Just played through DLC4, have story questions

Borderlands 3 Borderlands 3 SPOILERS
#1

So, the DLC opens with us going in there because apparently there’s something that causes people to become psychos on Pandora, and we can find out what it is in Krieg’s mind. We would presumably find out how he became one too, what he was doing before it, etc.

Did I miss something, or did we never actually find these answers? Yeah, Lieberman’s lab was traumatizing, but they were experimenting on the already existing psychos (who were there since the BL1 days, before Hyperion), and as far as I understood it, Krieg was one such psycho too - that wasn’t where he went crazy (maybe he got a bit angrier).
Psychoreaver was an angry dude, sure, and we found out sane Krieg managed to stay protected from him, but this was already evident based on BL2, even if we didn’t know exact details.

Are there some hidden damn echologs I missed, or is the ending really “I need more time for a conclusion”?

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#2

Yeah, basically that, super lackluster DLC, or as i heard someone saying before, DLC made just so people shut up about Maya and Krieg lol.

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#3

I wouldn’t mind its shortness, if the story it told delivered on the premise. It more or less did, to be fair, except the ending, which is a shame.

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#4

The lost echoes in the DLC deal more with how Krieg’s two sides worked out their differences and their feelings towards Maya.

Talking to the NPCs gets more information about what Krieg did between games.

The voices in Dr. Benedict’s Maps explain what his goals were. The used Psycho Character Models in the game, but the actual story Benedict tells as you make it through the maps (along with the side mission about Krieg’s cell, and the person in the cell next to him) is that those people were Bandits, not Psychos.

For anyone who hasn’t played Borderlands 1, or Borderlands 2 for that matter, not every Bandit is a Psycho, but almost all Psychos are Bandits.

Marauders, Bruisers, and Nomads are not Psychos.

Dr. Benedict experimented on the people of Pandora, ex Dahl prison laborers and miners/ scientists, and created a gas he tried to weaponize to turn civilians into soldiers who were fearless and felt no pain, against their will, like a programmable zombie army. It failed to make them obedient soldiers and only made them psychotic and violent, so they then decided they could use it as a chemical weapon to destabilize areas they were going to invade.

Krieg was someone they captured and experimented on. Their torture broke his psyche, and his Psycho persona took over when it came time for him eradicate his torturers. Psycho Krieg was a product of the gas, but we can assume that Krieg having been a Bounty Hunter beforehand is what gave him an edge, since he must have had some skill with combat and stalking to have been good at that before he was incarcerated by Hyperion.

This all had to have happened after TPS since Krieg remembers all the weaponized Hyperion robots. That lines up with a side theory I posted a while back I connected some dots.

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#5

Didn’t Benedict want to experiment on those people because they were psychos? He describes the patients multiple times: “bloodlust, high pain tolerance, hallucinations” etc etc - traits he observes before messing around with them.
How would Hyperion have been present on Pandora before BL1, anyway? Jack was the first guy to take interest, and he was lucky to be able to get just a satellite there. It was Dahl who did some mining there, and that’s it.

Well there you go, even your post doesn’t explain the BL1 psychos. According to you, it might have something to do with the plants that mutated Hector’s crew? Why not mention this in the DLC dedicated to explaining psychos?

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#6

Everyone had high hopes for this DLC and every single one was let down. A DLC on one of the series favourite characters… And they did almost nothing with it…it was the only DLC that I only played through once and didn’t want to go back.

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#7

Been a while since I’ve played the DLC, but if memory serves I took those observations as being in reaction to the experimentation that was ongoing. Could be wrong, but let’s get to the alternatives that relate to my other post you referenced…

There were competing mining operations. As of the time on BL1 we can confirm Dahl, Atlas, and Torgue had dealings there that we were aware of.

TPS establishes that Hyperion had been experimenting on Helios with Pandoran wildlife, and Angel is older and has full access to the Echo-net on Pandora at the start of Borderlands 1, so it’s fair to say Jack and Hyperion have been operating on Pandora for a while, but they don’t run the planet. Their Cl4p-Tps are all over the planet (even if their new Us aren’t canon, those bots are). Jack’s hunch about Pandora that Tassiter mentions is in regards to the Vault specifically. Being right about that is what got Jack promoted and in the good graces of the Board of Directors.

As for Psychosis - If you let BL Tannis tell it, being on Pandora in the harsh isolation drives people crazy. If you connect it to the Eridian Lore that is settled by Fight For Sanctuary and BL3, then the power of the Destroyer may very well be corrupting the planet from the inside out, hence the aggressive plant life and mutations of the New Pandoran Army (a possible source of the gas). Cassius from Tales in Fight For Sanctuary does say that the spores are present throughout Pandora’s atmosphere: https://borderlands.fandom.com/wiki/Soliloguy_Scientific

So in the case of Hector’s men the idea is that they were underground, in theory closer to the Eridium Mantle, and the Destroyer, and also in the presence of the Vault Key, which activated the spores in their lungs and mutated them. The key was taken from them before Borderlands 1 by Dahl before they abandoned Pandora, and somewhere along the way the Key was broken up by someone and given to the various bandit factions.

The idea that some scientist before Cassius discovered the spores mutating a Miner and used that as a basis for experimentation would fit Dr. Benedict’s line of study. The Jakob’s and Jack connection would be the way to explain New Horizons also experimenting on a plant that was capable of mind control through pheromones, the gas Benedict attempted to make being a Hybrid, or sharing a common origin? At best it’s hinted at and not clearly spelled out. It’s a theory after all.

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Did Gearbox Quietly Introduce A New Lore Thread & Timeline?
#8

I’ve tried to figure it out but I still don’t really understand what Psycho Reaver is. They literally say it represents rage but I’m lost as to the relationship between Psycho Kreig protecting Sane Kreig from rage. Would Sane Kreig be wiped away forever if rage took over? Isn’t Psycho Kreig a manifestation of the rage that built up within Sane Kreig’s mind during his torture at the hands of Hyperion? The Psychos don’t seem all that angry/rageful to me, they just seem like violent lunatics who get off on being violent lunatics. I know I’m just saying random things but I can’t figure out how all of it fits together (assuming it makes sense to begin with).

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#9

I thought Psycho Reaver was the link/ common connections she said appeared in all Psychos, a shared brain wave pattern or something to that effect. Sane Krieg existed first if we trust his narration, and Psycho Krieg is a dissociative personality that seemed to emerge as a result of the torture. Psycho Reaver seems to the a mental manifestation of the Gas Dr. Benedict created that turned Bandits into murderous psychos.

The origin of the gas is the thing I’ve been theorizing about since September. Regardless if the gas has an origin tied to the Pandoran Spores and the Destroyer’s corrupting influence or not, Psycho Reaver exists in Krieg’s mind because of the gas exposure. Sane and Psycho Krieg are personalities of Krieg, and Psycho Reaver is the foreign influence that was introduced. I think it’s fair to say that Psycho Krieg would still exist without Psycho Reaver there, but it would make Krieg more like Tina and Jack, people struggling with mental illness as a result of varying trauma.

It’s a triple layer cake:

Sane Krieg tries to keep Pyscho Krieg in check because Psycho Krieg is in control.
Psycho Krieg keeps Psycho Reaver in check because Psycho Reaver is chaotic and wants to run rough shod over everything and destroy it all.

That is part of the reason why I find it logical to connect the gas with the Pandoran spores and the Destroyer. The Destroyer just wants to destroy everything in it’s path with no rhyme or reason guiding it. The only thing preventing it was that it was locked away in Pandora by the Eridians and Sirens.

Psycho Reaver was locked away in Krieg’s mind and Krieg was able to gain some sense of control and peace in part because of his connection with Maya. So there are parallels there.

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#10

That definitely sounds interesting, and is exactly the kind of discovery that was set up in the beginning of the DLC, but Tannis “needs more time for a conclusion”.

Yeah, Pandora is harsh, Dahl used prisoners and crazies and then abandoned them - but surely there’s other harsh planets, and corporations pulling out also surely happens fairly often in a galaxy. Why is it that Pandora has THIS many psychos, all wearing masks with a vault symbol on them? Tannis even says that they somehow share a strange, unique brainwave pattern. There is clearly something extraordinary going on, but we can still only guess and speculate about plant spores and stuff.

Oh yeah, and according to the crew challenge, Krieg has directions to a vault in his head? How did he get that? The mysterious source of the psychosis could be linked to it. “Data is still incomplete”. *fart*

Between these, and the small hint that Rose might not be dead at the end of DLC3, and the lack of confirmation for Oletta obviously being her gran, I’m increasingly thinking that they have the rough story for Borderlands 4, and are foreshadowing stuff already. Or hey, maybe there’ll be one more Takedown: the Vault that Krieg’s mind points to. Loads of psychos, since it’s the source of them, and a vault monster at the end. Maybe the eridians put a crazifying signal in a vault on Pandora, so it would always be populated with hyperaggressive, tough wildlife/people to indirectly guard the Destroyer.

Yeah, both psycho Krieg and Psychoreaver are manifestations of crazy, but they’re different. It’s like the difference between anger and blind fury. Psychoreaver is more primitive and savage, while psycho Krieg still has some semblance of thought and decisionmaking. He chooses keep psychoreaver away from sane Krieg, for instance.

#11

BL3 answers that by explaining just how unique and powerful Pandora is, and tells the story of every planet suspected of having a Vault through Typhon’s journals as he visited them ans succeeded or failed to find there Vaults.

Vault inspired Psychos only emerged one place, but different kind of Cults/ Gangs seeking supernatural power sprung up everywhere Vault-like monsters were found other than Promethea:

The Lost Legion - Helios
The Bonded - Xylourgos
The Devil Riders - Gehenna
Athenas - Order of the Impending Storm
Pandora - i’ll just list them in order of appearance.

Pandora, as of BL3 is the one place where there have been consistent rumors about a Vault that many thought was a rumor in BL1. By BL2 one was confirmed and a second was as well. At that point you get the second wave of cults.

The third wave is inspired by the Calypsos and the rumors about the existence of even more Vaults, and of course, the great reward.

In this case Tannis’s dialogue doesn’t really fit with what thr games have spelled out pretty clearly.

Psycho Reaver was the shared brainwave between psychos as far as I understood.

The Crew Challenges were something important to Krieg, that have to do with who he was, not necessarily a vault. I took it to be connected to his childhood, or his having a child.

#12

I am concerned with the origin of the psychos, i.e. the masked dudes we fight in BL1. The various second and third waves are already known.

You mention an interesting thing with the other planets spawning vault-related groups, so why not Pandora, but those are just explained better, imo. The story behind BL1 psychos is still just handwavium-riddled vagueness. “There’s rumors of a vault with riches in it”. Really? And these (at this point unsubstantiated) rumors are enough to get people to wear masks with conspicuously identical symbols and rant in Shakespeare quotes? You know what, given that this is a population of mental rejects to begin with, it even sounds plausible - up until DLC4, where Tannis tells us that apparently there was more to it than that, with the brainwave pattern yadda yadda. But we never find out anything more, unless you want to count “psychos have a big representation of rage in their mind” - wow, what a revelation. And if you are right, and there’s a psychoreaver in all their heads, it still doesn’t tell us why? Why do they all have a psychoreaver in their heads, why do they share such a specific and particular brainwave pattern, something that Tannis considers worth investigating? If it was just a generic “aggression+crazy” brainwave, I doubt she’d care.


(skip to 18:42 if the link doesn’t)
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#13

“But I could be wrong.” - Dr. Patricia Tannis

It was a funny Nursery Rhyme. Dare I say a joke. It has significance to Krieg but he can’t recall why. That bit about a Vault is a good way to bait us players into completing the challenge until the decide what if they go further with it.

The easy guess that it leads us to that door to the Varkid raid down the line.

As for reason for Psychos, it’s implied rather than stated plainly. The gas drove then insane and either opened their kinds up to the Psycho Reaver’s influence, or the gas directly inserted that influence.

In dream states our kind will often create images or manifestations of internal or external sensations. I would dream my arm was bleeding when I cut off circulation to it while I was asleep and woke up to no sensation or motor control in it. Things like that.

That gas, whatever its origin was a foreign invader that literally wreaked havoc in the Psychos minds.

Now outside of a marketing choice, there is no in canon reason for the Vault Masks being so common and mass produced on Pandora. It really is as of Pandora had a really successful Hockey team dump all their merch there like the US does the runner up teams ina championship series/ game.

BL2 started the Cult of The Vault to explain that a bit retroactively in the lore. In BL1 it wasn’t a part of the logo design or start up screen. The warmed up to it over time. I look at that as a superficial cosmetic thing in game more than a lore element. I could spin head canon that Hyperion/ or Jack secretly had Benedict infect the planet one Bandit camp at a time, while also trying to brainwash the Bandits they infected into searching for the Vault and Key, giving them the Masks to differentiate their would-be army from the other Bandits. The plan backfired that’s why Jack moved on to trying to use Cl4p-Trps instead.

That, to me, gives Hyperion more of a role than I care for, but again, their New U’s double as Fast Travel, which is canon, and widely in use throughout the game, like Cl4p Trps, so their presence throughout Pandora is well established.

also, to boil things down to basic Freudian Psychology:

Psycho Reaver - Id + Jungian Collective Unconscious

Psycho Krieg - Ego

Sane Krieg - Super Ego

#14

I mean, BL1’s explanation was that the population is made up of criminals and mental ward fodder. With that, it’s actually not that much of a stretch to imagine some crazies hearing about a vault with treasures in it, starting to rant about it and converting others, and them having some crude “uniform”. As you yourself pointed out, we saw this kind of culty thing happen several times on Pandora.

The issue is that everybody already knew all this. Tannis started DLC4 because she found something worth investigating, which has to be something more. I enjoy your speculations about the gas, but I’m still unsatisfied :frowning:

#15

How are Vault Masks productive or serving any utility that they would have them all over Pandora? :smiley:

Seriously though, a uniform/ common color or attire is one thing, but the Hockey Masks? That’s just a design convention that owes more to Jason Vorhees, Mad Max, and Casey Jones. It’s a neat gimmick that’s also silly. That’s why I picked on it in particular.

It functions like a Guy Fawkes mask in the games I guess, but with no real explanation as to why. It has a respirator so they could say it has some function or another. They just never bothered as far as I know. It could be as simple as saying that is the standard mask for Miners on Pandora. They can even say the Vault symbol was placed on the masks a a promotional gimmick to try and motivate workers since the quest for treasure in the Vault was a reason people came to Pandora?

Those are superficial things that don’t necessarily have to be directly related to the experimentation and torture, along with the pseudo-psychology and implied metaphysical aspects of the story.

#16

I’m just picturing a psycho turning to some other dude, going
“you worship vault?”
“Yeah, hail the vault!”
“I don’t see no mask on you, brother!”
“Mask?”
“Here mask! Holy symbol! Hail vault!”
“Hail vault!”

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#17

:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:

#18

I can’t remember where I heard it, but I swear there’s an ECHO or some kind of dialog in BL3 (the base game, not the DLCs) where someone mentions Pandora has some kind of “corrupting effect” on people who go there. I think Tannis says it in relation to the Calypso Twins?

I took that as laying the groundwork for some kind of “origin story” for Pandora’s stranger inhabitants, especially since the planet itself is artifical. Creating in some kind of mental interfernce to deter potential vault hunters from inadvertently awakening the Destroyer seems like something the Eridians might do.

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#19

Which doesn’t really make sense because we have plenty of characters in the series who have lived on Pandora for decades and are still sane, relatively OK people (emphasis on relatively).

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#20

Maybe it’s a virus, with certain people being immune/resistant?

PS: ayyy, carmageddon!