I’ve never played Borderlands before BL3. When I finally decided to give the series a try, I was glad I did. My first impression of Borderlands was that it was unrestrained. It has a large open world with plenty of loot and activities. It totally loved up to the hype. I slogged through the story and grinded for hours to get the right gear to make the most powerful builds. This is what any video game should be. Fun in a virtual world. Almost no rules. I have played enough to get to 230 Guardian rank (adding even more power to my stats) and there is still more gear that I’m hunting. I’ve still never seen a recurring hex or rain firestorm (RIP).
Then the nerfs started coming. Nerfs to weapons and skills. My problem with these sort of adjustments has nothing to do with difficulty. I still have no problem playing the game on TVHM:MH3. It has to do with fun. It’s fun to grow more powerful in your virtual world and even be considered OP. I can understand The Porcelain Pipe Bomb adjustment. One shotting bosses is an unintended effect. But I would still argue against it. Why? Because it’s just awesome and fun. It’s not how I would always play the game but it’s cool to be able to do it. I would definitely argue against the rest. Especially recent Nerf’s to grenade mods and skills. The most fun thing to do in the game is find a synergy between weapons, artifacts, Shields, class mods and skills and become a god (if you want to).
Here’s the thing; you don’t have to. If you want to, you can make the game more difficult by using all white weapons or any of the plethora of green, blue, purple or even orange weapons that are not powerful or with talents yet to be discovered. You can try out new skill allocations or do any number of things to change the way the game plays for you. I think it is worth mentioning that many of the items that are considered OP are only OP in conjunction with certain skills or artifacts and not everyone uses the same loadout as the guys/ gals posting videos online. Not everyone plays the game the same and that’s the real point.
More and more I feel like developers want to force players to play games the way they want us to play. They want us to have the experience that they want us to have. This is where we will disagree. I think I should be able to play the game and enjoy it the way I want to. Especially in a PvE only game. Devs don’t have to sit next to me in my living room and witness my experience and it doesn’t affect other players. There is no reason to make heavy handed adjustments to gear/ skills in a game that is just PvE. The game now feels subdued and less fun to me. There are things I never got to try before they were adjusted. Things that I saw streamers use that looked like fun. There are plenty of things to fix in the game without fixing things that aren’t broken. Leave the fun alone.