Hot take, Borderlands was never really a good franchise. Yeah I played through the second game, but i did so once, and never wanted to return to it afterwards.
there was something special about playing through 1 for the first time knowing nothing about what to expect. Then when 2 came out I liked it alright but already felt like it was a big tonal departure. funny to see the discussion shift over time to 2 being the benchmark and 3(+) going too far.
Well to me, borderlands 2 was the most fun I’ve had with a shooter since half-life 2 or CoD4. It’s one of the funniest games I’ve ever played as well. I think the writing in general is really top notch (props to Anthony Birch), the characters are memorable, the weapons and abilities are fun. All and all, BL2 really hit the mark in a lot of ways for me.
Borderlands 3 on the other hand, just wasn’t as good. It had a ton of great quality of life improvements, so that was nice. The player abilities were also largely really good, I liked most of the classes. But it had a ton of weaknesses… The level design was pretty awful, the much bigger maps really spread out the action absolutely killed the pacing. The story was pretty dumb, and while the villains were detestable, it was only in the way that all obnoxious teenagers are detestable. And the greatest sin, the loot was a mess. They actually threw way too many guns at you, so many that you never really get a chance to enjoy any of them. And way too many of them were uniques (with mysterious effects they never bother to explain).
Honestly that was how I felt as well. I remember being hyped the play bl2 and then getting bored doing meaningless quests over and over. Like am I supposed to feel anything for these people asking me to retrieve parts over and over? At least do some sort of quest where they can shoot people. I thought the combat system was better but I wasn’t compelled to play through it
That one is a gem, Gearbox can’t compete with this. B2’s only biggest asset is the voice actor, the animation when two character interact is worst than Oblivion.
“We don’t want to put resources towards optimising our product. We don’t care if the methods we built our product with make it more difficult to use, while regressing in several key visual aspects. The burdon of our shortcomings will be placed on the end user, who will have to spend their resources to out-power them.”
Because the previous ones were great and this one has glowing critics reviews. For me though, the system requirements are too high, so I’ll buy and play it sometime after a PC upgrade.
BL3 was just as much (if not more) of a mess - people shouldn’t be surprised, especially with Randy telling people they should be selling their souls to have the privilege of playing this game.
I played through BL3 on a 2016 PC and it was OK. Not perfect, but perfectly playable. Looking at that PC Gamer article, I don’t even understand the complaint of being unable to run the game at 120 FPS. Seems like an unreasonably high bar. I’d take 60.
If you asked me to recall the story of any of the games, I’d not be able to. I don’t think people play the games for the story. It’s just a fun looter shooter, especially in co-op, which is how I played BL3 around its Epic launch. Revisiting my technical review of the game from then, yeah, you’re right, and I documented various reports of issues, though there were quick fixes deployed or workarounds available for the biggest issues. That seems commonplace in the industry though.
Same as games like the Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk, fans playing it in release year vs 2025 are gonna have completely different experiences. And BL 3 release was also messy, albeit not as bad as this. I was there.
I mostly agree. I’d say they went uphill though, but so did every other game, but even faster. Each game improved some things, but the competition improved much more. They’ve been coasting off of name recognition ever since the first game.
I’m going to have to try to remember that everyone has different taste… But good God I can’t be the only one who despised the dialog and “so randumb holds up spork!?11!” type humor in BL2?
It seems like everyone else loves it. I just found it incredibly grating.
in 3 years PC build guides are gonna be like "You need 3 drives in your gaming PC. One for the OS (this can be small, its not important), at least 2TB for games, and another 1TB for the shaders for those games. Oh and you'll need a top of the line Nvidia card because even a dumb UE5 asset dump game like Notary Simulator won't run on a budget card"
From the reviews I’ve seen, it actually seems like they listened to complaints about three and have toned down the cringey dialogue.
Of course, nobody can get the damn thing to run, so hard to independently verify, but it seems like this entry was meant to be a triumphant return to form, far closer to BL2 in tone and style than BL3.
It’ll maybe be worth checking out once the inevitable Game of the Year edition goes on heavy discount in like four years.
The story is really good so far have beaten 1/3 guys to get the things (trying to not spoil for those who know nothing). I have been having a blast. Only crashed after a hotfix then a second one came out and fixed it as far as I can tell.
The specs required make no sense though it doesn’t look that much better than 3.
How tf do companies get to say this shit and still be in business?? Are there that many people who just blindly bend over and take it?? Don’t people have standards anymore?
That’s just the inherent cost of going with general purpose engines. They’ll always perform worse than specialized tech, but modern games are so complicated that custom engines aren’t really feasible anymore.
Unreal is the king of bloat. Rather than “general purpose” they strove for “all purpose” - Unreal Engine tries to do literally everything out of the box with as many bells and whistles attached as possible. The result is that Unreal Engine games require tons of optimization to run well, and even the editor itself consumes tens of gigabytes and runs like crap.
Unity is simply a mess of poor decisions and technical debt. Their devs seem to reinvent a crucial development pipeline every few years, give up halfway, then leave both options exposed and expect developers to just automatically know the pitfalls of each. Combined with horrific mismanagement and hostile revenue-seeking, Unity has lost a ton of goodwill over the past few years. It’s a major fall from grace for what was once the undisputed king of Indie dev engines.
Godot is tiny, decently performant, and great for simple games, but it’s very bare-bones and expects developers to implement their own systems for anything beyond basic rendering, physics, and netcode. Additionally, the core developers have a reputation for being incredibly resistant to making major changes even when a battle-tested pull request for a frequently requested feature is available. Still my personal pick though.
That’s just the inherent cost of going with general purpose engines.
Some studios are able to use these major engines very well, others not so much. It seems like there is a level of expertise needed to make well-oiled games.
On the contrary, custom engines have been bombing.
Look at Starfield or Cyberpunk 2077 or basically any custom engine AAA. Look at what happened to things like ME Andromeda.
…Then look at KCD2. It looks freaking fantastic, looks like raytacing with no raytracing, runs like butter, and it’s Crytek.
Look at something like Satisfactory, rendering tons of stuff on a shoestring budged and still looking fantastic thanks to Unreal Lumen.
There’s a reason the next Cyberpunk is going to be Unreal, and its because building a custom engine just for your game is too big an undertaking. Best to put that same budget in optimizing a ‘communal’ engine, polish, bugfixing and such.
Borderlands 4 is slow because the botched optimization, not because its Unreal.
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