I haven't seen anyone talking about this game, but I finished it with a friend i had been playing with over the course of two months or so to finally be done with it this past weekend. Borderlands 3 was a well known disappointment for a lot of people due to what Gearbox did with the story, but the gameplay for BL3 was actually quite fantastic, and BL4 makes the gameplay even better. Now you have double jumping, a glide pack, power slides, grappling hooks, lots of easy ways to zip around the battle field and make it feel more dynamic than just trading bullets with the bad guys until you win.
This move feels good in the open world setting, I don't really like the open world in general. I feel like Borderlands games felt good with just instanced areas that could sometimes be quite large, but still confined without everything bleeding together. But the open world does exactly that, everything sort of bleeds together. It also takes away agency from the story, BL4 effective has the same story as Far Cry 5 in which you have a big villain in the center of the map but you have to deal with his Champions first, each Champion has their own section of map and you can tackle them in any order. Problem there is that it means that no Champion can have a cannonical story because events have to assume that this Champion is the first one you are taking down. It also means that the different regions can't interact with each other in any way because interact would mean changes to things that you might not have done yet.
I will say the story and characters are better than BL3 for sure, but not by much. The biggest improvement for me is that BL3 was constantly trying to force feed you reddit meme quotes the whole game in which every character had to have a zinger quip at the end of every statement. BL4's writing is more reserved than that and the characters feel a lot better, there is no character I actively hated here, but there also aren't characters I actively liked either except Zane a returning vault hunter from BL3 here as an NPC and he's fantastic. To BL4's credit there were quite a few side quests though that did yield genuine lol's though.
Gunplay is solid but I found myself hating the new guns as a whole. There are Ripper guns and Order guns which both have the same general gimmick in which you have to charge up the weapon before firing it at full power and it never felt good to do. You have a lot of movement but so do the enemies so trying to charge a weapon up to blast a baddie is annoying because that baddie will be somewhere else before you shoot them. And the legendary drop rate sucks a fat load of shit. BL3 had a problem in which legendaries were WAY too common, making everything else in the game useless. BL4 has gone too far in the other direction making legendaries themselves useless because they're too rare to even find. In my entire playthrough, my friend and I found a total of 3 legendary items during the whole main story. Two of which were class mods that were not exciting at all. So I feel like the balancing there is bad.
To make up for the bad loot luck is that character skill trees all seem genuinely good, I played the Siren who summons grim reaper ghosts that absolute destroy things and gain element damage of whatever weapon I am using at the time. Very cool. And all three tree each character gets seem genuinely useful, which is a plus for the whole.
It was cool. Runs like dogshit, and has a few problems here and there, but it was a good time in the end.
This move feels good in the open world setting, I don't really like the open world in general. I feel like Borderlands games felt good with just instanced areas that could sometimes be quite large, but still confined without everything bleeding together. But the open world does exactly that, everything sort of bleeds together. It also takes away agency from the story, BL4 effective has the same story as Far Cry 5 in which you have a big villain in the center of the map but you have to deal with his Champions first, each Champion has their own section of map and you can tackle them in any order. Problem there is that it means that no Champion can have a cannonical story because events have to assume that this Champion is the first one you are taking down. It also means that the different regions can't interact with each other in any way because interact would mean changes to things that you might not have done yet.
I will say the story and characters are better than BL3 for sure, but not by much. The biggest improvement for me is that BL3 was constantly trying to force feed you reddit meme quotes the whole game in which every character had to have a zinger quip at the end of every statement. BL4's writing is more reserved than that and the characters feel a lot better, there is no character I actively hated here, but there also aren't characters I actively liked either except Zane a returning vault hunter from BL3 here as an NPC and he's fantastic. To BL4's credit there were quite a few side quests though that did yield genuine lol's though.
Gunplay is solid but I found myself hating the new guns as a whole. There are Ripper guns and Order guns which both have the same general gimmick in which you have to charge up the weapon before firing it at full power and it never felt good to do. You have a lot of movement but so do the enemies so trying to charge a weapon up to blast a baddie is annoying because that baddie will be somewhere else before you shoot them. And the legendary drop rate sucks a fat load of shit. BL3 had a problem in which legendaries were WAY too common, making everything else in the game useless. BL4 has gone too far in the other direction making legendaries themselves useless because they're too rare to even find. In my entire playthrough, my friend and I found a total of 3 legendary items during the whole main story. Two of which were class mods that were not exciting at all. So I feel like the balancing there is bad.
To make up for the bad loot luck is that character skill trees all seem genuinely good, I played the Siren who summons grim reaper ghosts that absolute destroy things and gain element damage of whatever weapon I am using at the time. Very cool. And all three tree each character gets seem genuinely useful, which is a plus for the whole.
It was cool. Runs like dogshit, and has a few problems here and there, but it was a good time in the end.
