I never really played BL2 for the story, but the flow of gameplay - loot and shoot. I mean it mixes it up a little, but like one cares after op levels - as you have done everything to death and there is just something crazy addictive about the peak… Perhaps because it’s truly challenging skill. In BL3 there is IMO better voice acting all round. Not so sure about some character models though. The story is decent enough to keep me going. Quirky, sometimes lame or laborious. Yet, everything is so PR focused now I’m sure that takes away some of their options…
This is me. While I enjoyed aspects of the story more in BL2 it’s really not the draw for me in any type of way. Also most of us are much older than we were early on. I actually want BL to stay BL to an extent even if that means the humor might hit me less as I age. I want it to have its zany moments, stupid as hell type stuff. Say things like Butt Stallion and have bombs be pizza toppings.
Some of the complainants seem nitpicky to me like your VH not doing anything in some scenes. Would people have been satisfied if you were just phaselocked during these portions so you can say “well yeah I couldn’t do anything?” I can think of tons of games where you “watch” an intense moment between other characters when you’re right there as well. Maybe that’s how they should have handled it I don’t know but to me that’s not a whole lot less lame than doing nothing. If you’re “there” they have to incapacitate you into doing nothing anyways.
I definitely agree that more could be done with the twins but I didn’t find them too bad. They couldn’t just do another handsome jack and he was so liked that I think whatever they did was bound to be a bit of a letdown. The idea of crazy people doing things for online glory is at least relevant to 2019.
It seemed like they setup more tension between the two that was never really fleshed out though.
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Somewhere between disappointing and satisfying. It’s like a saturday morning cartoon: the logic often breaks down if you stop to think about it, certain emotional beats are pretty hamfisted, the humor is hit and miss, and characters often try way too hard to be entertaining. But I’m no snob, I like those cartoons from time to time. And I like that it takes us around the galaxy, around vaults, there’s siren shenanigans and lore, the eridian homeworld…
I also laughed a good few times, usually at the enemies’ lines, and Zane and Fl4k’s dialogue.
I only noticed just now that the infirmary has datalogs on each planet, written by Tannis. Thought I’d mention it because they’re kinda easy to miss, but they’re worth a read. You unlock more of them as you progress through the story.
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I’m somewhere in between disappointing and satisfying, and overall went for satisfying. There’s a LOT of good stuff in this game. The Promethea arc is mostly great, Eden-6 is fun, and there are some excellent side quests. But the problems the story does have are pretty major since almost all of them have to do with the overarching lore of the series. I really don’t like where they took the lore of the sirens and the Vaults, for example.
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The series has a history of that, though, to be fair. I didn’t like the way BL2 rewrote the BL1 story and had it all about Jack manipulating the original Vault Hunters. For me the story worked better without that and it retrospectively cheapened our efforts in the original game. But as far as the Sirens go BL3 for me just took what had been set in motion in BL2 and played with it a bit. If there were only ever 6 sirens at any one time, then logically their powers weren’t some kind of genetic inheritance as otherwise they’d be pretty easy to identify from birth. BL3 has echoes of Avatar (the cartoon series) where the powers “find” a host and I don’t think that really interferes with the canon that BL2 laid down.
I don’t understand how you can say Maya was great, she was boring and that’s why they killed her off. Simple as that. She was the most 1 dimensional character they have ever written.
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Fl4k’s dialogue is so good!.
Yeah I don’t really get the love for her, either. Did she have a bigger backstory in TFTB maybe as in BL2 she was just an anonymous VH from what I recall?
Wilhelm’s autobiographer would probably beg to differ 
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You can say that about all the player characters in BL2, they barely spoke, dude. As for Maya in BL3, it’s easy to call her one-dimensional if she dies after two scenes.
I’d say her backstory of being used by brainwashing cultists is at least more interesting than Salvador “grr my village burned down” the Gunzerker.
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I have to agree, Salvador’s is probably the only VH backstory I never felt particularly interested in. His logs are funny, but the story never intrigued me or made me curious enough to invent an elaborate headcannon, which I’m guilty of with others.
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I can’t abide what they did to Vaughn and Mr. Torgue. Absent is all of their charm and most of their humor. They need to review prior games to understand who they are and why people loved them, because they overwrote who they were with shallow gags and contradictions of character and it’s painfully bad. 
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I voted disappointed. It just doesn’t seem as good as the past games…like it’s sorta coasting on it’s previous success. I really didn’t like Troy and Tyreen very much but maybe not as much as some. I’m also not as bothered about Ava as some have been but a lot of her character writing just seemed a bit predictable rather than annoying. I sorta liked her more early on (what you got gate!? You got nothin’!) but didn’t really develop into anything as the story went on.
I also feel like a lot of the humor fell flat or was just plain bad. Still unsure if it’s that the writing was distinctly worse than previous games or it’s just becoming a bit stale at this point or that I’m just an older, grumpier person who isn’t as amused with the shtick. Maybe some combination.
I also didn’t like what happened with Lilith and Maya. Those story-lines seemed jarring and out of place or something. It’s especially jarring when juxtaposed against the story arc of Ava and where she ended up. It just didn’t make a lot of sense IMO. I won’t go into details but I’m sure everyone knows what I mean.
I do agree with the OP on these characters:
I really liked Rhys and he felt more like a Borderlands character I expected to see. I would also add Clay to that list. I think he was pretty solid.
As for the story the biggest complaint I have and something I find a bit grating with each play-through is the weird logic holes in the main story. In the main story Tyreen/Troy always seem to simultaneously be behind us (they need that map piece that we have or whatever) but also are always ahead of us (they are always established and ahead of us whenever we go to the next area).
I know that this info could have been gotten via Typhon but then if that’s the case why did they need us for anything in the first place? None of it really makes logical sense to me but maybe I’m missing something.
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I think this game was written for, and aimed at 13 to 15 year olds, any of us older than that would think that streaming, memes and bro jokes are extremely tiresome and bland. The story is already old news and it is not going to age well at all.
Also, I don’t mind a bit of toilet humour, that’s why I love BL2 and some other games that it is done well in, unforunatly this games humour is like a blocked toilet where you keep seeing the same ■■■■ over and over again.
I think your post sums up my feeling on the writing.
There’s a good quote:
‘If you try to be funny, you’re not being funny.’ John Sinclair
I think that it’s better to focus on good character development and their interactions, and this produces humour without really much effort.
Focusing on gags or one liners - has a very short shelf life…
It’s the difference betwern this:
And this
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None of the options tbh.
Not bad, not good.
The DLC was really a lot better “writing” wise. The character had more depht (perk of having less of them) and Moxxi make a good story leader.
This DLC was great cause you really “felt” how thing had devolve like this
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I’ve spoken about this so many times before but for me, I didn’t mind what they were trying to achieve with the story. It was interesting that they moved away from the dynamic of it just being a big chaotic mess to make it more obvious that this was a bad guy and that the people we are teaming up with are heroes. In 2 they were the good guys but only really because we start off on their side. If we were someone who didn’t live or fight on Pandora and someone on the other side, they could easily see the bandits and the crimson raiders brig the bad guy. There wasn’t a hero. In the pre sequel, there wasn’t really a villain. We were working for Jack who at the time wasn’t straight up a villain - just some guy with goals and ambitions that didn’t coincide with other people. He became Handsome Jack, the baddie in 2, but we were more mercenaries and adventurers who were looking for a vault. In Tales there isn’t a clear cut hero - we’re on the side of Rhys because that’s who we’re playing as who is again just looking for a break and trying to accomplish a goal. In 3, it became clear straight away that we are the heroes that are going to save the planet.
I liked the Twins…but here’s my issue with 3. I can see where they were trying to go with the game, they just failed big time on its delivery. The goal was fine, the journey there was in my opinion really poorly executed.
It didn’t feel like it had any flow, characters seemed out of character and there was nothing that made me feel any ounce of emotion.
In Tales I heavy cried over Scooter AND Jack. The build up and how it was then executed was perfect. I like claptrap but when playing the dlc on TPS in overlook, I genuinely felt really sad for him. Even people I watch who hate claptrap said ‘poor claptrap’ and felt really bad for him. People who before would have happily shot him. And in 2, seeing how people dealt with the grief of losing Roland…it made them more human.
As someone who takes part in a lot of fan writing and roleplaying online, character development is really important otherwise the entire story feels dead. And if there’s no sense of urgency or dread, it’s flat. At no point in the game was I shocked or upset over what happened in terms of story.
I didn’t care about any of the new characters and they didn’t seem to have interesting backstories. Even the main baddies backstory was really ‘eh’ to me. The vault hunters we play aren’t very interesting either which is a shame as I do love Zanes quips…they could have made his backstory more interesting than ‘Oh you know captain flint? His brother.’ And even then we could have done the same as TPS and had character talk to the VH differently depending who you play. It’d have been cool if we meet Zero and Zane is like ‘here you killed my brother didn’t you? Big boy, massive ship stuck in a chunk of ice, reaaaally likes fire’ and then Zero or Maya reply to them. Just some kind of uniqueness for each play through.
I was upset in terms of how lazy it felt to just throw siren powers around (Tannis had so much potential! Why does she need to be a siren to be relevant?) and there were a lot of noticeable conveniences and plot holes that go against previously confirmed lore. And while that might not bug some people, it does bug me because it ruins the flow of the game.
For me, this game didn’t feel like a part of the borderlands story. It didn’t feel like a chapter of the borderlands universe - it felt like to me they were trying to rewrite a new universe, picking and choosing what they liked before.
And as any DnDers out there should know, whatever consequence of your story happens you need to continue with it. You can’t just change it because it doesn’t suit you - you should work with it, build up on it.
I still play the game because the gameplay is fun sometimes. But I still go back to 2 and the pre sequel a lot more because it’s replayable. And I love doing challenge runs on those (which is more about the VHs and their skill trees but different topic altogether) which I really don’t want to do on 3.
In short - it felt rushed, loose in terms of canon, non-immersive and left a lot of potential unexplored. But that’s just the story side.
It’s still a great game for blowing crap up and making ridiculous builds that make all the other vault hunters look weak. (Though that’s kinda another gripe I have.)
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Most of you already hit the nail on the head about the story, but I’ve found that the main thing that I don’t like are many of the characters in the story.
Lilith was a weak leader, Ava is an insufferable little brat, Moxxi and her pointless innuendos, Elie constantly sexually harassing the VH, and Claptrap wasn’t as good without the original VA. I couldn’t stand any of them, Elie especially got on my nerves. Vaughn is HORRIBLE as well. Like dude, put on some clothes, take a bath and quit with the damn screaming, “BLOOD FEUD!!!”, so corny and annoying.
Marcus was criminally underused and had no good lines. Would’ve liked for Maya and Zer0 to have some dialogue with one another given their history.
I liked
Clay
Rhys
Wainwright
… that’s all lol. Brick, Tina and Mordecai were all shells of their former selves. Except for that touching Mordy mission with the girl he took under his wing
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Yes, that’s probably the most realistic part of the story. Never ran into that whole cult of personality thing?
that and how Troy was such a lil bitch that Tyreen had to trick him to leave Nekrotefyo
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