A Return to the 'Lands.
I’m sure like most of the gaming community out there, I’ve been pouring a lot of my gaming time into Borderlands 3. When it comes to large releases that I’m excited about, I tend to consume a lot of the information that’s out there leading up to the release. I do try to avoid spoilers, but sometimes I don’t even mind those. Usually the smallest amount of caution can keep one from stumbling across big ones, and my measure of what constitutes a spoiler is probably a lot more lax than the typical person. Some of the early reviews seemed mixed but generally ended up skewing positive (currently an 84 of Metacritic). They were also conducted under some really strange circumstances. There were some technical issues cited, as it appeared that people were reviewing without a pretty critical day one patch. The other common thread in the reviews I read is that Borderlands 3 is either more Borderlands or just more Borderlands, with the former tending to look at that as a positive, and the later, well, not doing that.
I’m not really here to argue one way or the other right now. I guess it’s at least worth stating that I do like the game. One thing both sides of the argument acknowledged, even if briefly, are the quality of life improvements in the game, and that’s really what I want to talk about.
It’s unlikely, but if you haven’t yet played Borderlands 3, I would recommend that you go play some Borderlands 2 before you boot it up. Ideally you would give it a couple of hours to really get into the groove of playing it. Even part of the Commander Lilith DLC should do the trick. I played a portion of the Commander Lilith DLC with a buddy a few nights before the release. Then I played a little bit more as Borderlands 3 installed. Doing so really highlighted just how well Borderlands 3 feels to play. The movement instantly feels more smooth and natural. Actually, no, smooth isn’t the right word. Fluid is probably a better description. The movement just feels right.
The other big quality of life change is that now you don’t have to hold down the X button (or whatever the accept button is on your platform of choice) in order to pick up cash or ammo. It sounds like such a small thing, and honestly you could easily argue that a game shouldn’t be praised for implementing something that they should have implemented from the start, but it has really removed the monotony of looting. This is how looting usually went for me:
Walk up to loot chest.
Open loot chest.
Hold down X as I quickly back away to loot next thing.
Nothing is collected.
“Did I fuck that up and back away too quickly?”
Go back. Hold X again to grab ammo/cash.
Oops, I accidentally had the prompt over that shitty common rocket launcher so now I’ve armed that and dropped the good weapon.
My buddy Josh steals the good weapon.
See, it’s not ideal.
That last major QoL change is that you now have the option to play with instanced loot for items (guns, grenades, shields, mods, etc). This also means that the loot scales to the level of each player as it drops, which is also great. Kind of takes all the guess work out of greedily grabbing shit as you pop boxes open. Not that Josh ever cared. Do you remember how in the first Borderlands they had a little loot feed at the top of the screen that would tell you when a member of your squad opened a chest? We’d be in the middle of a heavy firefight, screaming about how we were down, just watching the feed tick away about how much loot Josh was out there stealing. Thanks, Josh.
