Since the announcement at PAX East that Borderlands 3 is just only starting pre-production, I’ve been thinking about the possibilities. And eventually, I think I’ve summed my wishes for more awesomeness in BL3 into three broad categories. To wit:
Wish number one: a bigger focus on the gunplay and guns. For all the talk about Borderlands having the biggest amount of guns in any game ever made, I feel the guns themselves should receive more attention. They should have more “punch”, like some guns (shotguns, snipers, Mashers, Anarchies…) had in BL1, since in BL2, even Jakobs and Torgue guns didn’t feel all that punchy, in my opinion. All guns should be equally useful - not like in BL1, where repeater pistols felt too weak to be of any use, and not like in BL2, where assault rifles felt this way. I also think there really should be more gun subvarieties, like the distinction between Combat Rifles and Assault Rifles in BL1 - and there should be less manufacturer restrictions: I see no reason why Dahl and Vladof can’t make shotguns, or why Hyperion and Tediore can’t make assault rifles.
What’d also be great to see are active abilities that you have to switch on and off with a separate button - like switching a gun between full-auto and burst-fire, or between the normal optics and offset optics bolted to the side. And there should be more things to do with the guns too: grind them up to try and make better ones, gamble with them in hopes of getting a legendary, possibly even cannibalize them for attachments (for example, by finding a decent gun with a good scope, bolting the scope to a good gun, and tossing the decent gun away), burn 'em, give 'em to Tannis, build orphanages out of 'em - I don’t care, just something to do with all the white, green, and in the endgame, blue guns that get dropped.
Wish number two: a new story with a new villain. I’ll be honest and say that I really, really disliked Handsome Jack, for a variety of personal reasons. As a villain, he was simply not in my taste. I liked some of the DLC villains, in both games, far more - Doctor Ned, General Knoxx, and Professor Nakayama all felt a lot more palatable to me. Knoxx especially was a complete riot, with his resigned deadpan observations of the stupidity around him. But that’s not the only, and not even the main, reason I want a new story and a new villain. The reason why I’m asking for the devs to bring in someone new is that after three games, I simply want to see the Handsome Story Arc brought to a close, and an entirely new bad guy to take center stage, letting the franchise branch out in a new direction. I think we had enough of Handsome Jack, even if he was liked overall as a villain, and that the franchise genuinely needs to move on from him.
I really wish that the story of Borderlands 3 will be something to describe with the term “casual as usual”, with the Vault Hunters banding together, organizing themselves, and going on the offensive, sending out groups of badasses towards the locations of other Vaults in order to gather information, establish a foothold, and deal with them. I want to make planetfall in some new, unknown part of the galaxy as a part of a crack team of new badass Vault Hunters, arm myself and my companions with the most outrageously powerful guns we can find, and go out to save the world, in style and with confidence. Which brings me to…
Wish number three: a brand-new environment to mess around in. Again, I’m asking for this because I feel we’ve had more than enough Pandora over the course of the series. Given that Pandora was heavily redesigned and expanded upon in Borderlands 2, with just a few locations from the original game being seen, it could have just as easily been a new planet. Same can be said about the Pre-Sequel, making use of a completely different environment that just happens to be a moon revolving around Pandora. I believe that in Borderlands 3 - or whatever it will be called - Gearbox should finally wave goodbye to our much-tattered, Vault-strewn starting point, and show us another planet in the Borderlands universe. After all, there’s an entire galaxy out there, with several other Vaults if the ending of Borderlands 2 is to be believed, so why not go out there and hunt after those Vaults?
Note, however, that going to a different planet does not have to mean abandoning Borderlands’ ethos reflected, among other things, in its title. This new planet can just as easily be another “borderland”, a world out in the boondocks that saw none or little attention from the galaxy’s big players - but perhaps a different kind. Pandora in the first game was mostly a desert with some parts of steppe and junkyard; Pandora in the second game added icy wastes and craggy highlands to the mix. For Borderlands 3, why not have the game set on a lush, colorful alien world, teeming with dangerous forms of life? Give us places like grasslands, forests, jungles, swamplands, and oceanic coasts to explore, and people struggling against the nature’s onslaught to do quests for. Possibly, if the engine and budget allow, even make the game open-world, with dynamic loading, so that there’s more flexibility in traversing the map.
I hope that this post was constructive enough for the thread, and something some people can agree with. Ideally, of course, I’d like to see some/most of what I suggested to end up in the game - and who wouldn’t want their suggestions to be heard? - but they are not more valid than anyone else’s. Those are just my particular wishes, my hopes for the exact ways the Borderlands series will be moving forward.
