Figure it out Lilith!

Borderlands 3 Borderlands 3 SPOILERS
#1

Has anyone ever REALLY paid attention to the end credits scene and noticed 2 things:

  1. At the end they show the Firehawk symbol on Elpis and Ava says, “she’s pointing the way!”

  2. One of the hand-drawn sketches at the end shows Ava plotting coordinates on Elpis with a picture of Lilith and a note asking “Where?” Implication being either where is Lilith or possibly where is the entry to the machine that operates the Great Vault machine key/thingy on Elpis

Questions:

-are we going back to Elpis in a DLC or BL4?
-is Lilith alive and still on Elpis?
-does the Firehawk symbol on Elpis point to where the entrance to the Great Vault opening device (or whatever machine/contraption on Elpis) is located?
-is Ava smart enough to figure out Lilith’s location? Just kidding, we all know she’s not LOL

Maybe I am late to the party and everyone already has thought about this, but this just occurred to me tonight at the end of a leveling playthrough. Thoughts on the above?

EDIT: to make my post more clear about the distinction of Elpis being the “key” to the Great Vault, which is located on Pandora, as opposed to being the Great Vault itself (because I was a little too loose with my language).

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#2

The great vault is Pandora, that’s pretty well established in the main story. Elpis is gone, you can see there is nothing behind the Firehawk symbol when traveling away from Pandora on sanctuary.

Randy Varnell, Gearbox story lead, confirmed that Lilith is just gone for now. She’ll be back, probably in BL4 if I had to guess.

Also you can activate the vault key in Lilith’s room. It shows a map to another vault with siren wings and it makes the Firehawk noise.

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#3

Sorry, big duh on my part, that was a mis-statement by me. What I was really referring to is whatever opens the Great Vault, clearly is on Elpis. We haven’t seen that yet. I guess that is what I was getting at here.

#4

Elpis is the key from the way it’s explained. Not specifically anything on Elpis, just the whole moon.

I can see us visiting Elpis in a future game searching for Lilith. She’s most likely there, wherever it is that she teleported it. Perhaps there’s another great vault somewhere that Elpis was drawn towards.

We still have the whole vault war that the Watcher foretold.

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#5

There’s also all the cryptic messages from the trials that we are now the new guardians.

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#6

Lilith is definitely alive. The writers kept it ambiguous on purpose for later. I have a feeling some of it will tie into DLC4.

I’d love to go to Elpis again, and now we know how much more significant it is I think we will! Hopefully in BL4 so they can incorporate oz-kits or even jump-packs.

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#7

Oh yeah I was already there in my head! That would be awesome. I know a lot don’t like TPS but it is low-key one of the best BLs from a design perspective due to how those characters worked and how cryo worked as well.

/rant

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#8

Kinda cool if Elpis got destroyed. BLPS was embarrassing as an Australian :frowning:

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#9

Also wait - whaat? I have never done this! I am going to have to check this out. How did I miss this? LOL

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#10

The guy who destroyed everything good that was done in the previous installments you mean.

At least storywise, I disagree.

#11

I’m thinking more in terms of characters and the bad jokes.

#12

Speaking as a Brit, the most annoying characters in TPS were not the Australian ones… I enjoyed most of the characters and humour; it was a refreshing change from the US-centric nature of the previous game.

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#13

You won’t get any arguments from me on the bad jokes and stories. I actually think the VH backstories are really cool in TPS. But yeah, all the “bruv” stuff, obscure jokes that literally only someone from
Australia would understand (it seemed like there were a lot more of them than there should have been, that I was certain were supposed to be jokes, but I just didn’t get), and all the talking (for the love of god, shut up, Gladstone).

I was saying I thought TPS was great in skill tree and weapon design, forget the story stuff. Although some of the story stuff has merit, like the Claptrap DLC.

#14

I loved Gladstone. If I’m going to be bombasted with unskippable dialogue I’d prefer it comes from likable characters rather than the two ■■■■ for brain antags and Ms. Sup Killer we have in this game.

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#15

I get that. I guess to me, that seems like a choice between a razor blade and a bottle of pills. Neither is a great option in my book. Standing and listening to someone drone on with a 5-minute exposition dump is not a great solution to storytelling either way.

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#16

Eh, they brought in an entire “story group” for this game, so I wouldn’t hand him all the blame for the lore mishaps and poor writing. I actually love his enthusiasm, and you could see the passion he put into crafting Battleborn’s original lore.

Still, in a couple of interviews, he made some weird mistakes for someone who’s supposed to be the “head of the story group”.

He said that they’ve always respected the passage of real world time in the chronology of the games, so BL3 is set 7 years after BL2 because it came out 7 later, and the same goes with the 3 year gap between BL2 and BL1…except for the fact that everybody knows that BL2 is set 5 years after BL1, not 3.

He even mentioned Claptrap being present in the final cutscene for BL2, despite the fact that he’s nowhere to be found.

The idea that Atlas found a vault on Promethea before BL1 is also a pre-existing fan lore misconception that became canon because of their carelessness while writing the internal “BORDERLANDS LORE BIBLE” during the development of BL3.

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#17

He even said that Borderlands never had a Siren as villain. Like, ignoring Steele completely.

They took way too many liberties when writing BL3, and the story took a turn to the worse.

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#18

To make up for it, they decided to cover by adding in 4 Siren villains in BL3 - Troy, Tyreen, Lilith, and Ava. :rofl:

Seriously though, the story writer of BL3 made this many lore errors? If that many errors are being made mistakenly, may as well just have Anthony Burch again, and he basically just didn’t care too much about BL1 lore from some of the comments I have seen. Maybe that’s true, maybe not.

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#19

Steele wasn’t originally a Siren, to be fair. She was retconned as that in BL2

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#20

@shure I don’t believe that to be correct. Look at a picture of Steele from BL1. She clearly has Siren tattoos/markings. IIRC, it was never explicitly stated in BL1 that Steele was a Siren, but we know now that she was one because of the markings. Just because we didn’t put the pieces together until later, doesn’t mean they weren’t there all along.

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