When a brand new Borderlands challenge is coming, the query isn’t about whether or not or not it should play properly. The Borderlands collection is at all times enjoyable from a gameplay perspective, and in some instances – reminiscent of the primary two video games – leads to glorious shooter RPGs which have but to be crushed in some facets.
The issue is at all times with the tone. Some individuals love the humour in Borderlands, others discover it jarring. The video games strike the vibe of an HMV t-shirt of Rick and Morty. They’re a 3 for two provide on vape refills. It feels virtually not possible to think about a Borderlands recreation devoid of that, however what we’d love from Borderlands 4 is one thing that leans a lot nearer to the primary recreation within the collection than the third by way of writing.
Positive, the primary recreation had a little bit of web humour, however this was in a pre-Marvel dialogue local weather, one earlier than the web and meme tradition had parasitically contaminated every part. Evaluate that to Borderlands 3, the place the entire recreation was desperately making an attempt to depend on web memes and references that have been in all probability outdated as they have been being written.
We don’t assume that is ‘outdated man yells at cloud’ stuff, we simply assume it appears like a recreation being written for an viewers that doesn’t exist. Video games take a very long time to make. Memes are born, stay, and die inside every week. When the web was a kinder, extra novel place, you possibly can get away with a Leroy Jenkins joke or 40, however within the age of TikTok, go away the web humour to the web.
We’d love Borderlands 4 to depend on the characters and their relationships as the idea of humour. Introduce extra glorious facet characters like the primary two video games did, and put down the shotgun that’s jokes about Rizz and Skibidi Rest room.
This gained’t occur completely (as a result of we already know that Lilith will seemingly return), however we’d love Gearbox to fully reduce ties with the established lore and characters and take a look at one thing else with the identical gameplay basis. Positive, you may preserve Claptrap – we have been all 14 as soon as and located his dubstep quest in Borderlands 2 humorous – however we’d fortunately pay £600 for a model with out Tiny Tina.
From a gameplay perspective, there’s not an awesome deal we’d change from the latest entry. The factor the collection has by no means wavered on is how properly it dishes out loot. No recreation apart from maybe Diablo has so expertly captured the drip feed of latest weapons, and we wish that very same system to return.
Provide you with new grenade modifiers, insane results, weapons that shoot out 100 bullets directly in each path, we don’t massively care. The act of choosing up a gun and capturing at one thing as numbers explode off of them remains to be enjoyable, we simply need to be given a extra compelling motive to do it.
Borderlands is a fully large franchise for Take-Two and we think about the sport can be large, so we’d love for the collection to search out its toes once more. A completely terrible movie apart, there’s rather a lot to love about Borderlands, and whereas the third recreation was a little bit of a facet step, a sequel within the mould of 1 and a pair of might be glorious.
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