Do you feel that BL3 respects your time?

Borderlands 3 Borderlands 3 General Discussion
#1

I stumbled across this Extra Credits video today

It got me thinking about Borderlands as a franchise. In BL1, there were only a few cutscenes and they were maybe 20 seconds max. The UI was incredibly clean and simple. The maps were larger and filled with encounters every where, the Rust Commons especially were bustling with activity.

BL2 took some slight steps back depending on how you look at it (dedicated drops vs world drops) but for the most par continued in or improved

TPS took more steps back with unskippable dialogue that you needed to wait through to continue, but at least it was enjoyable dialogue. Unfortunately the maps got to be very barren with very few options for moving through them quickly. Fetch quests were incredibly irritating in TPS due to how large, barren, and circular the maps were. Still, additions like the grinder, as well as more generous dedicated and world drop rates than BL2, made it much simpler to get gear through a variety of activities.

I feel like BL3 made some great improvements in this regard, but is a massive failure in others. Being able to Fast Travel from anywhere is great. The lost loot machine really lets you fly through maps since you don’t need to pick up everything. Quest complete automatically instead of needing to be turned in (except when you need to Talk to Lilith). However the incredibly clunky UI, long cutscenes and dialogue holding up mission progress, and pointless immunity phases drag out game play for seemingly no reason (and that’s not approaching the can of worms that is drop rates or balance patches). It just seems to excel in padding out the game and adding in pointless tedium.

What do y’all think about this? Do you feel Borderlands 3 is a game that respects your time?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Not sure

0 voters

Which game do you feel respected your time the most?

  • Borderlands 1
  • Borderlands 2
  • Borderlands TPS
  • Borderlands 3

0 voters

4 Likes
#2

Nope, i absolutely do not. In almost most every aspect i can think off, ranging from drop rates and the probability to a specific drop to the takedowns were one mistake out of my control can cost me 10-30mins.

I still very much enjoy my time i the game though.

#3

I mean I feel it doesn’t and there is not much to add this because you kinda got it all but, I guess 1 you missed is having to go thru the game again to get another character to the level cap I think is a problem that persisted thru every borderlands game I believe is just away for GBX to waste your time also give the characters freaking loadout options jesus christ why do I need to have to make like 5 Fl4ks just to have builds ready to go dam that pisses me off.

3 Likes
#4

Added poll, cuz that would make sense.

#5

No I enjoyed farming in BL2 because of the anointing system I am not enjoying farming. If this events drop rate stayed it would be tolerable.

At the same time I miss the randomness on stats that BL2 offered.

6 Likes
#6

Well the main game could be way better but where I absolutely feel that Borderlands 3 (or rather Gearbox) isn’t respecting my time is their handling of the timed events and pseudo game as a service approach.

After having finished the story I wasn’t really keen on continueing and already “shelved” the game till Bloody Harvest which forced me to waste 1h( often all I have to spare a day) each single day for 30 days straight only to farm Ghosts and run Heck, just to barely get the last reward before the event ended.

Now since March? I’m pretty much in an endless loop where I don’t really want to play Borderlands all the time but am kinda forced because event x starts, redo redo redo to get rewards, oh now the next DLC dropped, barely finished DLC oh now a bunch of Loot events start back to back that I have to take advantage of so I can get my gear up to date without spending much more pointless hours farming than normally would be the case… repeat.

I’m actually really grateful for every single week I get where I don’t have to chase after events and can spent more time on other games or do things IN BL3 that I would like to do, instead of rerunning the same map 10-30 times during a seasonal event.

Sometimes I get the feeling the Borderlands devs want us to play 24/7 and god forbid you want to play another game your interested in or work on your backlog.

This might read like a rant which wasn’t my goal but yes I don’t think they respect my time as a human being with other things going on or even the time spent playing their game.

9 Likes
#7

I actually liked. I used to have 20 or more characters in BL games, now I only have my one FL4K, it’s 2 copies, and whatever sav files I download for the gear. Then again, playing through the campaign was more fun in previous games.

I think BL3 fell into the pattern of “the game starts at endgame” that a lot of RPGs do now. The leveling experience is disregarded for endgame balancing, which is fine if you plan on sticking with 1 char forever but terrible if you want to actually bring up multiple.

3 Likes
#8

I get that one. I get maing the event’s feel special, but I hate how there are items that are gated behind events that only show up for a few weeks out of the year, especially when there aren’t any replacements for those items in the base game. I play the game when I have time, and being locked out of gear for a year because I didn’t have time that week is just incredibly irritating (I’m mainly thinking of terror here).

4 Likes
#9

I think the unskippable dialogue comes from people accidentally skipping dialogue that they wanted to hear but at the same time it’s not solved at all considering how you can have someone talk to you and you step into a trigger and it gets overwritten anyway. The best thing to do still if you want to hear stuff is to stand still. I think TPS dialogue was obnoxious in how it makes you wait at every turn and it really hurts the replayability of the game. BL3 suffers from the same problem. That said I guess the expectation is that masses don’t level up tons of characters. The players that do are most likely a small minority among the millions of people who buy and play the game.
Cutscenes are skippable at least.

I think the point of having to return to Sanctuary and talk to Lilith, sometimes multiple times within the same visit is interesting as it reminds me of the leveling experience of an MMO that I play, FFXIV. There’s a very widespread meme about “Pray return to Waking Sands” because that’s what you’re doing at every single point after a main quest and nobody liked that. Funnily enough the story after the base game progressed into a direction where you don’t have to keep doing that.

For what my opinion is worth it looks like GBX is trying their damnest to make this into a game that is being kept for months if not years to come, like BL2 was. Yet they have made almost every single mistake that BL2 managed to avoid apparently by sheer luck including not only the leveling experience but the after 50 experience and end game as well.

I guess I can’t give a straight answer but to try I’d just say no. There are things that BL3 improved from BL2 but a lot of things are just screwed right now.
Replaying the story, the pacing and the unskippable dialogue.
The farming experience.
When I do play endgame the enemies are piss easy but the modifiers are obnoxius IMO, so it’s more of a lack of respect towards player skill than time, I guess but I’ll just shove it in here too. This also comes into conclusion that since the leveling is not fun and the end game is non-existent and easy it’s really hard to even think of anything to do in the game to be quite honest so I guess I’m soon at a point where I’m not wondering if the game respects my time as I’ll play other games.

I’ll get my last 2 VH’s to max level but something needs to change in the end game or it’ll be really hard for me to find reasons to come back to it like I did time and again for BL2. As I didn’t watch the vid I’m not sure if this answers the question or if I’m going off the rails but that’s my 2 cents.

Oh yeah and this too. I wouldn’t mind if events rewarded customizations but this way of forcing people to come back periodically or feel like missing out is a concept I don’t like in any game, much less games like BL3.

6 Likes
#10

This. I have no problem running Heck a few times for fun because it is an awesome area but being forced to do it in a specific time window 30 times (not even knowing if I have another shot at it next year), while also keeping track of a dozen other challenges is just a big slap to the face. Not to mention farming Ghosts for 10-30min each time just to get there…

The Cartel event was a big step in the right direction BUT because of other challenges like killing 6 bosses per run or killing x gang members made it so you couldn’t just rush the thing 10 times, NO you had to do the whole map every single time and given some gangs never showed up(looking at you Purpatrators) meant you were running this thing way more than just 10 times.

I really hope for the next event they make the challenge progress universal among all characters so I can atleast use it to level up my other/new chars or have some change of pace instead of doing it for hours on a single char over and over again.

Oh and btw the Borderlands Science was also a little overkill, good cause okay but you look at 8-10h just to get all heads/skins and this is if you already only take 20-30sec for a single one.

#11

It’s not just time but respecting the players. Unless you’re on PC, load-times are a grind, so even if drops were good in terms of quality and quantity, you still are spending so much time on loading screens, compared to PC.

Not to mention the numerous QOL requests that have gone ignored or the numerous co-op/split-screen bugs and issues that have been ignored.

This is the first game where having gotten the season pass, I feel like I’ve been ripped off. I’m not even interested in DLC 4, despite having already paid for it, unless significant improvements and fixes precede it.

5 Likes
#12

Another solid post Boom, you been on a roll!

I understand what they tried to achieve with the admirably long dialogue. And I would be on board with them had they been more useful and impactful. I seemingly spend hours waiting, watching, listening to NPC’s babble on trying to teach me how to throw a grenade. It wears on my patience and Countess grows hungry.

The implementation of skipping cutscene was a very positive move forward. I would love to see a similar system at least in TVHM, you’ve beat the game, heard the dialogue, know the story, just let me get to the shooting and looting already!

2 Likes
#13

And while at it for all the “follow X” quests, make them run straight to their next interaction point instead of stopping to wait for you if you dare leave their side for a while. It’s a bit dull that you need to be humping the leg of every other NPC just to get them moving again.

1 Like
#14

The follow along missions dont bother me, it’s when I have to wait out a soliloquy to be prompted to the next waypoint. This gets under me skin lol

1 Like
#15

BL3 needs a “speed run” option - unlocked after you beat the game once: gets rid of all cutscenes and dialogue expositions if you wish to do so.

Not my idea - someone else here mentioned it few weeks ago.

3 Likes
#16

The biggest thing keeping my brother from playing the game with me is not being able to skip or mute the character dialogue. He doesn’t want to listen to Tyreen do her anime villain rant every time we play through the story. They should take a page from BL1 and get the story out of the way so we can get back to enjoying the game.

3 Likes
#17

For me, definitely not. One of the best parts of the series is the vast amount of content you can go at your own pace. You didn’t have to wait a year to go to a cool map. In BL3 there’s always a fear of missing out, because the events are things that game is lacking. Cartels/Heck bring so much more stuff to do. Some mini-events are band-aid fixes to deeper issues. (Why the guaranteed drop rate for Trials isn’t permanent yet, I don’t understand)

The loot. Even with the mini-events farming is still long because of the amount of RNG in every item. I guess they want us to spend hours chasing for that perfect roll, but the grind is just so tedious that the moment I get it, it does not feel satisfying. It’s so obviously padded out.

And of course, the main story. It’s paced very poorly. Unstructured to the point missions feel tacked on, so it dips a lot. The previous BL games were better paced, and you could at least skip dialogue by moving to waypoints. But here, you’re locked down for minutes at a time. The game expects you to sit still and listen to its story for 30 hours, 12 if you beeline it. I’m in the camp that loves new game+, and while I’m “grateful” I don’t need to play this slow story twice, I would have preferred a shorter, more replayable campaign. Like it’s so long, I kinda wish the fake-out ending was real, yikes. Also, its umm… not very good, so it’s not fun to experience or replay imo. :Y

I actually have the most hours on BL3, but its mostly from the high of a 7 year wait and the slowness of the game.

1 Like
#18

I would take perfect parts chase over perfect annoint chase anyday. But not both at once. I farmed 50 harolds the other day, only 2 came out with max damage parts. Both were non-elemental and had annointments that were not even for me.

1 Like
#19

Like an option to start a playthrough with all the main missions completed? Yeah i’d be down for something like that.

The way the game scale with the player much better than in previous games means there’s more than enough content to get you to max level. I’d love to have the game opened up from the get go on a new character so i can focus on things like crew challanges, farming named bosses, redoing side missions and DLCs. With the veteran vendor change to re-purchase quest rewards you’d not miss out on any of the good rewards you might have gotten along the way. Or if they allowed me to only reset the side content (including crew challanges) that would’ve been pretty cool aswell.

#20

No. Everything in BL3 feels wasteful.

  • Anoints that block you from good versions of gear
  • Takedowns that force you to redo 15 mins - half an hour of work for mistakes
  • Class mods that are worthless or have inane bonuses
  • Long load screens
  • Slow guardian rank level up that gives massively diminising returns
  • Slow menus
  • Slow boot up of the game
  • Big areas lacking more than one fast travel point
  • Loot events that are active before cap increases, instead of active during
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