A little?
Once you played PvE missions with 5 man, 3 man feels absolutely boring. The difference is huge. I could go on for paragraphs why 5 man is so much more fun, but I doubt you want me to come up with an essay.
I encourage you to play 5 man PvE a bit more, if you haven’t already, to verify the validity of my statement.
I agree with the former, disagree with the latter. I don’t think it’s fair at all to exclude solo play, and it would be a nightmare.
I’m a former couch-only co-op guy. I’ve loved couch co-op since forever. For some reason, online gaming never appealed to me. Battleborn was the first game I ever really got into joining up with people out there, and it took some time. I’ve now met a bunch of cool gamers who I like running story and PvP with, so I concur heartily that “the more the merrier” is true in this game, but I also think it’s bad to exclude people who just wanna do their own thing.
Only 3 total players does bum me out. When it originally said “3 buddies” I figured it might just be cutting from the usual 5 man team because of the difficulty spike that happens at 5.
Ideally, you want to play with every number between 1 to 5.
I find solo necessary. 2 is boring. 3 is meh. 4 is good. 5 is fantastic.
The only reason 2 is a thing is because the pre-made was made with 2 people. I hate it in the current PvE I queue into a game with 2 players. I just immediately leave, no question about it.
Overall, the DLC reveal was not nearly as powerful as I would’ve liked. Again, I’m still cautious with my expectations instead of being excited.
It sounds like to me you’re saying that man difficulty is fun because of all the enemies that spawn and the challenge that accompanies that(which I agree with). Keep this in mind: The missions are being made FOR 3 man teams. So i’d imagine that it would be somewhat comparable in difficulty to normal(by normal I mean non-DLC missions) 5 man missions. This is however just speculation as nothing has been confirmed.
That’s actually a pretty good point (especially after the unusually dismal number of PvE players on XB1 tonight - ended up 1 solo and 1 2-player on advanced.)
Bit unfair on the two players you abandoned though - what if they were hoping for a 3-man (which seems to be optimum in advanced to me)?
I simply do not enjoy playing this game with a 3 man team. The nature of the game, in both PvP and PvE, maximizes the enjoyment when it’s done with 5. It would be even cooler if you need to do a 10 man raid, or a 10v10 battleground.
They are trying to sell to me that a 3 man composition, when all aspects of the game caters to 5, is a good thing.
I’m not buying it so readily.
I’ll see how effective 3 man is when I finally see the DLC.
Uh, no, I was referring to me and another person, making 2/5.
I don’t enjoy 2 manning a mission. It’s even more dull than me doing it solo.
that’s fine. From the post I replied to it seemed that you were saying that they were making the game easier. But I see your point. Though I don’t know If the playerbase could do something like that( the 10 man raids, as cool as that’d be)…but that’s neither here nor there
I like the idea of them being more replayable. Now we just have to see if their idea of replayable is the same as mine
I’m hedging my bets. At a glance, yeah - I can definitely see that it sucks. But given that the regular story missions allow up to 5 players, it’s a very odd change in my opinion. If the new stuff is basically just new content stuffed into the existing engine, I can’t imagine any performance-related reason they’d want to limit the number of players.
That leads me to think it’s either a mistake or they have a very good reason for it. I can’t imagine what that reason would be, but I also couldn’t imagine having more than four or five playable characters with distinct play styles either - that’s my own personal limitation 
Maybe they are making major changes to the underlying framework and there would be performance problems with more than 3 players. Maybe it’s to make it easier to get a “full team” for people playing with randoms. (Or maybe it’s because they just want to find different things that piss off their gamer base - I doubt it, but I really can’t say.)
One thing @epicender584 suggested might play into it too - maybe they’re going to enforce player roles somehow, and you won’t be able to have multiple DPS characters playing at the same time.
@Japanman15 suggested about getting rid of the difficulty spike; I can’t imagine that’d be the case, because it’d probably be easier to just tweak the 5-man settings (and it’s possibly we’ll see a spike between 2- and 3- person teams with this).
I might do public PvE matches at some point; we’re still trying to find time to get through the campaign on Advanced. I haven’t even bothered switching from Oscar Mike yet lol (wanting to get him to 15 first). I know that probably gives me very little backing to throw out my opinions on this, but it isn’t like that stops most people on the interwebs anyways.
I kinda stated in some posts above this one, but every mode in this game, from PvP to PvE, provides the most entertainment and enjoyment in a group of 5.
When you lower the number, the less fun it becomes.
What sort of performance issues or balances or problems could there be that it must be a 3 man mission? Once the number drops to 3, this is where the balance may actually be an issue when it didn’t really exist in a 5 man. In the current PvE missions, it’s encouraged to go with 1 Tank, 3 DPS, and 1 healer. In reality, you can go with whatever combinations since each could cover strengths and weaknesses of the other heroes. 5 man allows you to go with these mix ups for trial and error and still have the mission succeed.
In 3 man, this is not the case. If the structure requires 1 Tank, 1 DPS, and 1 Healer, each of the classes chosen have to perform their part more than adequately, since you don’t have additional friends to cover for you if things go awry. Certain characters can DPS much more steadily than some, some heal with considerably better consistency, and some tanks can defend more reliably than the rest. The team composition becomes more rigid and less flexible. Some of the heroes, as a result, may be played even less in PvE. Therefore, I don’t see how some of the heroes getting even less represented while you’re playing with fewer friends is a good thing.
And Gearbox is trying to sell to us that idea of a 3 man is a worthy experience. That it’s gonna be fun. That there is somehow more replayability.
Less may be more in some circumstances in life. However, for this game… I’m not seeing that to be true.
I’ll cast my final judgment when I finally see the end product. Until then, more cautiousness from me.
You’ve stated multiple times that the game is designed for maximum enjoyment with 5 people, yes? Well these are clearly designed with three people in mind. I understand your argument and caution, but just that thing caught my eye.
Then I thank you for understanding.
I pray the campaign will be good. Prayer seems to be the only thing I have left these days.
I personally don’t care what the max is, as long as the minimum is 1. I’ll be solo’ing these most of the time anyways.
I feel exactly the same - at this point, I don’t even play PVE unless I know it’s going to be five people. For me, the story mode’s saving grace, besides the Battleborn chatter, is its potential for huge swarms of enemies. It feels like most of the Battleborn are designed to fight waves anyway.
If the game had better boss fights, I might feel differently - right now, they range from the unmemorable to “oh, that was a boss?” I’m not sure what it is that makes Battleborn boss fights so unsatisfying, except maybe the personality deficits (ISIC and Arachnis being the exception, and even then, the actual fights are pretty dull.)
Really hoping the new missions manage to bring something new to the table. It does sound like they’re planning to mix things up, so… hoping.
I think it’s how easy and short they are.
No.
People seem to be assuming that the story ops will scale the same way that the default story missions do. They won’t from what we’ve been told. They will ramp up in difficulty the better you are and the more you play. If it gets too tough you can reset the difficulty (like the OP levels in Borderlands 2 from what I hear). Then you play until it ramps up the difficulty to the level you like.
On top of that every time you play the level there will be content that wasn’t there the last time. Each playthrough will progress through the story just a little bit more so each playthrough won’t be the same as the last. So there will be an overall arc for the story but you won’t experience it all in every playthrough but will have to play through several times to experience it all.
That said I am curious as to why they chose to go with a team of 3 instead of the usual team of 5. I like a team of 5 simply because I enjoy playing with more people. Maybe it has to do with balance? It could be they limited the team to 3 because it was easier to balance within the new system. We’ll have to wait for an official answer to this I guess.
I think your right it may be easier to balance but also it’s available to less players (only those with season pass). So this will probably help with finding a group.
Couch coop will always best online IMO. Nothing like seeing your buddies faces as you wreck them or being able to sit next your gf and laugh. God I miss it.