While working on Borderlands 3, the team was severely underpaid. People started quitting, so Randy promised them an “unprecedented company profit-sharing bonus model.” That never got paid—he blamed “higher-than-anticipated development costs and sales not meeting projections.” Borderlands 3 went GOTY, a few dozens millions copies sold. Randy secured a $12M executive bonus for himself. When staff expressed dissatisfaction, Pitchford told them they were free to quit. This was in the middle of the pandemic, and the job market was absolute crap.
Too much games to play on the market to justify the urgency to buy it at release for 80 bucks. they now compete with free to play, gamepass, Indy games, piracy, and tons of past games with lower cost.
The fomo of newly released games is low when most games are released in shitty state and need 1/2 months of patches/fixes and that’s not even taking in consideration that the best experience is when all the dlcs are released and make the game finally complete.
The AAA industry is fucked. In a world where quality games are released each weeks they are often but even the best way to have fun with our limited time, like tepid Ubisoft games…
Yeah I’m really starting to feel like we’re gonna see a lot of these companies shift from doing big AAA games to instead publishing small indie games. Almost all of these big companies have indie publishing arms now and as they start to see good profits from those without having to take on the cost of paying devs themselves I wouldn’t be surprised if they start cutting back on their own dev teams and shifting to that.
Honestly, in my opinion, there’s too many games to justify buying it at all. I enjoyed one and two when I was a kid, and there wasn’t competition for the genre. Three I think was free on Epic or something, so I played and it was fine, but not great. I don’t expect much from four, and there’s companies I’d actually like to support instead.
I can’t tell you exactly why, but as much as I played and replayed borderlands 1&2, the third one didn’t interest me at all, I can see that the recipe used the same ingredients but it just didn’t taste the same to contribute the metaphor. It just bored me and my wife during our coop campaign, and we didn’t have any desire to continue our playthrough. I hope they get it back with four but I don’t trust them enough anymore to buy it blindly anyway.
I don’t know if there’s even anything to get back. Is it that 3 was bad or is it just that Borderlands doesn’t interest us anymore? I honestly don’t know, but I think it’s at least partially the latter for me. I’ve played much better games since, and I don’t really find that formula appealing anymore. Almost everything it created has been used to make better products since, so is there even a reason to care about them anymore?
I’m the opposite, I don’t give a monkeys about the story but I like the loot goblining.
That said a borderlands came on the gamepass the other week and I was so excited to lure my boy into co-op with me for the first time in ages. It wouldn’t stop crashing. I googled it to see if they were aware and all I could find was the company sucking it’s own dick about having already released the final patch to stop it crashing so many times. I wouldn’t say I’m thrilled about the idea of dropping $80 on a day one release.
I’m a Loot Goblin that spacebars through the story too, but Borderlands hasn’t been able to scratch that itch in a long time.
The last one I played was Tina’s Wonderland and everything about it was a slog. I didn’t care about any of the loot or any of the fights and I definitely didn’t care about the story.
I’ll add Factorio to the list of games that deserve the $80 tag. $40 for base, $40 for Space Age expansion. Or don’t get Space Age and go with the mod that spawned Space Age (although not exactly the same).
I get it’s a bit of a niche genre, though. The factory thing the way Factorio does it isn’t for everybody.
It didn’t used to be like that and they actually mentioned in the deep dive that they’re getting back to the way it was before. Like the point of the game is loot goblining, but they’ve promised not to inundate the player with legendary weapons every twelve seconds so that you actually have time to savor the weapons you get between good drops.
It’s not like I need to do the math to figure out which gun is better and why. Find something with green arrows? Hold E to equip it immediately. If I use it for a bit and dislike it I’ll just swap back to what I was using before and mark it as junk so I sell it next time I buy ammo or fill my inventory.
It’s a combination of a huge variety of attributes and an endless supply. I just get anxiety about walking past a super powerful weapon or dropping it in exchange for something else without realizing it.
If it ain’t a purple I can basically guarantee it’s shit. Just keep the rarity order in mind, and you can generally assume anything that’s less rare than what you have is also worse. One of the load screens in BL1 or BL2 said When Grandma Burps Patrick Obeys- White, Green, Blue, Purple, Orange. Got absolutely burnt into my brain.
But hey, if it’s stressful fair enough. I think they’re fun games, but nothing is for everyone.
I’m absolutely ready to pay 80$ for a game. But then I don’t want to see scummy shit like lootboxes or advanced access in it. If I pay 80$ I expect to see a game release that isn’t half-baked and has to get fixed with hotfixes and patches over the next two months but that just works out of the box and that doesn’t try to get me to spend even more money on it. That also includes no content that they’ve already produced being held back for DLCs.
This has always been my counterpoint for the Nintendo haters when they complain about price. (Although they are a shit company in several other ways) Because when my daughter wants a new switch game if its a top tier Nintendo title its going to be a finished game with zero bugs and zero concern about problematic content for me.
I’ve found a way to play every Borderlands game, 2 is my fave, and not pay more than 12 usd, for the 3rd one which I didn’t even get halfway through 'cause it’s boring AF - I love Steam sales and don’t have FOMO
I got bored with Borderlands 3 in one hour. Copy pasta gameplay and I’m tired of the art style and humor. I only paid a fiver but I wish I had bought a burger instead.
I thought Borderlands was lots of fun, but not four games (for now) and a movie (for now) worth of fun. Even two games was pushing it a bit. You can only stretch things out so much.
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Aktywne