Borderlands is a fantastic video game franchise. When I say "franchise" I specifically only mean the best/only game in the series. That game being Borderlands 2. I actually ripped the assets from Borderlands 2 to get the graphics that you see before you! Thank you very much to UE Viewer, a program that allowed me to do such things very quickly.
Borderlands 2 to me feels like the perfect storm. The writing is not all there, the characters are middling, but somehow the entire thing ties into one big mess that is incredible. Gearbox hit their stride, and managed to trip and fall into the best looter-shooter ever made.
I mean trip and fall very genuinely. There are insane, game breaking glitches that appear in droves throughout Borderlands 2. There are such glaring oversights in terms of level geometry and balancing mechanics that I am astounded that they are still in the game after 10 years. One quick jump around Sanctuary and one can easily see the glue and string holding this mess together. There are enough Moxxxi panty videos on YouTube to prove that as much.
Speaking of Santuary, it is probably the best hub world in gaming ever conceived. Jumping around the vast open spaces of Sanctuary is very satisfying to do. Whether you are waiting for your friends to connect to your game, deciding on what mission to do, or even just jumping for the sake of it. Sanctuary satisfies that innate urge that everybody has to just jump around brainlessly. I do it, my friends do it, everyone "Sanctuary Jumps".
"Sanctuary Jumping" is not only present in the Borderlands series. Far from it. Sanctuary Jumping happens in any videogame where the player feels compelled to jump around the level geometry pointlessly, without any particular goal in mind. I feel like this is an indicator of a good game. Actively idling in a game by exploring the geometry around you shows just how interesting the game itself is. Call me crazy, but I believe this is why Borderlands 3 falls so insanely short.
Borderlands 3 dropped the ball so hard that all of the positive parts about the game are quickly and easily swept away by the overwhelming negatives. Yes, the gunplay is better. Yes the skill trees are more interesting. These are the only two things in this game that I think are actually good. EVERYTHING else is so much worse. The characters, the story, the GRAPHICS EVEN. The bugs, the performance issues, the dialogue, the GUNS. It's all so bad...
I played this game day one on launch day. I was met with countless graphical glitches and general annoyances in the UI. The map screen is 3D, which was nice, but the controls to view the vertical parts of the map were very cumbersome to deal with. Claptrap had a new voice actor, which was weird. The humor is somehow worse than in 2. I am very confident in my opinion that the writers for Borderlands 3 are some of the worst in the industry. They have no concept of what it means to act human. They are ants in a sandhill trying to come up with witty banter for alien characters that have no concept of humor. It's actually astonishing.
To briefly speak on the hub world for 3... It is bad. Really bad. Not only is the hub world very maze-like, but it's also cramped and incredibly restrictive. No Sanctuary Jumping for you! You're in a cramped spaceship where the only way to get to the second floor is to walk up one of the two stairs in the hub. It's a complete mess, and it makes me think that every good thing done in 2 was a total fluke. It's that bad.
Borderlands 2 is easily one of the best shooters of all time. This is bolstered even more by Borderlands 3, which fails so badly at being a good game that it makes me appreciate everything in 2 even more. Jankiness and all. I appreciate the amount of oversights 2 has. It allows you to break the game in ways that aren't necessarily harmful to the overall experience. It was lightning in a bottle, and there will never be another game like it. It even has Midgemong...