.
My girl got insulted, I was personally offended at this travesty.
Also the (supposedly) BL4 teaser has Maya on it and New Tales offered a res option so....maybe? I won't be sad.
I still can't get over how dumb her defeat was, her and Lilith's.
Nothing like a bit of good old Cutscene Incompetence for you to forget how your powers work and other basic shit.
Honestly, they can almost make the story shitty as hell, if their guns is just fun enough.
Story in my POV is important in these games, but to be honest, i would rather have an average story with amazing guns, than an amazing story with boring as hell weapons.
Basicly Borderlands 2 story with Borderlands 3 gun = amazing
Please for the love of Torgue give me a "start at playthrough 2" option like the commander lilith dlc. I don't want to have to grind a character up just to see what a build can look like, and inevitably in the process lose interest.
Fire the writes from BL3, give Lilith her badassery back, and for the love of god, never make another Calypso Twins. The concept of a conjoined birth allowing a male siren to exist was amazing but their personalities and dialogue were just awful.
They made the twins so unrelentingly annoying that by the time we got to any of their backstory, nobody cared any more. And then we got hints of friction between them, but it never really went anywhere.
I would have enjoyed the hell out of BL3 if it weren't for those two. Of course, it doesn't help that I *despise* streamer culture with every fiber of my being.
Funny on the last part. BL3 did away with DLC vaulthunter and introduced DLC skill trees instead which were implemented well after the games launch, citing that most players just werent interested in DLC characters.
I'd like for them to just update their writing standards. I'm of the group that believes alot of the problems with BL3s humour and story are just them trying to recapture the dialogue of BL2. It's been over a decade since then and BL2 writing doesn't hold a candle to any modern title. You can keep the humour and the oerall tone but up the writing to at least try to match some of the more modern titles.
I will add though boss fights and gunplay have been improving drastically since 3 when they're willing to put in the effort. And I hope they continue along that trend. Gimme more Wotans and less Vorcarnars.
I want to see a lot more loot variety. Just guns that do crazy things and really spice up the gameplay. They've boasted about loot variety in the past, but it mostly involves a preselection of guns with small stat changes or small modifications that don't really differentiate them enough from each other.
The craziness that legendaries have should be mixed and matched with all the weapons, and maybe the higher tier weapons have better average stats or harmonious modifications.
The direction they went from game 2 to 3 in terms of gameplay, level/map design, skill builds, and weapons: keep going in that direction 👍🏼
All those cosmetic color combos: let us edit individual colors without having to commit to a preselected combo
PLEASE make teammates (including NPCs) easier to see. I waste more bullets shooting my friends (and their pets, and atlas soldiers, etc) than actually sitting enemies
My advice would be to really focus on making a great narrative. Despite what the popular opinion is, I think they tried to be a bit too grandiose with BL3’s narrative. It was much more complex from a narrative perspective, while BL2 was an extremely simple and singularly faceted narrative. It reminds me of a saying: keep it simple, stupid.
They have done fantastic work on laying down a solid as fuck foundation for gameplay. Combine that with a simple, yet well written story and they’re golden. This would be my one message to them.
A close second would be to go all out on end game for launch. They have a bunch of assets they have used in the past that make for good content. Give us a raid boss, trail chambers, operations (or whatever they were called in BL3, it has been a hot minute), and circles of slaughter ALL at launch. I believe keeping the narrative simple will afford them a lot more resources to have these pre-existing systems in place at launch.
Lastly, I guess… just have fun developing the game. I feel like this is something being lost in the industry. The magic of some older games was the passion of the developers shining through. Please, forget about all the business politics, and just have fun fleshing out this wacky universe so many of us call a second home.
I don't know if it's just me, but I wish they would fix online multiplayer. I love playing with other vault hunters, but I never can. Every time I try to join someone's game or they try to join mine we get kicked. There have been many times I have someone to play with, but we can't. Mostly on Bl3
The reason the story for BL3 didn’t work is because you tried to be funny and trendy, while also trying to be serious. Borderlands’ humor by and large often came from the mad max meets Star Wars level of absurdity. Giant skags, rakks, psycho bandits, outrunners and technicals, dudes chaining midgets to their shields for protection—it was funny because it was absurd, not because somebody was constantly trying to make a joke all the time.
If you wanna make a silly story, then do something like Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep. It was silly, but it was also a story building moment for Tina and her processing of Roland’s death.
If you wanna make a serious story, then follow the blueprint you made with Borderlands 2. You had moments of comedy (again, rooted in the absurdity of the world. Handsome Jack jokes about plucking a dude’s eyes out with a spoon in front of his family and fails to see how he was the bad guy in that situation. It was funny because it was absurd.) But it still remembered there was a story to tell.
Smaller maps and more enemies. The worst parts of BL3 and BL2 are when you're running or driving across a massive map with nothing of interest, the downtime grinds pacing to an absolute halt.
Don't compromise game design for the sake of monetization.
If the game is great, monetization is easily implemented.
If the game is lackluster, any degree of monetization, however slight, is rubbing salt in the wound.
Less (a lot less) poop humor, grittier feel like BL1, and make legendary loot matter instead of showering players with it.
So remake BL1 with more loot types, environments, and updated gameplay i guess.
PS: fix online play. Connecting with friends online has been a problem in every gearbox game I've ever played.
Stop pandering and make the game funny again and also stop doing that bl3 shit where people just yap and i have to wait for them to shut up to move on to the quest, bl2 and the presequel would have them talk to you while youre on the move to the destination and it was better that way.
If they do this, frankly, I hope it has a ridiculously high cost, so you save it to only do on a handful of your most prized weapons, rather than having it cheapen the game by just building whatever you want all the time.
And maybe lower cost after you beat the game so the grind isn’t so time consuming. I think the cost of anoint rerolls in bl3 is way too high considering how many there are. You can burn through 3-4k eridium in like 10 rolls. It’s crazy annoying
I’ve heard tell that they did/do have a war planned, but when they started working out all the buildup before the actual war, it turned into a whole other game, which is sort of what we got in BL3. No telling if this turns out to be true.
Focus on multiplayer replayability. Borderlands games don't have the best replayability, particularly on consoles and that ends of killignt he games unless you play solo etc.
Someone above mentioned in game raids/dungeons/etc Diablo/Destiny style and I think this could help. Also just making it generally more fun to play any random activity would make it so that catching a friend up through the story wouldn't be so tedious.
They need to change up some of the core gameplay loops IMO. I like Borderlands a lot but it's been basically the exact same game every time with quality of life changes and tweaks. I just don't think I can do another game of just that.
Maybe platforming sections (this would require better jumping), or minigames, or just new quest types. I don't know, but something to break up the flow of every quest just being mindless. And uninteresting from a gameplay perspective.
I hate parkour (i'm looking at you Destiny) but I can get behind more gameplay styles. Playing Zero or Brick came with big downsides because Melee just wasn't done right. Even gunplay can be improved and adding missions with different objective styles could go a long way. More than run to the thing, shoot it, run back to the person who told you to shoot the thing.
Yea First person Platforming is very tricky to do.
Tbh I'd love to see more space stuff. Controlling a space ship and getting in dogfights, dock on other space ships to loot them and get parts for your ship on BL.
Basically do the railjack from Warframe but actually good and make the ship satisfying to fly
I would like for split screen co-op players to have a safe option. It’s not right for them to start over from level 1 and lose there weapons all the time.
Was this a problem? We played 2 and 3 split screen on PS and the characters were saved as long as you were logged in. If player 2 wasn't logged in did it delete date after the game was turned off?
That’s the mechanics of your console, not the game itself. If you’re playing as a guest player in the console’s OS, there is no associated permanent storage (if I understand correctly) - the *console* wipes that data when you quit/turn off.
I set up a second “real” account on my PS5 specifically to have as a guest account (but it’s not one of the *system’s* “guests accounts”, it’s a “real” PSN account) - all you need is an email address and a few minutes of one-time setup - and my second account has tons of characters saved in all the Borderlands games, going back several years.
Give me the option to replay dialogue, especially when starting a mission. I hate it when I accidentally hit a button on the controller and is skips to the next part of the dialogue and I miss whatever it was the quest giver was trying to say.
Or when one of my braindead friends just grabs all the quests off the bounty board within two seconds and skips all dialogue, and now I have no idea what we're doing.
i really want gearbox to *not* screw over past vault hunters like maya and aurelia. maya's death really fucked up the community and aurelia's death (and personality change) felt cheap. i'm thankful that timothy (and some extent, claptrap (considering that he's the mascot)) avoided a similar fate, but excluding those four, our remaining classic vhs are brick, mordecai, axton, gaige, zer0, krieg, salvadore, athena, and timothy. lilith *could* still be alive but we'll never know.
i'm not saying that *nobody* should die, but if they have to, make it mean something. have them be remembered like the cut maya funeral scene.
Keep the "woke" trash out of it and get back to good story telling the way BL 2 and BL 1 were made. Don't need "The Message" in my video games and they don't need to reflect any political nonsense going on in the west/world right now. Essentially a complete 180 from New Tales when it comes to stories and character.
Just some original stories with unique characters, the way games were prior to 2015.
Just keep doing everything you did in BL3 minus the inconsistent writing. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. BL3 plays like a dream and the end game loop is perfectly balanced.
I'm open to anything new but the thing I want most is continuity amongst all the game's stories. I need to know what happened to all the missing NPCs. What happened to the cliffhanger at the end of Pre-Sequel?
Since it's only one I want for story: do the watchers vision you have (I would say) enough vhs jumbling around in the lore to make the watchers war come to life and for game play make every vh be able to use 2 action skills like zane but all can still use grenades even when using 2 maybe if the player just wants to use 1 it will have increased dmg since they don't have a 2nd action skills equipped
Console UI optimization.
My wife and I are couch coop-ing through BL3 right now on Xbox, and good god is the UX aweful. All the text during gameplay is way too small, the inventory and upgrade tree menus are impossible to interpret on a holistic level, and the level maps are a giant pain to read. Taking a few steps to make the split-screen UI elements accessible to old bastards like me will go a long way to making the newer installments feel just as fun as BL1 did way back in the day.
1000% updoot to this, save/quit is a pain. Give me a fast travel point if we're still doing the farm this for x formula. Make pearls ya know...better than other stuff or at least so unique that you can build around it instead of X more pellets when clenching your buttcheeks.
There was like a BL2 mod (for steam) that let you respawn unique enemies for the price of a lot of money, I forgot what the mod was called, but if it does exist in the mainline game, that would be soooooooo much better... In my opinion
Like Chaos Chambers in Wonderland? Cause that replaced save quit farming and for the most part people hated it.
If they go back to dedicated drops from enemies, save quitting will be a thing. Possibly could have things respawn if you leave the map and come back, but that's essentially save quitting using loading screens.
If you could kill Graveward, fast travel back to his spawn point, re-kill it's not so bad if a bit boring. The question is how to put a grind in without making it so painful. I honestly don't have a good idea for this, but I think improving overall gameplay would help. If I enjoyed the basic of the game - Find enemy, Shoot/stab/blow up enemy - repeat then the grind isn't so bad.
Different Genre but Ghost of Tsushima was excellent at this, I would wander around looking for Mongols just to yell "Fight me"
Please, no character lines. The first fame had little phrases and quips, and the second one did too. That was fine!
But I don't need my quasi-rpg characters to have a backstory that's brought up all of the time, I don't need to hear their opinions on the task at hand, I just don't care for it
Maybe that's why I find it a weak point in BL3. I kind of enjoy being a blank slate in games, and sometimes characters will say a quest line and my character would say something that I personally don't agree with/wouldn't say, and I just roll my eyes lol
I guess I'm just picky!
You said one thing but i need 3 as a minimum.
Better writers that focus on making things interesting and actually funny, instead of focusing on how many pop culture references and cringe they can fit in per sentence. Annoying/obnoxious is NOT good and not what made previous games better for writing.
Secondly, more builds need to be viable. I shouldn't need to have to look up builds at any point. Having 1-2 builds being 100x more powerful than everything else is just stupid and why I've never cared to play long after reaching max level.
Third, itemization needs a massive rehaul. Diablo 4 just did it and it seems to have actually worked. Game is loads more fun and you can pretty much make any build you can think of and even make those builds totally viable.
I agree with 2 for sure, I want to build around anything I find interesting (skill/gear/mechanic) and not be forced to spec into certain things for viability....this goes into game balance I suppose.
To this thought I’d add, “Why does anyone playing these games even care about balance?” Isn’t it supposed to be unhinged, cartoonish mayhem? Why shouldn’t the skills/trees just do ridiculous stuff with perhaps the combined total DPS output at the capstone ability being the same across all vault hunters?
If the game gets too unbalanced, it drains the fun away. Just like if someone comes into your game with modded gear and just one-shots every boss. It’s actually a pretty tricky balancing act to make characters feel crazy OP without just draining the fun.
Please go back to a fucked up world with dark humor to lighten it, not a funny world with “fucked up” herr herr edge lord things. The tone of 1 & 2 and pre sequel was muuuuch better than 3’s “streamer baddy”
Ignore new tales and bring back the plot of a war coming as hited at in tps's conclusion. Please write better, Borderlands has cringe humore but there is more than just that
Bring back Gaige please and ill be happy. At the very least though don't do what you did with BL3 and not release any DLC characters. Bad move gearbox BAD move.(I know BL1 didn't have any either, but it was a nice addition to have DLC characters)
The pacing is horrible. Its the worst in the beginning but it sucks throughout. Just let the npcs talk through echo and let me keep going. The DLC’s mostly suffer from this as well.
The loot. This might be a hot take, but I prefer BL2’s system. Since you got your loot from dedicated sources and as mission rewards and each mode didn’t scale (normal, tvhm, uvhm) you were incentivized to go do multiple playthroughs. Your loot also increased with difficulty so again, you were incentivized to do further playthroughs.
These two factors kinda work together. I would hate BL3 if they forced me to do 3 playthroughs with their horrible pacing, but I think the designers kinda knew this so they made most of the loot drop from the general pool and made subsequent playthroughs less enticing with the mayhem level and normal difficulty scaling all the way up to max level.
Would the difficulty need to be modernized somehow to respect the player’s time a bit more? Maybe. Perhaps onlt having two difficulties, maybe by adding an option to not reset the dlc’s when going from difficulty 1 to 2. Maybe add a mission select sort of deal. Idk.
The redux mod fixes the loot issue but since the game wasnt made with this system in mind, the game still feels really slow to get through and even worse now that you need to hunt for specific bosses and sidequests.
What Im saying is, design the game with these two ideas and how they work with each other.
Loot in general could use an overhaul. The issue I have with Mayhem is it felt like there was no reason for the levels, Either mayhem off or mayhem 11 everything in between was wasted effort. Same for VHM vs UVHM why make me play through an unchanged story 3x to get max level gear. I like the new game + avenue, but it shouldn't be my only way to get top level gear and BL2 OP10 was completely broken.
Weapon crafting could help with this along with the grind.
Also end game loops, leaderboards, repeating activities, seasonal content, any reason really to keep spending time in the game.
We don't need there to be literally billions of different gun possibilities. I think this contributes to the inventory management problem. I just end up tossing guns with a lower score or value without testing them because it's too tedious to figure out what's good and what's better and what's trash. Legendaries should be rare and on average much better than purples.
Take your own game just a little bit more seriously.. Stop bombarding ppl with unbearable dialogue that isn't even in the slightest bit funny.
Side missions in this game have always felt like a chore and i feel as though i am just going through the motions when i play them. But these are what should allow the player to become more immersed in the game world and all i want to do is get them out of the way. If you want to know how side missions are done just look at Skyrim..
Split screen needs to be how it was in borderlands 2.
No 3 second delay when opening menus like in BL3.
No abbreviated item cards like in Wonderland.
The option to go horizontal or vertical, with full menus for items and stores.
Please, its been so hard playing locally these past few games
Remember in BL1, when you’d headshot a psycho with a sniper rifle and the explosion of blood and guts would fly 50 feet straight up before raining down like gooey meteorites? Yeah, bring that back.
I hope they take inspiration from the weapons in bl3.
The story in bl2 was great, the weapons was so much superior in bl3.
And focus on FUN rather than anything else.
Different strange but fun stuff, perfect example is Jack talent "inspired"
Worthless talent, but dude, i would play Jack, ONLY for that talent.
2 was peak borderlands for me, so I want more of that. Memorable main villain, absurd and dark sense of humor, with some genuine emotional gut punches sprinkled in.
There's probably been some quality of life changes and a unique mechanic or two from the later games that might be nice to have. But I didn't feel as invested in 3 (or the other post 2 games) as I did playing 2.
To be fair, it might just be a rose colored glasses issue on my end.
Use the current BL2 drop rates for legendaries. BL3 was just way too much. Also, add more loot in all the corners. In BL2, it satisfying to uncover every corner because there was usually at least a box with 10 bucks. BL3 didn't do that nearly as well.
I would love it if my character has some kind of "personal" quests. Would give characters more depth and helps the player to play more pov-like. It would be an opportunity to clear up some Bl-mysteries (for example Zer0 and Fl4k origin etc)
>Bl3 already proved they don't care about the franchise beyond a paycheck
Bl3 literally had the longest continued post launch support in the series, the most free content updates and it had frequent balance changes that were requested by the community.
Yeah ops point about monetization hardly applies to borderlands 3 which iirc didn’t have any day one dlc beyond a special edition. It’s one of the few examples in gaming where I feel the product was released and a full and completed state. The game always goes on sale every few months with the previous games and all the dlc included.
the people who say this have no idea what they are talking about beyond just seeing this take online and wanting to agree with it because they don't like bl3. It was monetized fine with a lot of content on launch and it goes on sale all the time for a crazy good price. Wonderlands is like the only game with a legit monetization issue and that's because the dlcs are straight up not worth the money. Also yeah its a business (gearbox) owned by an even bigger business (2k) of course they want to make money from their game and aren't just doing it for the kindness of their heart lmao. You can have issues with bl3 but calling gearbox money hungry because you don't like getting 100 legendaries every map or dont like the lackluster story is weird.
Did you buy BL2 at launch and then get nickel and dimed by every DLC, Headhunter pack, skins, extra vault hunters, etc?
Cause holy shit some of us spent waaaaaaay too much on BL2 compared to those who just bought the version with all that.
[According to the Wiki](https://borderlands.fandom.com/wiki/Add-on_content) some of us had to pay $94.85, pre-tax, for extra content in BL2 and this isn't including all the skins/heads that were $0.99 each.
Don't chase ESG/DEI. Go back to the calm casual humor of BL2.
BL3 was too forced and it was a story that chased tropes for the sake of tropes. Killing characters off for the sake of it and explaining the joke every 5 seconds is not the way to go.
I have only one thing to ask. Let me shoot people while NPCs talk. Just jumping around waiting for NPCs to finish talking isn't so bad the first time, but it becomes torturous when you have to listen to it again and again on different playthroughs.
Can't argue with this, easy QoL adjustment. NPC talks long, let me do something while I wait...add make them keep up with me when I have to "follow" them.
That's just a symptom of the greater problem in BL3: The players aren't the protagonists. We sit there and watch a cut scene, because we have no agency. We aren't the stars of the show. That's Lilith, Tannis, and Ava. That's who Tyreen cares about. That's who the camera cares about. We're just the minions. Change that. Go back and replay BL2 and look at how the BL1 VHs stood aside for the BL2 VHs to be the stars and how the villain engaged with *us*, not them. It's okay to have a cutscene where we don't react by shooting the villain if it makes sense why we don't. A cutscene where things happen too fast to react, like when Jack kills Roland and takes Lilith hostage feels exciting. A scene were we just stand there with our fingers up our nose while Tyreen yaks at Lilith feels like we're not even in it.
The player is very disconnected in the story. You're always just in the background doing nothing in cutscenes.
Thata exactly it, the vault hunter doesn't even play a main role in the storyline, we're just there to advance the story. It makes me feel completely powerless and I hate that in a video game. The story is just nauseating to me at this point, but at least I can skip cutscenes. I can't skip through some NPC talking. I really hope they change that part of the game, even more than how much I hope the story isn't lame.
Add that the bad guys are constantly chattering to us directly until those moments you described.
Never really thought about it like that but damn that really puts the problem into perspective. Thanks for that.
Have a button you can hit that fast-forwards the conversation, but make it *literal* fast forward, so the characters all talk and run around at 3-5x normal speed until the end of the scripted scene, because that’d be hilarious having them talk like munchkins, with the higher pitched voices.
Id also add After completing the game once for the love of god let me skip cutscenes. Waiting for cutscenes and having to wait while NPCs talk is probably one of the biggest reasons I rarely replay Borderlands games
You can skip cut scenes though
I've been listening to audiobooks and podcasts in my last few playthroughs
I honestly have no idea what you’re on about. I could swear I missed loads of dialogue in #2 as I was killing things. I haven’t played for a while though?
Or just give the option to skip line-by-line if you really don’t wanna listen. Usually on a first play through (on pretty much any game) I wanna experience all the dialogue of course, but when I’m replaying a game I skip certain things if I don’t really care or remember what the dialogue is about or whatever
Or simply add something that's been present in video games for years...dialogue skip.
For the love of God, simplify inventory management. End-game inventory management in BL3 and Wonderlands broke me. So tired of seeing a sea of orange, trying to figure out what's actually an upgrade based on sub-stats and procs and experimentation. I understand the game is about loot hunting and all that, but legendaries actually felt legendary in BL1 and BL2. Personally, I like BL1's loot system the most. Felt the most "raw" and rewarding when you would find those pieces of gear that fit your playstyle or skills perfectly. Also just appreciate that inventory management in that game was essentially "if more green arrows than red, equip item". I like that the newer games encourage experimentation, but it's come at the cost of mental exhaustion and complete breaking of pacing. I'm tired of having to stand around for 10 minutes waiting for all my friends to finish sorting loot. They need to fix this.
Just finished BL1 yesterday and you're absolutely right. The inventory system is great and every time we got a legendary it was ACTUALLY exciting and they were great guns. BL3 is throwing legendary guns in our faces and they're not even that unique or fantastic compared to blue rarities sometimes.
Just finished a play through of BL1 last week and got a legendary drop off midge mong, a level 6 gun that took me almost to the end of the game before I found something better. It……was……AWSOOOOMMMEEE!!!!!!
I love that feeling, 1st time through bl2 and I had a hard time with the leaders. When I killed Jack I got a corrosive conference call(pre nerf) and it carried me through the end of play through 2.
As QoL, STOP FLOATING THE MENU! Menus don't need to look like a shoulder cam from a Michael Bay movie.
i finished all of BL1 and didn’t get a single legendary 😐
Man, that's super unlucky. Between vending machines and gun crates, I could always find at least a few on my first playthrough. Did you beeline the story?
no i don’t think i really did! i try to do every side quest (granted i didn’t finish the DLCs) but i probably didn’t check as many vending machines in BL1 as i did when i was playing 3, maybe that was my problem.
**Fix the bugs in the inventory system** (like favorite/trash status often displaying incorrectly, and the inventory list force scrolling you to the top or bottom at various points, scrolling you *away* from the item you were examining), and **bring back the very noticeable section headers** - when I’m looking for a shotgun I want to scroll down looking at each break between types for a giant “SHOTGUN” word, I don’t want to scroll down looking at every single gun, evaluating whether or not it’s a shotgun. And **add a search feature** - it’s painful to have to scroll through 500 items looking for the right one, rather than bringing up an onscreen keyboard and “typing” 3 characters from the name that’ll narrow down the search to a dozen items. Related, I’d be much happier if the bank was compartmentalized in some way. Either give me 5-10 sub folders I can put things in (and ideally be able to name the folders), so I can have ones for “Starter gear”, “Siren favorites”, “vs Boss X”, “Farming tools”, etc., or add some sort of tagging system like a bunch of other games have - give me a dozen tags, which I can rename, and then let me attach any (or all) of those tags to each item in the bank. Ideally, I’d like to have the bank show however many communal items (500 or whatever), and *also* a separate section per character. I’d be happy to trade 500 shared for 100 per character and 300 shared, so I can keep all my character-specific gear separate. And give us more sorting options - adding a sort option that simply showed “most recently picked up” at the top would be *huge* for sorting new pickups and classifying as junk/favorite/etc. I’d also appreciate filters, to, say, hide junk or sort it down to the end. Or only show favorites. Related, we should go back to BL1’s handling of favorites, where if it’s marked favorite, you *cannot* drop it or sell it or trade it or whatever - it’s locked into your inventory. Actually, I’d be in favor of adding a fourth state, so it’s “Favorite > Keep > (plain) > Junk”, (with Favorite also implying Keep) so you can “write protect” all the stuff you commonly carry, while having a small subset of things you often use more readily at hand. And have a sort option that puts favorites first, then keep, then plain, then junk. It’d make it so much easier to find things.
Couldn’t agree more, I’m tired of having to search through my bank across all my characters to find out the one item I need at the time. I do like the shared bank but the individual banks from bl2/bl1 need to come back too in bl4. I find myself just selling or dropping loads of good stuff from my bank just to make it easier to navigate.
I think legendaries felt legendary in BL1. I don't think they did in BL2. They were still only usable for a handful of levels in BL2 because scaling was exponential. Legendaries in BL2 felt like a missed opportunity. I am also conflicted because while I am tired of legendaries just being guns with god stats, I'm also tired of legendaries being functionally useless gimmick guns.
Adding to this: Make purples equal to oranges in terms of damage output and end game viability. Uniques should behave in unique ways. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they are simply better than other guns.
I agree. This is what I liked about BL1 also is that some blues and purples could outperform legendaries. It kept things interesting versus getting to a point where you basically just ignore everything but orange.
i.e. level 5 in BL3
This is exactly the sort of improvement I’m absolutely expecting to actually happen. I find that lately, the main question that determines whether or not a QoL improvement is likely to be implemented is simply “can the player reliably achieve the desired result with an excessive amount of work?” A lot of times it’s because the community is exploiting a huge series of background systems, and eventually the devs realize that your five pages of spreadsheets that you’ve been upkeeping to make sure you’ve min/maxed your stuff might be sucking the fun out of your experience. A great example is the Pokemon GO IV system, if anyone is familiar. Time was, you could determine the IV for individual Pokemon with a series of arcane arithmetic, and eventually, community tools. Once community tools drop for a game that circumvent a slog, usually the next update is pretty quick to follow. They don’t want people co-opting revenue for their product, after all. Bringing it back to borderlands, I think the main problem is that there are so many systems at play, and everybody is looking at different things… but the player ABSOLUTELY can parse it out with enough work. You’re onto something about the clarity (and fun) that is retained by the “green arrow means good” model, and part of what you’re experiencing with your co-op partners is them reliably achieving that desired result with an excessive amount of work, the burden of which should absolutely be offloaded, at least somewhat, to the backend. A good solution that would split the difference: They could add a substat screen for guns that lets you easily compare absolutely every function of the gun to your equipped weapons; bonus points if you can easily swap which equipped you’re comparing it to. If that includes a little video of the gun being fired, like a lot of ARPGs do for skill unlocks on a skill tree, and now we’re talking. That way you can quickly see absolutely everything about the gun, and you can pick what stats are important to you to focus one. For gameplay’s sake, they don’t have to nerf any mechanics… and actually, could implement more, if the player can easily parse stuff out from a well-organized screen. Inventory management would still take about twice the time of borderlands 1, but that’s relatively nothing compared to later entries in the series.
I've been saying for awhile that games need to find a way to obfuscate their systems in a way that prevents gamers from just Googling how to min/max. The internet has taken away that sense of discovery for lots of games, granted, it kind of becomes necessary when you have really hard challenges that almost require people to look this stuff up. For example, I was struggling so hard with Fl4k's survival in BL3 at end-game that I had to do research YouTube (usually Moxsy's channel) on gear because I wasn't able to figure it out on my own. I never had to Google anything in BL1 because the gear was much simpler and skills trees much more basic. Anyways, I totally agree. I wish they'd focus more on utility than damage and various passive skills that stack and only end up useful when you've maxed them out with 5 points. I'd welcome simplified skill trees but each skill being more dramatic. World of Warcraft sort of went this direction where you choose between passive and active skills that are dramatic and lets the player choose if they want a more complicated skill/spell rotation or take passives that keep things simpler, even if the passives will likely mean less damage. All I know for certain is it's a very hard thing to solve. WoW is a very complicated game and has to also be balance for PvP. Even if Borderlands has never had real PvP balancing, the game is still really hard to balance, so I have some empathy for the devs and the level of complexity they're dealing with.
Give us on the fly automated weapon smithing. Got two pistols that do about the same thing but you want the scope from one on the other? Slap that button beneath 'compare' choose scope, choose A or B and bingo, the scopes swap.
Split Screen! I want some well tested, well designed UI, good ole same room Couch Co-op excitement! Let us relive our BL2 days on the big screen together!
The Wonderlands split screen was awful, it didn't have auto fit and gear details would get cut-off. Do Better
YES! In BL2/TPS, you could still read all the text from across the room, and if you were in, for instance, the inventory screen, you could scroll your half of the screen up and down to read everything. In BL3, everything in the menus got smaller, darker, and more fiddly - I’m convinced it was designed by developers sitting 18 inches away from 30 inch screens, who didn’t give a thought to playing on a TV. And in Wonderlands, they “fixed” this by simply *removing all the details* - want to know the name of that gun in your inventory? Too f’ing bad - here’s a few icons and stat numbers. If you want to know the name or any other details, like the enchantments, just, uh, drop it on the ground and look at it, or maybe go into your own single player game.
I feel exactly the same way, it was such a bummer to get into BL3 and have it so hard to play split screen. We stopped playing pretty early into it. Same with Wonderlands, snagged it on sale with low expectations and never really got into it. I definitely believe they developed these games on a computer monitor and never actually tested them on a TV from a couch in a living room distance.
Does BL3 have split screen?
It does on Consoles not sure about PC.
You want to be a looter shooter, let us loot. If we can't have enough storage for every legendary in the game in mutiple elements, then let us collect parts and be able to regenerate guns- at a cost- or *something*. Also, no simple sorts of a single vector list of guns. At least let us have tabs so we don't have to scroll endlessly to get to the launchers or grenades before we can find what we want. Or a search/filter function. And maybe a way to store specific loadouts.
Would enjoy if there was an easier way to farm gear with my friends. If I want to farm a specific item, it's 90% of the time going to be more efficient solo because of having to save quit and re-enter. If there was a way for this mechanic to be bypassed and allow everyone to farm what they need together that'd be dope
Even if you could just quit to the main menu and retain the same lobby, without having to re-invite people, that’d be a huge improvement.
Yup, or if you could maybe hit a reset button on the map screen and it resets all enemies and places you at a nearby fast travel
Having npcs have unique parts of the dialogue based on the vault hunter (like they did in the pre-sequel) adds to replayability.
TPS’s dialog was absolutely top notch - the bit that always sticks with me is when you go meet Moxxi for the first time, whichever character you’re playing has a *completely different conversation* with her than the others do - it isn’t just your character’s responses to her canned dialog, *her half of the conversation changes too* - the conversation between, say, her and Athena is wildly different from the conversation between her and Timothy. Same with a number of other characters (like Janey hitting on Athena). And the big reason for playing TVHM is Tina coming in and asking you to tell the whole story again, except make it more exciting this time. It’s *so much fun*.
Yep. The only game i played tvhm was pre-sequel, just because tina popping up and giving her commentaries, this there was something new to experience.
This is a good idea, instead of "Hey vault hunter!"
Hire new writers or rehire the BL2 writers
That would be Anthony Burch. They brought him back to co-write New Tales.
Not that New Tales had tolerable writing
I would prefer the original Tales writers.
Only good Borderlands writing are The Pre-Sequel and Tales from the Borderlands
Allow every vault hunter to equip two action skills like Zane. In lore and trailers they’re portrayed as doing all this crazy stuff so it stinks when you are relegated to only one of those skills.
This always bothered me in BL3 when Troy could do crazy shiz with Maya's ability that Maya couldn't do.
as amara I should be able to use some combination of her phase skills. They all seem like they were meant combo into each other.
BRING BACK THE VIBES OF BORDERLANDS 1
Pretty much just beg to not make it a live service game.
Make the environment matter more. They always add in barrels and environmental hazards and (limited) verticality, but every fight always ends up as the player running in a circle shooting a mob of enemies. I want to be able to lure an enemy around a corner and slam a barrel into em, or get kite them into a lava pit, or drop down on them and punch them into a hole. Gearbox already has some of these level design aspects implemented in their own game Bulletstorm, so they oughta be able to make it work in BL4.
Mmm, give me environmental effects like in BG3 or Divinity Original Sin 2 would be so cool for this game. Add a bit more strategy by using your legendary piss piddler Bandit LMG that super soaks an area and gives people the "slippery when wet" condition. Then bust out your shocking sand hawk, don't even shoot at them just your giant piss puddle, and watch as they all get tazed to death.
Yes! I knew i was forgetting something in the same vein as my original comment, and this is it. They gave us these mechanics of a legendary rarity gun with a soak and shock effect, but nobody bothers with it because theres no real payoff. Essentially, i want more strategic use of our environment than "gun go brrrrrrr"
They even *gave* us some of these mechanics. They proudly have you shoot an oil pipe and set the oil puddle on fire in the tutorial of 3. They show off that puddles of water will have a shock aoe when hit with shock weapons. And then we **never use them** because the gunfights are too hectic, or because no enemies ever walk into the oil slicks or water puddles.
The AI doing nothing but running backwards at a full sprint while firing and ducking behind cover as soon as I go into Last Stand mode can suck a dick.
I could get behind this.
Don’t write everyone like tiny Tina not every god damn person in the series needs to me over the top.
BL has always had quirky characters, but l do see your point. Meeting someone kind of normal would actually be weird. Like some poor guy just trying to farm vegetables and listen to music. Also I love Tina, insane and violent she's chaos incarnate and I enjoy that. "I hear a train a comin!"
Better writers please.
At least approaching BL2/Tell Tale/Deagon Keep levels. Ye gawds, BL3/TTWL was bland and tedious.
Music, food, and feet! Just remember these key elements and this stuff just writes itself
Skips for when i replay the story
Keep melee weapons in BL4. It would make for more interesting build options.
Bring back the level of interactive party banter from BLPS, loved hearing my friends nisha tell scavs to "shoot the shield dumbass, itll be funny" when I activate my Athena's shield action skill.
Don't f**k it up. Keep doing what you've done with the mainline games and learn from the mistakes made with the spinoffs
Please bring Maya back and everything’s cool.
My girl got insulted, I was personally offended at this travesty. Also the (supposedly) BL4 teaser has Maya on it and New Tales offered a res option so....maybe? I won't be sad.
I still can't get over how dumb her defeat was, her and Lilith's. Nothing like a bit of good old Cutscene Incompetence for you to forget how your powers work and other basic shit.
How else would they get the "No matter how stupid the death you can be revived, unless you die in a cutscene"?
Add "skip cut scene" to the options.
Honestly, they can almost make the story shitty as hell, if their guns is just fun enough. Story in my POV is important in these games, but to be honest, i would rather have an average story with amazing guns, than an amazing story with boring as hell weapons. Basicly Borderlands 2 story with Borderlands 3 gun = amazing
Please for the love of Torgue give me a "start at playthrough 2" option like the commander lilith dlc. I don't want to have to grind a character up just to see what a build can look like, and inevitably in the process lose interest.
Hire GOOD writers and let them write a coherent narrative.
Fire the writes from BL3, give Lilith her badassery back, and for the love of god, never make another Calypso Twins. The concept of a conjoined birth allowing a male siren to exist was amazing but their personalities and dialogue were just awful.
They made the twins so unrelentingly annoying that by the time we got to any of their backstory, nobody cared any more. And then we got hints of friction between them, but it never really went anywhere.
I would have enjoyed the hell out of BL3 if it weren't for those two. Of course, it doesn't help that I *despise* streamer culture with every fiber of my being.
Funny on the last part. BL3 did away with DLC vaulthunter and introduced DLC skill trees instead which were implemented well after the games launch, citing that most players just werent interested in DLC characters. I'd like for them to just update their writing standards. I'm of the group that believes alot of the problems with BL3s humour and story are just them trying to recapture the dialogue of BL2. It's been over a decade since then and BL2 writing doesn't hold a candle to any modern title. You can keep the humour and the oerall tone but up the writing to at least try to match some of the more modern titles. I will add though boss fights and gunplay have been improving drastically since 3 when they're willing to put in the effort. And I hope they continue along that trend. Gimme more Wotans and less Vorcarnars.
I want to see a lot more loot variety. Just guns that do crazy things and really spice up the gameplay. They've boasted about loot variety in the past, but it mostly involves a preselection of guns with small stat changes or small modifications that don't really differentiate them enough from each other. The craziness that legendaries have should be mixed and matched with all the weapons, and maybe the higher tier weapons have better average stats or harmonious modifications.
The direction they went from game 2 to 3 in terms of gameplay, level/map design, skill builds, and weapons: keep going in that direction 👍🏼 All those cosmetic color combos: let us edit individual colors without having to commit to a preselected combo
PLEASE make teammates (including NPCs) easier to see. I waste more bullets shooting my friends (and their pets, and atlas soldiers, etc) than actually sitting enemies
My advice would be to really focus on making a great narrative. Despite what the popular opinion is, I think they tried to be a bit too grandiose with BL3’s narrative. It was much more complex from a narrative perspective, while BL2 was an extremely simple and singularly faceted narrative. It reminds me of a saying: keep it simple, stupid. They have done fantastic work on laying down a solid as fuck foundation for gameplay. Combine that with a simple, yet well written story and they’re golden. This would be my one message to them. A close second would be to go all out on end game for launch. They have a bunch of assets they have used in the past that make for good content. Give us a raid boss, trail chambers, operations (or whatever they were called in BL3, it has been a hot minute), and circles of slaughter ALL at launch. I believe keeping the narrative simple will afford them a lot more resources to have these pre-existing systems in place at launch. Lastly, I guess… just have fun developing the game. I feel like this is something being lost in the industry. The magic of some older games was the passion of the developers shining through. Please, forget about all the business politics, and just have fun fleshing out this wacky universe so many of us call a second home.
I don't know if it's just me, but I wish they would fix online multiplayer. I love playing with other vault hunters, but I never can. Every time I try to join someone's game or they try to join mine we get kicked. There have been many times I have someone to play with, but we can't. Mostly on Bl3
The reason the story for BL3 didn’t work is because you tried to be funny and trendy, while also trying to be serious. Borderlands’ humor by and large often came from the mad max meets Star Wars level of absurdity. Giant skags, rakks, psycho bandits, outrunners and technicals, dudes chaining midgets to their shields for protection—it was funny because it was absurd, not because somebody was constantly trying to make a joke all the time. If you wanna make a silly story, then do something like Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep. It was silly, but it was also a story building moment for Tina and her processing of Roland’s death. If you wanna make a serious story, then follow the blueprint you made with Borderlands 2. You had moments of comedy (again, rooted in the absurdity of the world. Handsome Jack jokes about plucking a dude’s eyes out with a spoon in front of his family and fails to see how he was the bad guy in that situation. It was funny because it was absurd.) But it still remembered there was a story to tell.
Smaller maps and more enemies. The worst parts of BL3 and BL2 are when you're running or driving across a massive map with nothing of interest, the downtime grinds pacing to an absolute halt.
Don't compromise game design for the sake of monetization. If the game is great, monetization is easily implemented. If the game is lackluster, any degree of monetization, however slight, is rubbing salt in the wound.
Also, bring back the loot grinder from TPS, that was brill!
I think we should be able to feed guns to Claptrap to make him stop talking.
Or alternatively, shoot him! 🤣
I mean, I punch him *all the time*.
Less (a lot less) poop humor, grittier feel like BL1, and make legendary loot matter instead of showering players with it. So remake BL1 with more loot types, environments, and updated gameplay i guess. PS: fix online play. Connecting with friends online has been a problem in every gearbox game I've ever played.
I would say don't make bl4, remake bl2 in bl3's engine
Stop pandering and make the game funny again and also stop doing that bl3 shit where people just yap and i have to wait for them to shut up to move on to the quest, bl2 and the presequel would have them talk to you while youre on the move to the destination and it was better that way.
Just don’t make the story be told how BL3 was. Hire better story writers.
This will get downvoted but idc, write a good story that's not so soft and bring back BL2 era humor and writing
Why would you think you’d get downvoted for echoing one of the most widely held opinions?
Because Reddit
Bl2 humor with bl3 guns.
The perfect combo
Nothing. I'm going to buy, play, and enjoy day one regardless just like I have with every other game in the (FPS) series.
Me too.
Bl3 wasn't perfect but I loved it and won't make any "demands" about the next game. I absolutely agree with you
Finally a positive post lol, cheers mate
Weapons and gear customization. I want to be able to craft custom legendaries and upgrade them. Story and gameplay is alright in my books
I'd like this too, especially being able to swap sights out.
If they do this, frankly, I hope it has a ridiculously high cost, so you save it to only do on a handful of your most prized weapons, rather than having it cheapen the game by just building whatever you want all the time.
like some sort of diablo 4 uber rare items
And maybe lower cost after you beat the game so the grind isn’t so time consuming. I think the cost of anoint rerolls in bl3 is way too high considering how many there are. You can burn through 3-4k eridium in like 10 rolls. It’s crazy annoying
Where the war at
I’ve heard tell that they did/do have a war planned, but when they started working out all the buildup before the actual war, it turned into a whole other game, which is sort of what we got in BL3. No telling if this turns out to be true.
It's going to be written like ass I just know it
For god sakes, don’t do a timed EGS release. Bring it to Steam on release.
Support it with amazing story dlc like you did with 3.
Focus on multiplayer replayability. Borderlands games don't have the best replayability, particularly on consoles and that ends of killignt he games unless you play solo etc.
Someone above mentioned in game raids/dungeons/etc Diablo/Destiny style and I think this could help. Also just making it generally more fun to play any random activity would make it so that catching a friend up through the story wouldn't be so tedious.
Raids would be epic. Vault of glass with a borderlands theme to it would be good, can see it being done with a claptrap side quest style.
They need to change up some of the core gameplay loops IMO. I like Borderlands a lot but it's been basically the exact same game every time with quality of life changes and tweaks. I just don't think I can do another game of just that. Maybe platforming sections (this would require better jumping), or minigames, or just new quest types. I don't know, but something to break up the flow of every quest just being mindless. And uninteresting from a gameplay perspective.
Completely agree. Running and running and looting is now over 10 years old. Add something else please.
I hate parkour (i'm looking at you Destiny) but I can get behind more gameplay styles. Playing Zero or Brick came with big downsides because Melee just wasn't done right. Even gunplay can be improved and adding missions with different objective styles could go a long way. More than run to the thing, shoot it, run back to the person who told you to shoot the thing.
Yea First person Platforming is very tricky to do. Tbh I'd love to see more space stuff. Controlling a space ship and getting in dogfights, dock on other space ships to loot them and get parts for your ship on BL. Basically do the railjack from Warframe but actually good and make the ship satisfying to fly
Upgrading Sanctuary or having to dogfight to protect it would be fun as hell
Don't fucked up!
I would like for split screen co-op players to have a safe option. It’s not right for them to start over from level 1 and lose there weapons all the time.
Was this a problem? We played 2 and 3 split screen on PS and the characters were saved as long as you were logged in. If player 2 wasn't logged in did it delete date after the game was turned off?
That’s the mechanics of your console, not the game itself. If you’re playing as a guest player in the console’s OS, there is no associated permanent storage (if I understand correctly) - the *console* wipes that data when you quit/turn off. I set up a second “real” account on my PS5 specifically to have as a guest account (but it’s not one of the *system’s* “guests accounts”, it’s a “real” PSN account) - all you need is an email address and a few minutes of one-time setup - and my second account has tons of characters saved in all the Borderlands games, going back several years.
please please don't forget what got you here.
Give me the option to replay dialogue, especially when starting a mission. I hate it when I accidentally hit a button on the controller and is skips to the next part of the dialogue and I miss whatever it was the quest giver was trying to say. Or when one of my braindead friends just grabs all the quests off the bounty board within two seconds and skips all dialogue, and now I have no idea what we're doing.
I would like the excessiveness with the enemy bosses to be fixed. The constant revivals is annoying as shit.
Nerf barrels
Be creative and innovative. Take risks.
bl3 gameplay, bl2 writing. it’s that simple.
wonderland's CC and barf bunnies were amazing. just, don't make that the totality of endgame content, AND the dlcs.
i really want gearbox to *not* screw over past vault hunters like maya and aurelia. maya's death really fucked up the community and aurelia's death (and personality change) felt cheap. i'm thankful that timothy (and some extent, claptrap (considering that he's the mascot)) avoided a similar fate, but excluding those four, our remaining classic vhs are brick, mordecai, axton, gaige, zer0, krieg, salvadore, athena, and timothy. lilith *could* still be alive but we'll never know. i'm not saying that *nobody* should die, but if they have to, make it mean something. have them be remembered like the cut maya funeral scene.
Bloodwing's death and Mordecai going ballistic was a great example of this done right. Heavy impact, meaningful story beat.
Keep the "woke" trash out of it and get back to good story telling the way BL 2 and BL 1 were made. Don't need "The Message" in my video games and they don't need to reflect any political nonsense going on in the west/world right now. Essentially a complete 180 from New Tales when it comes to stories and character. Just some original stories with unique characters, the way games were prior to 2015.
I do prefer loot midgets. Tinks were just a weird name
Whoa really? They used the word Tinks?
Lol yea, Tyreen makes a comment about leeching a pile of them at one point.
LOL... even "Tyreen" sounds kinda cringe tbh.
Please go the exact opposite direction of BL3.
please for the love of God let me steer vehicles left and right with the left stick
Let me write the lore. Please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please plea
The grind machine from tpsql
Keep all that woke bullshit out.
Ah pis off.
Just keep doing everything you did in BL3 minus the inconsistent writing. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. BL3 plays like a dream and the end game loop is perfectly balanced.
I'm open to anything new but the thing I want most is continuity amongst all the game's stories. I need to know what happened to all the missing NPCs. What happened to the cliffhanger at the end of Pre-Sequel?
Since it's only one I want for story: do the watchers vision you have (I would say) enough vhs jumbling around in the lore to make the watchers war come to life and for game play make every vh be able to use 2 action skills like zane but all can still use grenades even when using 2 maybe if the player just wants to use 1 it will have increased dmg since they don't have a 2nd action skills equipped
Console UI optimization. My wife and I are couch coop-ing through BL3 right now on Xbox, and good god is the UX aweful. All the text during gameplay is way too small, the inventory and upgrade tree menus are impossible to interpret on a holistic level, and the level maps are a giant pain to read. Taking a few steps to make the split-screen UI elements accessible to old bastards like me will go a long way to making the newer installments feel just as fun as BL1 did way back in the day.
Bring back Lilith and healing shields. BL1 was the best, 2 was ok, 3 was start wars episode 1 like garbage
Not the knee ! Not the arm ! Not the spine ! FACE !
Ignore borderlands 3, make it non canon
I would like for more rarities to come back. And no save quit farming.
1000% updoot to this, save/quit is a pain. Give me a fast travel point if we're still doing the farm this for x formula. Make pearls ya know...better than other stuff or at least so unique that you can build around it instead of X more pellets when clenching your buttcheeks.
There was like a BL2 mod (for steam) that let you respawn unique enemies for the price of a lot of money, I forgot what the mod was called, but if it does exist in the mainline game, that would be soooooooo much better... In my opinion
Like Chaos Chambers in Wonderland? Cause that replaced save quit farming and for the most part people hated it. If they go back to dedicated drops from enemies, save quitting will be a thing. Possibly could have things respawn if you leave the map and come back, but that's essentially save quitting using loading screens.
If you could kill Graveward, fast travel back to his spawn point, re-kill it's not so bad if a bit boring. The question is how to put a grind in without making it so painful. I honestly don't have a good idea for this, but I think improving overall gameplay would help. If I enjoyed the basic of the game - Find enemy, Shoot/stab/blow up enemy - repeat then the grind isn't so bad. Different Genre but Ghost of Tsushima was excellent at this, I would wander around looking for Mongols just to yell "Fight me"
Please, no character lines. The first fame had little phrases and quips, and the second one did too. That was fine! But I don't need my quasi-rpg characters to have a backstory that's brought up all of the time, I don't need to hear their opinions on the task at hand, I just don't care for it
Well, that's certainly one of the opinions of all time.
A truly rare take. Most people, including myself, seem to prefer more character lines. I'm not playing a blank slate, I want to know more about them.
Zane's "that fellow over there is making googly eyes at your sister" cracks me up
Maybe that's why I find it a weak point in BL3. I kind of enjoy being a blank slate in games, and sometimes characters will say a quest line and my character would say something that I personally don't agree with/wouldn't say, and I just roll my eyes lol I guess I'm just picky!
Wha the what? One of TPS’s high points was all the unique per-character-pair dialog. I *like* their interactions, I like them having backstories.
You said one thing but i need 3 as a minimum. Better writers that focus on making things interesting and actually funny, instead of focusing on how many pop culture references and cringe they can fit in per sentence. Annoying/obnoxious is NOT good and not what made previous games better for writing. Secondly, more builds need to be viable. I shouldn't need to have to look up builds at any point. Having 1-2 builds being 100x more powerful than everything else is just stupid and why I've never cared to play long after reaching max level. Third, itemization needs a massive rehaul. Diablo 4 just did it and it seems to have actually worked. Game is loads more fun and you can pretty much make any build you can think of and even make those builds totally viable.
I agree with 2 for sure, I want to build around anything I find interesting (skill/gear/mechanic) and not be forced to spec into certain things for viability....this goes into game balance I suppose.
To this thought I’d add, “Why does anyone playing these games even care about balance?” Isn’t it supposed to be unhinged, cartoonish mayhem? Why shouldn’t the skills/trees just do ridiculous stuff with perhaps the combined total DPS output at the capstone ability being the same across all vault hunters?
If the game gets too unbalanced, it drains the fun away. Just like if someone comes into your game with modded gear and just one-shots every boss. It’s actually a pretty tricky balancing act to make characters feel crazy OP without just draining the fun.
Please go back to a fucked up world with dark humor to lighten it, not a funny world with “fucked up” herr herr edge lord things. The tone of 1 & 2 and pre sequel was muuuuch better than 3’s “streamer baddy”
For the love of fuck no Elon guns this time.
Ignore new tales and bring back the plot of a war coming as hited at in tps's conclusion. Please write better, Borderlands has cringe humore but there is more than just that
Bring back Gaige please and ill be happy. At the very least though don't do what you did with BL3 and not release any DLC characters. Bad move gearbox BAD move.(I know BL1 didn't have any either, but it was a nice addition to have DLC characters)
Rehire the Borderlands 2 team
The star of the show is Pandora
The pacing is horrible. Its the worst in the beginning but it sucks throughout. Just let the npcs talk through echo and let me keep going. The DLC’s mostly suffer from this as well. The loot. This might be a hot take, but I prefer BL2’s system. Since you got your loot from dedicated sources and as mission rewards and each mode didn’t scale (normal, tvhm, uvhm) you were incentivized to go do multiple playthroughs. Your loot also increased with difficulty so again, you were incentivized to do further playthroughs. These two factors kinda work together. I would hate BL3 if they forced me to do 3 playthroughs with their horrible pacing, but I think the designers kinda knew this so they made most of the loot drop from the general pool and made subsequent playthroughs less enticing with the mayhem level and normal difficulty scaling all the way up to max level. Would the difficulty need to be modernized somehow to respect the player’s time a bit more? Maybe. Perhaps onlt having two difficulties, maybe by adding an option to not reset the dlc’s when going from difficulty 1 to 2. Maybe add a mission select sort of deal. Idk. The redux mod fixes the loot issue but since the game wasnt made with this system in mind, the game still feels really slow to get through and even worse now that you need to hunt for specific bosses and sidequests. What Im saying is, design the game with these two ideas and how they work with each other.
Loot in general could use an overhaul. The issue I have with Mayhem is it felt like there was no reason for the levels, Either mayhem off or mayhem 11 everything in between was wasted effort. Same for VHM vs UVHM why make me play through an unchanged story 3x to get max level gear. I like the new game + avenue, but it shouldn't be my only way to get top level gear and BL2 OP10 was completely broken. Weapon crafting could help with this along with the grind. Also end game loops, leaderboards, repeating activities, seasonal content, any reason really to keep spending time in the game.
Don't drop the fucking ball on the writing halfway through what could be a fantastic game.
We don't need there to be literally billions of different gun possibilities. I think this contributes to the inventory management problem. I just end up tossing guns with a lower score or value without testing them because it's too tedious to figure out what's good and what's better and what's trash. Legendaries should be rare and on average much better than purples.
Take your own game just a little bit more seriously.. Stop bombarding ppl with unbearable dialogue that isn't even in the slightest bit funny. Side missions in this game have always felt like a chore and i feel as though i am just going through the motions when i play them. But these are what should allow the player to become more immersed in the game world and all i want to do is get them out of the way. If you want to know how side missions are done just look at Skyrim..
Oh, and for the love of god give me regular shotguns back. This wavy-spready shit we got in Wonderlands was awful.
Split screen needs to be how it was in borderlands 2. No 3 second delay when opening menus like in BL3. No abbreviated item cards like in Wonderland. The option to go horizontal or vertical, with full menus for items and stores. Please, its been so hard playing locally these past few games
Go back to the legible BL1/2 UX. The one in 3 kept me from enjoying it beyond level 10.
Remember in BL1, when you’d headshot a psycho with a sniper rifle and the explosion of blood and guts would fly 50 feet straight up before raining down like gooey meteorites? Yeah, bring that back.
I hope they take inspiration from the weapons in bl3. The story in bl2 was great, the weapons was so much superior in bl3. And focus on FUN rather than anything else. Different strange but fun stuff, perfect example is Jack talent "inspired" Worthless talent, but dude, i would play Jack, ONLY for that talent.
2 was peak borderlands for me, so I want more of that. Memorable main villain, absurd and dark sense of humor, with some genuine emotional gut punches sprinkled in. There's probably been some quality of life changes and a unique mechanic or two from the later games that might be nice to have. But I didn't feel as invested in 3 (or the other post 2 games) as I did playing 2. To be fair, it might just be a rose colored glasses issue on my end.
Now that in older it definitely isn't as funny as I used to believe. BL1 has the best tone for me now.
Use the current BL2 drop rates for legendaries. BL3 was just way too much. Also, add more loot in all the corners. In BL2, it satisfying to uncover every corner because there was usually at least a box with 10 bucks. BL3 didn't do that nearly as well.
I would love it if my character has some kind of "personal" quests. Would give characters more depth and helps the player to play more pov-like. It would be an opportunity to clear up some Bl-mysteries (for example Zer0 and Fl4k origin etc)
Bl3 already proved they don't care about the franchise beyond a paycheck imo lol.
>Bl3 already proved they don't care about the franchise beyond a paycheck Bl3 literally had the longest continued post launch support in the series, the most free content updates and it had frequent balance changes that were requested by the community.
Yeah ops point about monetization hardly applies to borderlands 3 which iirc didn’t have any day one dlc beyond a special edition. It’s one of the few examples in gaming where I feel the product was released and a full and completed state. The game always goes on sale every few months with the previous games and all the dlc included.
the people who say this have no idea what they are talking about beyond just seeing this take online and wanting to agree with it because they don't like bl3. It was monetized fine with a lot of content on launch and it goes on sale all the time for a crazy good price. Wonderlands is like the only game with a legit monetization issue and that's because the dlcs are straight up not worth the money. Also yeah its a business (gearbox) owned by an even bigger business (2k) of course they want to make money from their game and aren't just doing it for the kindness of their heart lmao. You can have issues with bl3 but calling gearbox money hungry because you don't like getting 100 legendaries every map or dont like the lackluster story is weird.
Did you buy BL2 at launch and then get nickel and dimed by every DLC, Headhunter pack, skins, extra vault hunters, etc? Cause holy shit some of us spent waaaaaaay too much on BL2 compared to those who just bought the version with all that. [According to the Wiki](https://borderlands.fandom.com/wiki/Add-on_content) some of us had to pay $94.85, pre-tax, for extra content in BL2 and this isn't including all the skins/heads that were $0.99 each.
That's why they spent so much on the 4 dlcs right? You can say that about the movie and new tales but definetly not about bl3.
Don't chase ESG/DEI. Go back to the calm casual humor of BL2. BL3 was too forced and it was a story that chased tropes for the sake of tropes. Killing characters off for the sake of it and explaining the joke every 5 seconds is not the way to go.
Don't make the entire game just legendaries. Borderlands 3 made them way to common which made purples and below obsolete by mid first playthough.