And now that I’m cleaning up side missions, holy Pandora, many of them are indeed way too short and unrewarding. Just ran across Hot and Bothered, for example, and it took 30 seconds and moving a virtual 10 feet to complete. And it only took 30 seconds because of dialog.
The Harpoon mission took a minute and you moved maybe 300 feet, so that’s an improvement?
Not sure what the point of micro-sides is…
What makes this sad, is from the announcements before release it was confirmed that both GBX studios were working on this. Whats worse IMO is the team that did the story for the first two DLC also did DLC4. (I see a quality drop that’s hard to miss)
I don’t know if COVID or time constrains added to the problems, but things like the side quests, the last boss, or portions of the DLC main story, feel rushed, halfheartedly done, or just not necessary.
IIBPH, GBX has done well on the game play portion of the series, but story wise they have written themselves into a corner. While the Maya/Krieg stuff is nice it didn’t really do much of a send off. New lore makes more unanswered questions, and it IMO only hinders how they can move forward.
I started DLC4 last night. This is the first time between all of the prior DLC as well as events I wasn’t really drawn into it.
I think I am 1/3 of the way through Just killed evil Lilith
The maps and combat areas are not that great IMHO.
Unless it magically gets more interesting and fun, I won’t be playing DLC4 again. The new gear so far has been ok, but my older gear is still better.
The level design is great but the lack of interesting enemies does make combat repetitive.
As for weapons, I feel you but I’m a Zane player. Amara got a new class mod that makes her melee build even more destructive - which I didn’t even think was possible. And a lot of the new weapons are really good for Moze and Fl4k.
For me, the only weapon that I’ll be adding to my collection is the Convergence as with my clone and a swap anointment for damage, it does great. Other than that, the rest felt very meh for me. My poor irish madlad needs some love though…or at least the other vault hunters need some scaling down.
Zane isn’t weak but it’s very particular what you can use well with him, I’ve found. And while I don’t mind having to think about what I’m using - swapping with clone for more damage and stuff - it still sucks watching my friends one shot everything with their vault hunters with ease.
I would rank it probably dead last out of the BL3 DLCs, honestly the order they came out is fairly accurate ranking, although 2 and 3 are easily switchable. I was hoping for some kind of new enemies, instead of just more marauders and heavy tinkering to add to the visual garbage. I really don’t know what they were thinking as far as bosses either, honestly most of this DLC seems like either a chore or a story cutscene. The assault on the castle was about the only enjoyable part in my opinion.
I’m guessing the gear is cranked up to 10 to make up for the lack of depth. Oh well, back to Jackpot I go.
I mark it as decent in terms of story content, better than DLC 3 and just shy of being as good as DLC 2. DLC 1 is still by and far the strongest in terms of narrative. DLC 4 is unfortunately the weakest DLC in terms of added content, however.
The areas are large but linear, the bosses are bullet sponges even by Mayhem 10 standards, and the drop rates on the Legendaries feel dialed back incredibly compared to the base game and other DLCs, let along the increased drop rates in DLC 3. The sidequests aren’t even sidequests, it feels more like they wanted to have more content between the Sane and Psycho Kriegs but couldn’t justify it as part of the main narrative. And the Crew Challenge for the DLC is just an utter pain if you play controller, it does nothing for the story at all on top of that.
By and far, this feels like the worst of the DLCs when comparing them to the others in the game, let alone to other DLC content from the previous games. It feels more like a Headhunter than a proper expansion campaign.
One other thing I do want to mention in a positive vein;
The additional dialog from Zane is pretty good. I only play with audio on the first pass through a game or DLC, there are sometimes audio cues that can get missed that I don’t need in subsequent playthroughs, but Zane’s dialog is fun.
Care to share any of your top ones?
English is not my native language, so i strongly apologies for mistakes
And my impression after beating story part of this DLC, emotionally it’s… …salt on the wound, which still hurts even after year of actual release of the game, and left me depressed. Some things stay unclear for me, such as: is Maya kinda memory/mind shard left by herself in Krieg’s mind(and possibly in Ava’s), or she’s just his memory; is it really finale for her character?
And I confused about that Maya’s quote: [Maya] Just because there are always six, doesn’t mean they always stay the same. There’s something different coming.
Also, I have to admit Martha Harms voice acting, in chess quest she was brilliant.
In gameplay aspect, there are nothing new. it still great but nothing new.
Thanks GBX for possibility to know Krieg’s personalty little bit better. and pair of really heartwarming side quests.
Dear reader you can still turn around and ignore the terrible list of things that follows which will inevitable drag you down and remind you of all the horrific things this DLC did and all the stuff it was lacking. Go away from your computer, handy or tablet now and do something nice, like having fun with P.A.T. because you surely don’t want to lose your last bit of sanity that is still in you…
Seriously now, this DLC brings my blood to boil so much with how it destroys the ground for the Borderlands lore with just off-hand remarks, that halfway through I was just about to just not write this up at all and just quit.
I have such a long list of negative thoughts about this DLC that I don’t even know where I should start. So sorry that this will not be put together as good as my other entries, where I talked about the previous DLCs.
So here’s the short version: This DLC is just a stretch of boring mediocrity.
Last warning: You can still turn around and give P.A.T. a hug or something similiar exciting and fun inducing instead of keeping on reading.
It starts right of the bat instead of reintroducing Dr. Zed or even Athena, because she knows of the necessary Atlas or Hyperion tech to enter ones mind we again have to put up with a reused character that already had way to much time in the main game: Patricia Tannis.
She is so annoying and dumb in this DLC, rivaling Scooters stupidity at some points, that I got the feeling they were just reusing left over lines that were meant for him. (I don’t mean this in a negative way towards Scooter, that was just his character in BL2)
They could have atleast build upon her new Siren powers but nada, this game just doesn’t want to work with what is has.
We are then subjected to some lazy and questionable writing to explain why Krieg’s brain/or mind floats in space just as an excuse for not having him making a physical appearance, fixated to a machine or something.
We land in the beautiful area from the trailer, which I’m sure the overwhelming majority of us thought to finally be more of Athenas to of course be nothing more than this single small arena…
So that it doesn’t look too awkward for being the smallest map in the entire franchise it is part of a super boring and dull (and also small) hub area.
The first area, Castle Crimson feels like something straight outta Doom (2016/Eternal). Sadly, just like them the areas are composed only of several arenas, were enemies keep on coming sheer endlessly, connected by corridors inbetween. All locations of this DLC, breathtaking 3! offer nothing to explore, aside from the occasional floating island with the terrible orb shooting mini game. It was instantly odd that the statistic for this DLC says there are ONLY 2 red chests, and this is exactly why.
Because of such things, or the super lazy splash screens when you enter a new area you can already deduce the terrible quality of this DLC right from the start.
While Saphires Run is a small step upwards and offers some small nostalgic trips by fighting Borderlands 2 Nomads and Marauders, instead of the regurgitated CoV for the upteenth time, it just shows the lacking quality, that they merged the Pandora and Athenas portion into one single map.
And I’m totally fine with Tinks but having Nomads without Midgets and just renaming them to little Marauder/Psychos was really lazy. If you do this atleast commit to it and give us a side quests that explains that all Midgets revolted and left Pandora for another Planet or something. God knows, this DLC could use some side quests.
At this point the DLC clearly shapes up to something that could have just as good only been 3 Head Hunter packs with a bunch of thrown together, not connected ideas about Krieg that they still had floating around.
Atleast I was happy to see the giant Cacti again, yes they don’t stand a chance compared to there monstrous brethren on the Trash Coast but it’s a start. Hey gotta love the small things, and I always found Pandoras alien flora fascinating 
I instantly liked the Benediction of Pain because it felt like an area right out of The Pre-Sequal. This game could really use some more low grav maps.
I also love the creepy projections/atmosphere and all the little details this map has like the hidden levers to open loot containers or the metal detector.
Because of things like this I would bet this is the part which was made by Gearbox Quebec.
Also thanks to this BL3 has now a whooping 2 slam trap doors, yay 
On part of the Hyperion reskinned CoV, this is another rightfully concern but I have to say that I actually found this really fitting and quite real because lets look at it for a moment. In real life alot of institutions that are meant to help people, like the Police, hospitals, mental wards or retirement homes are sadly often filled with crooked ■■■■■■■■ that doesn’t give a ■■■■ about the people they are supposed to help. So having the staff look like they could have been inmates themselves instead of being composed of “shiny” Hyperion employees, is only fitting to me. That or it might be a projection of Kriegs mind about the mishandling the prisoners had to endure.
Nevertheless I would have welcomed it if they had used the awesome models of the Hyperion Riot Squad from Claptraps Robolution.
The last “area” isn’t much of special note, although I admire what is probably the closest thing to a Borderlands themed ancient egypt add-on.
On behalf of the (lacking) content:
There are NO side quests. Seriously you can’t call them that, even fetch quest are more entertaining and offer more than this. Yes the 3 “real” ones it had were quite exciting but a single P.A.T quest, no matter how cute doesn’t make up for everything else this DLC is missing.
Also yet another obvious way of padding out the playtime (not that it would make this DLC much longer) by locking them for later so you have to rerun the whole area right to before the boss.
Again the not existing Crew challenges 
The only thing they offer is pointless babling and even more pointless babling from Tannis on top. And yes I am aware of the nursery rhyme that again commits to nothing by telling us… nothing. We already saw that Krieg had a child at the end of the Benedict boss fight.
We are still waiting for a buttload of characters to return and this DLC almost exclusively has only Krieg. Not even a single new NPC or something.
Actually I’m still trying to wrap my head around why this one quest with the valve turning had 2 characters that weren’t Krieg 
It’s cool that they note Max sky although in a way that I find barely satisfying and that makes as much sense as the rest of the enter mind part.
We get a single lazy new enemy and for the 5th time CoV again.
No new side bosses aside from the questionable Spongeboss Bulletpants which even on Mayhem 0 feels like straight outta M10. I mean why? This surely can’t just be another of Gearbox horrible meta jokes, can it?
The bosses have so much health that I had to go from M10 to M0, even though I had no problems with any other thing I fought on M10 before.
They also are weirdly strong, I got oneshotted by Brick&Mordy even after lowering the difficulty.
And while I didn’t have a problem figuring out the weak spot of the Locomöbius, the boss fight is one of the visually most stunning and yet also one of the most boring ones in the series at the same time.
I would really like to put the new gear as something positive because, instead of the legendaries from the main game which were often just guns with the property of another manufacturer, these were exciting to test out and find out their hidden properties. I especially like the Maliwan Pistol which you have to charge for a single shot and can then rapid fire by quickly pulling the trigger and yes! finally a legendary Shockwave shotgun 
BUT…
Having just so little of them and then on top having them be just “reskins” of their unique counterpart or vice versa is insulting. Not to mention that after the power creep from the last DLCs they are just not cutting it in the slightest because nothing can compete with a M10 gun from BoB right now.
Also why do side quest again just give us money and no reward, which was already the case in G,L & T.
Atleast quest items have misc. text again.
The music is again good but also sometimes all over the place. I couldn’t tell if this was intended or bugged triggers because sometimes the music would change just by moving 5m into another part of the map and back.
The head, skins and trinkets have to be the laziest ever (hey, this seems to be a reccuring theme in this DLC) but altleast now everybody looks just as bad as Moze. Well atlest as long as Moze isn’t wearing her DLC4 head…
Now would be a good time to step away from your screen to grab something to drink or go get some fresh air.
Now to the dialoge in this DLC which while having some genuinely nice ones like the dancing echo or the one that’s about A Meatbicycle for 2 and the Intro of BL2, is just mind blowingly absurd with how it single handely crumbles established lore even more than the main game itself.
The whole Benediction of Pain area kinda completely rewrites Borderlands lore and gets rid of or makes them questionable like:
Or in other words it completely destroys the Vault mythology and everything around it, although the main game revolves around this to a big extent itself.
This is made even only more awkard considering it was none other than Tannis herself who discovered most of these things and was around when Dahl pulled out.
Not that she made any sense in this DLC anyway, with how she is a total hypocrite, disapproving of Hyperions experiments even though whenever we found a Slag sample or something similiar sinister in the past, she’s all over it and pleads us to “secretly” preserve a sample of it for her own experiments 
And as if it needed to be even more silly none of this should be possible in the first place because Krieg is not a natural Psycho but rather was experimented on, a long time after the first Psychos came to be. For this to even make remotely sense BL2 would have to be a prequal to Borderlands 1…
But the biggest offender of them all is Maya herself:
Her tip toeing around saying that she loves Krieg while at the same time seeming oblivious to his feelings towards her, making her look really stupid.
Her comments about how the 6 Sirens can/will be different. Basically already retconning the retcon from the main campaign that Sirens now choose to pass their powers to the next one.
How Guardians protect her memories, again hinting at a deeper connection between Sirens and Eridians yet still we are not one bit smarter and at this point with the supposed antagonistic “new” Guardians (BL4 cough cough) doesn’t makes much sense anymore/just complicates it even more.
Her comment about how she can feel all the dozen Sirens before her, over thousands of years is very odd to me. The Borderlands Universe as we know it (space traveling/ finding Eridian tech) is very new and only at most 1 or maybe 2 hundred years old. While it is of course possible that Eridians predate mankind for milleniums, I have a hard time believing this considering that Nyriad is the last and something of a “leader” Siren yet confirms that she and her sisters have only very little to almost no knowledge about the Eridians so it’s hard to imagine that they lived several thousand years side by side. Not to mention that being a Siren is a big thing in this universe that spawns instant interest and there (at the time of Borderlands 1) have ever been only 13 known Sirens*
This was already brought up enough times so I won’t go into more detail how her “Last words” echo, that predates Promethea make it seem like she just decided to let herself be murdered…
Her off-hand remarks about visiting, or rather get visited by the Lodge
Her mentioning how she visited a Noodle shop on Minos Prime, which shouldn’t be possible considering she was kept secluded on Athenas as a child and went back there right after BL 2 and I find it highly unlikely that she would just take a holiday on some far away Planet. Althought it would be possible, the main campaign make it seem like she just spend her time on Athenas.
She says something about Axton modeling career which just like the slide show at the end is a lazy way of incorporating Axton, Salvador and Krieg into the game(in a physical form).
And for me the worst offender, you might call me crazy, how she jokingly mentions that being a ghost has benefits in the form of not needing to buy hair dye anymore. Sure just take away a big part of the magic aura and identity surrounding Sirens…
Because she is just a projection from Kriegs mind we still don’t have a real conclusion for Maya, which was half the part what this DLC was supposed to be.
We also still don’t get an answer why the B team split from Lilith and such.
And while it was nice talking to them inside Kriegs mind the inclusion of the Evil Raiders just reminded me of all the Ava centered dialogue from the main game that make it even more seem like the writers of BL3 have a massive hate for our main characters…
Also why are Liltih and Maya more like ghosts instead of just projections inside of Kriegs mind? The answer is probably just so that Gearbox can again tell us in the most awkward way “please note that we are aware of y’all waiting for a conclusion to this and that so here have… again none”
Oh and I surely don’t need to point out the epic heartfelt moment we were all waiting for: “I know she’s gone” Thanks for a proper send off for Maya 
The ending is bittersweet but does this mean Krieg has now secluded himself and is inside his mind, catatonic on the outside just so he can be with his “perception” of Maya?
The dialogue after the ending is the cherry on top with Tannis proclaiming that with “whatever info?” we got her, she is now someday able to find out what makes a Psycho a Psycho, you know the thing that was already answered in Borderlands 1, has nothing to do with Krieg himself, gets awkwardly rewritten by this DLC which also declares the very same thing as one of its selling points… yet we are once again just as wise as we were before starting BL3 for the first time…
Also Tannis and (Sane-)Krieg’s dialogue, about freeing him doesn’t make one lick of sense because it would create a physical form of him, thus making 2 Kriegs (one personality each) exist in the physical realm at the same time.
All in all the DLC moves the story of Borderlands not one bit forward and yet succeeds at destroying it completly just by throwing in the occasional off-hand joke.
This DLC could atleast have been “good”, if it would just have 2-3 more areas and not shitting on all the lore for the sake of the one or two cheap offhand jokes, but alas…
So all in all I give this DLC: 3,5/10 Meatbicycles, 1/10 Cult of the Vault Symbols and 9/10 Ava’s!!!. Make of that what you want : P
Phew, if you read my other entries you know the drill. Thank you very much for reading this heap of text, Now go get a cookie
*Before anyone ask me where I take this information from: This is part of just one of many developer commentaries about the Manufacturers/world/characters that is written in the Borderlands 1 Goty Strategy Guide.
My own understanding is that Maya is not a mere memory but a ghost of sort, she explained that Siren can imbue themselves into objects and that the process is helped by strong feelings (clear hint at her love), she imbued part of herself into her last message to Krieg and she thinks it is why she somehow exists here.
Concerning the 6 sirens quote, I don t think it means anything different than what we already know: if they die a succesor will inherit the power
All of this in every single way. I’m not the best with words and stumble on my thoughts sometimes but all of this I agree with completely. And it hurts to agree with it because I wanted it to do well.
People say “just because something happened that wasn’t what you wanted doesn’t mean it’s bad” and I get that. But with so many glaring inconsistencies and going back on themselves, it’s really frustrating.
They’re trying to make some complicated and deep story when in fact it was better when it was simpler.
And omg - I loved Tannis in 2. But since 3 and hearing every second sentence be something along the lines of ‘yes I’m smart, deal with it’ legitimately made me want to quit the game.
You’re completely right - they didn’t have to use Tannis here. But again it just feels like a case of ‘look - sirens are the best! They are the center stage now - forget everyone else.”
Don’t even get me started on how they’ve changed her…between Typhon DeLeon and the DLCs, she doesn’t even feel like the same character anymore…
I can’t replay to all of this, but I have to agree with you on a lot of it. Story-wise I feel like this DLC was put together in a short period. (I’d say less than six months) I guess that GBX had to deal with the backlash without admitting that the main story didn’t pan out the way they wanted. Leaving us with ambiguity on weather Maya is somehow still around or not.
The line “Be ready” that Maya and Lilith say to Ava still makes very little sense to me, even now.
@spacebubbles22
I agree that simpler stories are often better.
Regarding Tannis, I agree that the whole Typhon DeLeon thing wasn’t really necessary, the same can be said about her being a siren. Take them both away and Tannis would still be more or less herself. (can’t say the same about the twins or Ava) This hurt the main story, and IIBPH I believe that it seeped into DLC 4 in a way.
As always that’s just my opinion