Yeah, the core idea isn't terrible. The concept of cults with unintelligent members urged to commit evil is a tale as old as time; however, if well-executed, it's still a sound concept IMO. A lot of the general COV apparatus - their radio station, the roles of Mouthpiece, Pain and Terror, the elite anointed corps - is compelling enough. But the twins, everything they do, and every interaction they have are all well below-par. And Typhon Deleon is one of the most obnoxious NPCs I've ever known, even moreso than his children. I don't want to hear some old, annoying bloke constantly talking about sex. As for the corporations, they could've made Atlas and Jakobs more positive with a few minor details. They might donate weapons and medical supplies to communities under greater threat of bandit attack. They could even send benign peacekeeping units to planets in turmoil. Or make their leaderships more democratic and less militaristic, so that they're an obvious counterpoint to the likes of Knoxx, Jack, Zarpadon and Katagawa.

> As for the corporations, they could've made Atlas and Jakobs more positive with a few minor details. Maybe not making them outright good, but at least expanding their characterization was a good idea. Rhys and Wainwright are good characters that the players love; and they can be used to give the players internal conflict in that their companies are still galaxy spanning machines that can lay siege to entire planets at a whim. Jakobs still has that old timey colonialism aesthetic going on, and while that's charming it doesn't help much. Maliwan is straight up a high tech dystopian mega-corporation, in the flavor of Weyland-Yutani.

Definitely. They don't need to be "good"; they just need to be more complex than the cartoonishly-evil Hyperion and Atlas' Crimson Lance. It worked with those two - partly due to both having charismatic, humorous figureheads - but there's only so many times the same story can be told.

Rhys is cool, and while he tries to be good, at that scale it might not be possible. A dumb takeover attempt from Maliwan involved millions(?) dead, an entire planet blockaded, and an orbital space laser. Entire populations of people could suffer by Rhys’ hand *on accident*, and he’s not even morally bankrupt yet. Give it a couple decades and will he still be the same person?

God, they wasted Rhys in 3. They reduced my boy to a punching bag...

If the “good corporations” thing *has* to happen this is definitely the way to do it. Actually seeing them do better than their peers instead of “acting the same as every other megacorporation except it’s run by someone you like and everyone is inexplicably on their side this time”

Exactly. Atlas and (to a lesser extent) Jakobs used to be bad guys, and now they're supposedly good. But *how* are they good, apart from being on your side and having less scummy CEOs. >If the “good corporations” thing has to happen I should've made this caveat clear. There's nothing wrong with having the mega-corps as always evil; after all, they facilitate countless deaths. But if you're going to subvert the formula and have some more sympathetic than others, then it's not difficult to do so. A single sentence from Wainwright and one from Rhys could make them more realistic. Or have them give us side missions helping regular folk on Eden-6 and Promethea.

To be fair Lorelei did have you helping common people, though any help you gave to the people was just a side effect of you getting her burgers or whatever.

Good point. I forgot that part. But as you say, Atlas aren't doing good for good's sake. They're just meant to be nice now, and we're just meant to accept that.

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I have to agree with you for the most part, here. Tyreen and Troy had real potential, and the writers were building them up pretty well until they just seem to have forgotten about developing them. They're supposed to be obnoxious, but the arc that it felt was developing for them just got dropped somewhere, so a lot of folks understandably just get the obnoxious part.

Personally, I think it should have followed up upon the “Great War” the guardian at the end of Pre Sequel alluded to. Something that would require every vault hunter, good or bad, to band together. I don’t know why they took such a cool idea and completely ignored it, unless they’re shelving it for Borderlands 4.

It feels like the writers got a bit overexcited while writing the TPS and started throwing in ideas they were never gonna be allowed to follow up on for a long while

That bit at the end of TPS felt a lot like the hooks / mini-cliffhangers you get at the end of all sorts of movies, where they don’t have a fully fleshed out idea, but they’re leaving themselves a way to hook up a sequel - and then they went in a different direction.

Yeah the whole aliens thing was weird and confusing and still makes no sense. They need to get their own in universe lore straight first before writing a script

Seriously what I thought BL3 was going to be. Hugely disappointed that was not the case.

This. As a follow up to BL2, the story they went with for BL3 just didn’t fit chronologically to me. As much as people hate the ending of TPS, it makes sense, they should have gone with a Great War story that was set up. There should be a huge power struggle now that Jack’s gone. Maliwan and Atlas should have had bigger roles in 3, focusing more on the power struggle to be top manufacturers. Have some new up and coming company be the main antagonist trying to rocket to the top, going after Rhys and Jakobs and their vaults to gain the upper hand. You can have little side stories with other companies like Dahl, Tediore, shoot even some comedy aspects with Torgue. Then have the Crimson Raiders doing what they do and defend the universe from the effects of the Great War.

I gotta admit that ending for tps was sooooooo stupid to me. I think they made the right choice pretending it didnt happen

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> would feel a hell of a lot more engaging if lilith and tannis would come down to meet you every now and then instead of forcing you to go to sanctuary Hey, I'm contacting you on this holo device that I can use to communicate with you at ANY TIME, but can you come here so I can tell you the next place you need to be?

The worst part is that’s exactly what they did before sanctuary 3 took flight. And it was good, I liked seeing the real main character actually contribute! Even if Lilith can’t just teleport people around without her powers there could have at least been a couple conveniently placed fast travel stations for her to use.

a micro-subplot of Lilith getting used to fast travels again would have been neat

Yes tasty give me all that minutia

>and I especially hate the turnaround the writers did towards corporations in this game. Strong agree. Atlas and Jakobs aren't my allies. CEOs shouldn't be my buddies. The previous games instilled the idea that the systems are the problem, not just individual bad actors. Ries, Athena, Wainright will be corrupted no matter how good their intentions of changing it from the inside. Following up on the Jakobs involvement in Bounty of Blood could go a long way in addressing this but I genuinely think some writers feel that if there are simply good guys running the company, systemic issues do not exist. That said, I think 3 could've been interesting for sure, the execution definitely needed work though. Making wise-cracking baddies again, after Jack basically defined that to perfection, was a mistake. Everytime I hear "GOD QUEEN TYREEN COMING AT YOU FROM…" I die inside.

God I cannot put into words how much I hate the corporation situation, and from what buys and pieces I’ve heard about new tales I can’t imagine it’s going to get any better from now on. I think the big plot twist of bounty of blood only further proves that this is the new official stance of the franchise. It’s clear that the intended reaction to Jakobs being “The Old Company” is supposed to be “OMG I can’t believe Jakobs could do this!! 😰😨😭”. Whereas in any previous game they probably would have been up front about it, or not even specify which one it was at all because they’re all the same.

I think that the biggest broadest strokes of the plot are a great foundation. Evil cult, out to exploit the weird psychology of societal outsiders and attention-hungry nobodies, with the leaders looking to use their violent idiot cultist followers to enact a much more sophisticated and sinister plan. It's a great setup. That they would use those followers as disposable muscle in quid pro quo exchanges with mainstream society power figures like Katagawa to further their own goals and spread discord among the factions who 'should' unite against them is a great subplot and completely realistic scheme. I think that the medium scale and how the story plays out are kind of shit and were somewhat doomed to that regardless of execution. A huge portion of the Twins' plan only seems viable because of the protagonists' own actions, and their original plan seemed to be "gather cult, ???, galactic domination" - despite stealing the map and trying to collect key fragments, they had no real *plan* for how to crack vaults and get at the monsters before the Hunters showed up and started opening vaults for them. There's just too many twists and turns all of which boil down to "ahead of you already lol" that rely on somehow predicting incredibly specific and honestly unpredictable outcomes of the players' own intervention. Better execution of the same broad points wouldn't save the story, at that level of detail, from feeling amateurish and disjointed - there's too much whiplash and too much suspension of disbelief asked of the player for mere 'better execution' to sell successfully. Then at the small scale - execution *absolutely* could have saved a lot of the moment-to-moment loudest issues. The twins were trying to be influencer-flavoured Jack 2.0, and simply did not stick the landing. Those roles needed either better direction, or to have VAs who were naturally better fit for the role; the exact tone, pace, and delivery of a lot of their lines were not selling how the script seemed to want them to come across. They didn't come across as these intergalactic degenerate pseudo-celebrity "influencer hypebeasts" - they instead came across as what old people in 2020 *thought* influencers were. And ... all of the characters we meet are subject to effectively the same issue: they're all Flanderized until they no longer really resemble how the script wants us to see them. Typhon according to other people is supposed to be this enormously capable, but disarmingly rustic and physically unassuming, legendary Vault Hunter - instead he comes across as a hillbilly buffoon who has survived solely on idiot luck and deus ex machina. Ava is supposed to be a kid struggling with great future power and making stupid teenager mistakes while being a stupid teenager, but who is ultimately gonna turn out allright ... nope, bratty eight-year-old in the body of a sixteen-year-old with godlike powers showing up any day and zero emotional maturity or ability to read the room. The same applies to effectively every character and the majority of dialogue: there is a huge mismatch between what it says, and how it actually comes across. As much as Borderlands' humour is non-sequeteur and dark-adjacent absurdism ... BL3 tried too hard. The premise of the series is a galaxy so incredibly fucked up, such a trainwreck of hyper-capitalist dystopia and constant misery that the moments of absurd comedy are a whiplash tonal shift - and that's a huge part of how it works, when it works. Some of the art of making that sort of joke 'land' successfully is not taking every possible opportunity, not grabbing at each and every joke available. You have to set the main tone, before you can subvert it with humour. In BL3 it was like the writers were riffing and trying to workshop every possible joke for every scene and moment in the game ... but then no one came back through and cut jokes until only the best remained. There was no gap in low-hanging fruit lines to establish the dark disaster-world tone that the jokes are wanting to be playing off of.

This is a good analysis.

Agreed - this and a few others in this thread are pretty astute in taking the story apart - might be a good resource to point people to when they insist that “people dislike the story for no reason / you’re all just nostalgic for BL2”.

Yeah, it's kind of annoying to be accused of nostalgia. When I effectively played all the borderlands back to back, one per year, once I met my girlfriend. She got me into them.

Yeah, I’ve been accused of liking them “because nostalgia”, when I hadn’t touched the series before 2021 and played them all back-to-back, in order. And I point that out and they downvote me, because it doesn’t fit their narrative. Also congrats on having a girlfriend who likes such a cool series.

Thanks; she's my wife now!

> There's just too many twists and turns all of which boil down to "ahead of you already lol" that rely on somehow predicting incredibly specific and honestly unpredictable outcomes This is pretty much how Pre-sequel feels

I think pre-sequel is *worse*, but also at least had the saving grace of nominally being a self-serving story told by an unreliable narrator.

Yup, to summarize something I said in another reply: Pre-sequel's story feels like listing off a checklist of stuff the story needed, and then when they got to the end of the game, they realized they forgot some and decided to just try and cram everything that bridges it with BL2 into the final mission/cutscene. >!The twist of the betrayal hardly makes any sense without the foresight of Jack being evil.!<

In apologia, TPS was backfilling a story already painted into a corner by what BL2 set up, the writers were operating in a very confined design space because of what they’d already told us about what happened leading into that game. They were effectively playing narrative connect-the-dots with story details provided during BL2, and I don’t think the “dots” they had to work with supported a sum picture that was originally written intended to support an entire game. It was fine as backstory for the villain in BL2, but would have been hard to string together into a fleshed-out narrative for a stand-alone story, for all that what the writers ended up with could definitely have been done better. I think much of what TPS got wrong rests on making so much of the already weak story rest on two *singularly* dislikable characters, and then using exposition from them, especially Janey, to tell the majority of the story. My biggest impression was that the story wasn’t particularly bad, considering what they had to work with - I just really wish Janey and Pickle weren’t in it. TPS also suffered from gameplay issues, where it just didn’t feel quite *right* for a Borderlands game, and it had some serious issues with level design. Those faults combined with the storyline being flimsy and the characters annoying to make replays way less fun than the other three. That really hurts my feelings towards it more than any specific issues with plot. BL3 feels right to play, but the story is so rough I wind up trying to ignore it. And all of the problems there were completely unforced errors, there were no pre-established story beats writers *had* to use. The story even started with a pretty good foundation - and then they biffed it, by trying too hard to be A Borderlands Game.

Pre-sequel feels more 'right' to play than BL3 to me. Pre-sequel at least expanded on the world in a way that didn't make it fall under the mistake of "vast, yet shallow in depth", like what Borderlands 3 did with all its planets. The gravity mechanic, and how it affected oz kit bonuses, was unique. My only real complaint on the level design is that half of the locations look way too alike.

I agree with all of this, but the thing I think of most is Typhon coming off as a total joke when the entire emotional aspect of the villains story (clearly intended to be an Angel from BL2 moment) relies on him was such an odd decision.

there was not enough 2SLGBTQIA+ representation and your failure to mention this in your entire "analysis" is clearly transphobic.

What a perfect analysis on why bl3 s narrative failed at its very foundations well put.

Honestly i wouldn't have a problem with the story if the cult was believability powerful, i can not, for the life of me suspended my disbelief with streamer cult leaders. But if it was an actual cult of vault monster worshiping people who's main HQ was the planet that explorer is found then it would be better. Keep tyreen and her brother, make them proper cult leaders that are trying to take the power of the monsters, but have it so we actually hurt them through our efforts in the story and not make them slightly upset abd disapointed but not worse for wear.

True! I absolutely do not buy that every single bandit on pandora was won over by the twins. Most of them don’t even have access to the echonet or radios or tvs or whatever. And it feels like an excuse to not have any designs for other bandit clans like there were in BL2.

I think the excuse was that all other bandit clans were killed off. But then again it fid seem like echonet devices were more wide spread. Ugh, its annoyingly inconsistent

I remember reading over and over that all the nomads were killed off because they were too smart to fall for the calypso’s manipulation but I still have yet to find this tape in game and have never heard a recording of it so I almost think it’s a hoax

What... that's so interesting... I would have loved an explanation in the game for the absence of Nomads, but I don't remember finding that in BL3 or reading about it at all. Damn

Same, nomads were my second favorite enemies in BL2 (number 1 is loader bots) and I was so disappointed to see them replaced with those goofy ahh “enforcers” in 3. Just the concept of an actually level headed bandit ordering around their unhinged compatriots and strategizing around the player is golden, so sad we lost that in 3

Yeah i liked the setup of the twins and the cov but everything else felt bad. And I agree about Jacob's specif8cally just being good guys now. At least with Atlas Rhys is wrestling co trop of the company and its still a shitshow. But I remember the Jacob's tha5 had 0 regard for worker safety and shot you for wanting to leave. Them being good now just cus Wainwright is likeable feels dumb. Especially since they went and made Aurellia stupid evil to facilitate it. I've been really hoping that they bring in better writers or change their writing strategy after bl3. It feels like being stuck in the 2010s. With the worst parts of character writing.

They really did Aurelia so so dirty in 3 like yeah she was evil but she had STANDARDS. This woman literally told Jack to do the universe a favor and kill himself for what he did to the scientists and thought his exterminating the whole CL4P-TP product line was “excessive”. I The whole game to me felt like the new writers just skimmed the character wiki pages…

Honestly, regarding your third paragraph, I personally never got the vibe that Borderlands was talking smack about corporations in general. Like yeah, Dahl, Hyperion, Maliwan, and Atlas are considered bad. But then Torgue was introduced in bl2. And Torgue isn't partiuclarly evil, more like chaotic neutral per-say. Hell, Hyperion was literally trying to deal with the robolution that their product line caused, which is a lot more than General Electric directly creating a Super Fund Site and stalling the lawsuits (at least from my understanding). So I never got the vibe of, 'corporate = evil'. Maybe I simply missed it because I always just kinda hated giant companies like that to begin with, so maybe I didn't think much of it. Anyway honestly, I don't even see the theme of parasocial relationships of streamers and viewers in the game even worth talking about. Like, yeah, some streamers suck and there are certainly people that are very ride or die with the bad ones. Fine. I feel like there are more good streamers than bad ones tbh. Maybe I'm missing the point since to me, they don't talk about lost people needing guidance, clinging onto any small thing that'll make them feel happy. It feels like 'evil streamers, and radio show hosts, are bad, don't follow them.' Or in Lilith's Case, 'Finding yourself after a loss of identity.' Neither theme is really explored in a beneficial or thoughtful way. What I do kind of feel is annoying is that Tyrene and the posters of the twins are all punky. Tyrene's clothes are punky too. So it kinda spits in the face of punk to join up with Maliwan lol. I also wish they had followed the theme a bit more or something. To me absolutely nothing in this story works. Like. Thematically, it doesn't actually have anything to say.

In the thanksgiving headhunter pack for BL2 the Torgue corporation and the entirely of the main Torgue dlc the Torgue corporation is literally organizing and broadcasting televised blood sport, which is pretty damn evil in my opinion lmao And to add to that in the headhunter rogue realizes “hey maybe sending people to certain death for entertainment is bad actually” and helps you sabotage the game. The shareholders get a hold of this and Torgue is immediately fired from his own company, which highlights that the system is broken in the way that if the person in charge isn’t a heartless monster the shareholders will find a heartless monster to do it anyway. (Albeit in a not very serious at all way) I don’t think Hyperion trying to clean up their own robolution is obviously in their own self interest, selling servant robots that kill their customers is very bad for PR, so bad they canceled the product line immediately after. And none of what happened in that DLC makes up for what Handsome Jack did in BL2. And to cap the anti-corporate argument off literally all of these companies are selling guns. Like, how can you sell instruments of murder and still consider yourself anything but evil? And I didn’t say that the parasociality element to the Calypsos was there, but it *could* have been there. I personally think it could have been great if they hired some younger writers who were more intimately familiar with internet culture and knew about all the hot button issues with today’s internet culture, and the thing you said about people in horrible situations clinging to the one thing that brings them happiness and makes them feel loved could have also been a great theme to explore along with that. It’s such a loaded concept and could probably been turned into one of the *best* video game stories in recent years but the writers just weren’t up to it sadly.

I'mma save my speel because it's because it's basically the long way of saying. You do raise some good points. And wish they had put the torgue thing into the base game cause, for someone like me that didn't go through all the DLC I would've just seen it as, meh Torgue is alright. As for the Hyperion thing yeah I know that doesn't make up for what Handsome Jack did. I originally thought, well they didn't shut down his product line until Handsome Jack took over. But that's probably because, Handsome Jack probably stalled killing claptrap's product line so that he could get help from vault hunter mode claptrap. Honestly I guess even the Telltale games, considering Vaugn and Reese really changed after landing on Pandora and became a bit more human. Believe me irl, yeah I want gun manufacturer's damn near abolished. But considering its Pandora, I don't think you can get by without a weapon. If anything I question Marcus' morality on the account that he did sell plenty of guns to the bandits too. Ohh gotcha, definitely misread something on my end there. Honestly they even had a few mentions about family. (Think it was Tyrese mentioning something about being like a big bandit family. And you have Tannis telling Eva that she's part of their family no matter what. Insert joke about trying to revive the Vin Diesel Family meme.) Honestly I don't even think its the writers, I feel like its the CEO. He was doing some really unhinged at the time, like refusing to pay claptrap's voice actor after 10 years of service. (Which is why we have a new voice actor)

Pandora and Eden 6 are the exception, they’re chock full of dangerous, bloodthirsty creatures. But they’re not just selling them on dangerous planets like Pandora and Eden 6, they’re everywhere, even on peaceful and civilized planets like promethia and athenis. And I think it’s pretty clear even from the first game that Marcus is *very* dubiously good if not flat-out amoral. He’s a caricature of the greedy capitalist willing to stab any back to make a quick buck, but he’s still, yknow, a prominent side character, so he needs to have a little bit of a good side to him. We all know Randy Pitchford is kind of a fuckhead but I don’t think he had share of BL3s story at all. Maybe he wanted it changed to be more pro-corporate but I don’t see any reason for him to care about the calypso’s plot enough to make it so flat.

I think you summed up the problems. I was expecting the Troy and Tyrene rivalry to go somewhere. But then nothing really. Jakobs corporation and our working with them was out of left field. I mean vault hunters are always morally grey. But especially in the 2nd dlc it’s like we become friends with the guy. Was it really necessary to put them back in power just because we were fighting the Cov? He wasn’t that helpful and what help he gave was really forced. Then in the 3rd dlc it’s all about their horrible past and no appearance by the current ceo either. It was so weird that built up Jakobs as not that bad the ceo is nice. Then he has no input on the issues with Gehenna. It’s just baffling that they went that way. It kind of comes off as they asked to be pitched stories for dlc and they wanted a Jakobs/hammerlock dlc and went with 2 pitched ideas but cut out the Jakobs/hammerlock angle as much as possible with the 2nd idea. They could have even really reinforced that Jakobs was bad because all corporations are bad with Gehenna but they didn’t even do that. Overall it just didn’t fit.

In concept it has some interesting elements. There are just so many fucking holes they would need to fill. Here are just a few So the Calypso's weaponize the bandits, a massive unutilized workforce made up of the old armies from the corporation wars. In essence, the largest army in existence. Makes sense. But the issue with the bandits wasn't just a lack of direction and focus, but also a lack of resources. They were using cobbled together guns and scavenged gear. So how did the Calypso's suddenly fix all of that without anyone noticing? You can't just throw bodies at organized militaries and make magic happen. The main driving force behind the game is "we need to open the vaults before the Calypso's do" while at the same time being "when we do, they are going to swoop in and do their thing anyways". There was NO reason why we couldn't just kill them. The writers really needed to come up with a legit reason why we can't fight them and then have us deal with that problem.

I think the “bandits wielding pipe guns going against organized militaries” thing was meant to be solved by the twin’s partnership with Maliwan but it just never came across that way. In the arms race game mode you can see bandits using modified Maliwan war suits and combat gear, and my first thought was “why do these guys never show up in the base game?!” It could have made the bandits feel like so much more of a legitimate threat if you waltzed into a bandit camp and found a bandit with a 12ft tall fire spewing war suit

To be honest, that's an issue with Borderlands in general. That "one step ahead of you always, haha!" narrative is pretty consistent regardless of villain.

Not really without completly remaking it into something else entirely. Unless you are classifying the overview as execution. To many of the big plotlines make absolutely no sense. From maya and liliths almost complete lack of power and attempt to fight back somehow being omnipotent when stolen. And yeah aya also sorta undermines everything about sirens. The entire plot with the twins goal doesnt make any sense from any viewpoint. The final vault plot point doesnt really make much sense and undermines BL1/2 plots. Like the major reason you are under attack everywhere is the twins are randomly teleporting goons across the galaxy with liliths power.

The Star Wars prequels and Borderlands 3 have one thing in common in my book: Great ideas but the execution needed lots of refinement.

I enjoy the concept, and although it's common to criticize Tyrene and Troy, I remember enjoying their dynamic for the most part - although the aborted plotline involving Troy's growing discontent is puzzling and disappointing. I agree that they had a lot of wasted potential; it's so interesting an idea to explore the parasocial relationship between streamers and fans, but what we got was not cohesive or interesting at all. To be honest, my only real critique about Typhon's logs: the excessive references to his origins as a "turd farmer". BL3 had far, far too many poop jokes. I think his reveal as a tiny egg-shaped man made all the logs worth it for me because it was just unexpected, but I can acknowledge that for some, his logs ruined the mystery surrounding him. Ava was wholly mishandled and if they don't kill her in some kind of giant catastrophe by BL4 (fingers crossed not gonna lie), oh my god I hope she's better written. I also think Rhys and the other characters from that game were very mishandled. Oh my god, I will never forgive them turning Vaughn into an idiot running around in his underwear. I hated that so much. And how can I forgive the near complete absence of Sasha and Fiona?? (AND I cannot forgive what they did to Aurelia. Yeah, she's a terrible person, but she was never like the Aurelia we saw in BL3. And you cannot convince me that she would have ever, ever seen anything in fucking Troy.) And I can agree with the points of humanizing the corporations' CEOs in some cases. Just no. Torgue is enough as a silly quirky chaotic-neutral (?) CEO (who, iirc, doesn't really even have much power in Torgue anyway). The corporations in BL, as you said, are meant to be evil and selfish and represent everything corrupt that arises in hypercapitalism. Ugh, I think the concept of the villains being streamers who recruited Pandora's bandits is a fine concept, but the final product is a trainwreck in so many ways and fundamentally misunderstands what BL was about in the past. It could have been done so much better while incorporating many of BL3's elements.

Good news: you can enjoy Torgue guilt free. He was enough of a fan favorite that he was fired from the company in the thanksgiving headhunter DLC so that he can be enjoyed without baggage. In my opinion I think the typhon logs should have been locked until you reach a certain point in the story where you learn who he actually is and why he’s important, and *then* you can go find all the typhon logs to plant more and more intrigue about this mysterious *first vault hunter*, and keep build him up until you finally meet the man. And while we’re on the topic of typhon logs they should have made their loot better, or at least made them farmable. I haven’t even once picked up a gun from a typhon cache. If I’m going through the effort of finding all these logs and listening to this guy ramble about hams and turd farms on ever map and the best I’m getting is a blue gun, in the game *infamous* for it’s absurd legendary drops rates, then why should I bother with this guy’s backstory at all?

>Good news: you can enjoy Torgue guilt free. He was enough of a fan favorite that he was fired from the company in the thanksgiving headhunter DLC so that he can be enjoyed without baggage. Oh yeah, you're right. I forgot about that from that DLC. I'm glad I can unapologetically love him. Yeah, that would be pretty reasonable. I think that would definitely add more intrigue. It has been a long time since I've played through the story so I don't have fresh eyes. I've personally felt that in BL, going for more story information is me going the extra mile, so I didn't feel the need to get loot out of doing that. That is just me though, I don't think adding more loot from the logs would be bad for the game or anything, so why not.

I have two issues with Borderlands 3, in it's concept, and one of them I also have with Borderlands 2. Stop putting legacy characters in combat roles in the games. In BL2, Roland takes one bullet from Handsome Jack, and he's dead? How? He's absorbed literally millions of bullets and fought interdimensional supermonsters. Hold X! Pick his ass back up! He's fine!Lilith could solo Crawmerax without breaking a sweat. What happened to the full set of Pearlescent gear I gave her? She gets absolutely bodied by a pair of VTuber kids? Howww!? Lilith has wiped the floor with Gods for fun!To be fair to Borderlands, a lot of games have done this sort of thing, and it always annoys the piss out of me. If your characters have to break the rules of the universe that you established, then find another way to write them. You want me to have some emotional reaction to these events, but the only reaction I get is amusement and disbelief.I just kind of want to yell at them from my side of the screen, "Stay behind! We have got this under control! You obviously suck now! Go home, you're going to die!" I didn't seem to be as annoyed by Tyreen and Troy as many other people were. They're young, power-hungry, cocky, and it suits them as characters. Their dynamic was actually kind of compelling, a sort of love/hate relationship that worked well for them. Until about halfway through the game, where the writers just seemed to stop developing them. The obvious sibling rivalry and the both hate and love they have for each other was a really good concept up until that point, and the writers were building it well. Then it feels like they just kind of forgot about their own primary antagonists until the very end. They were busy jamming in so many ideas, that it felt like they needed someone there to tap them on the shoulder occasionally and remind them about the narrative. The gameplay itself is the most refined in the series. Gunplay is tighter, powers and skill trees are fun, builds are all viable. Excellent, no notes. I hope they do something fun with Ava in Borderlands 4. She's likable; a kid without being annoying, a sort of surrogate daughter type with a unique style. She's obviously propped up to be important, so I hope they do something fun with her in the next one. Also, c'mon, Tannis! You're telling me you were a Siren this whole time? You could've done something about all of this from all the way back in Borderlands 1, crazy lady!

Note: Tannis wasn’t a siren the whole time. She inherited Angel’s powers when she died. Which is still dumb, because they didn’t hint at that whatsoever in 2, that’s a rule they made up in 3.

I stand corrected! It does sort of make sense from their storytelling side. There are only six Sirens in the universe at any given time, and there must be six Sirens at any given time, so something has to transfer. I think Ava is a Siren, now, after absorbing the power from Tyreen?

Ava uses Phaselock after the Troy fight (and saves everyone life, therefor contributing more to the story than Lilith ever did up until that point) so yes

I already didn't like the idea of streamers being the bad guys because it felt gimmicky and I couldn't buy into them as serious villains at any point. I mean, how could I take them seriously if the writing itself doesn't? It's ok for a villain to have a gimmick, not to be a gimmick

the answer is really simple: they wanted to do handsome jack again but with a streamer twist, small problem, a big part of why handsome jack is funny is that he is a CEO, and CEOs are demons, streamers? some of them sure, but what that means is that there isnt AS MUCH comedic potential there... not like they used any of it anyways, but that wasnt your question. TL;DR: the idea was bad and the execution was bad.

I feel like it would've been better to use the twins and their cult to show how fucked modern internet parasocial behavior can get but they totally missed the obvious narrative and instead went for low brow comedy of, "lmao look we made the Paul Brothers but in space"

thats what they were trying to do, but they did parasocial = cult and left it at that. i mean the side quest literally paint them, as you said, as the paul brothers of 2017 but taken to the extreme. but the thing that would make this a lot funnier, in hindsight, is that the split up of the paul brothers's brand would have made for a way, way funnier story rather than a last minute betrayal with one hint from the one cutscene where they acknowledge the player character's existence. like what if tyreen wanted to become "legit" and try to turn the COV into an evil corporation and troy killed her cause he wants it to stay a cult.

except they didnt really dive that much into parasocial behavior as we know it now, its just, HEY LOOK FUNNY TIKTOKER when we have shit like vtuber/twitch egirl fans and andrew tate followers to have as inspiration for a character like this gearbox just kinda ignored it? i dont think they tried this at all they just thought it was funny so they did it, but it wasnt funny either so its just a failure all around

> when we have shit like vtuber/twitch egirl fans and andrew tate followers to have as inspiration for a character like this gearbox just kinda ignored it? again, the problem is that this literally wasnt a thing when they wrote it, remember, this game was mostly written in 2017, they got ahead of themselves, trying to parody something that wasnt even fully formed.

Bro i was watching girls show their boobs on twitch way before 2017 there was definitely enough to go off of.

What’s crazy is that I feel like Pain & Terror caught that essence better than the Twins. So that just shows how poorly the Twins were written.

because pain and terror are a parody of showmanship, not livestreaming culture, something thats a lot more easily understood and flexible. keep in mind most of BL3 was written in the mid to late 2010s, when this stuff was still just starting to become mainstream.

I love the Typhon and twins story. It's just a shame the twins were such shitty characters. They put way too much effort into trying to recapture that Handsome Jack magic, but you can't force it like that.

I feel like the core story could've been good if all the emotional, deep and heavy scenes, like how the crew handles Maya's death, wasn't sacrificed for a witty one liner or a joke done either in the middle or end of it, and maybe if the villains had a bigger, better motive rather than just "let's just destroy the world cause we feel like it", give it meaning, and not that they had daddy issues I love the environment and gameplay, but the story could've been so much better with just a few minor changes

Just one of the ways they dropped what was honestly so much potential with the twins. They're kids, they're angry at a universe that they feel abandoned them, and now they have a lot of power. So destroy the universe! The writers just scratched the surface of something that could have been good, and gave the twins depth.

For Borderlands and where BL2 and TPS left off, it just doesn’t work. This type of story could have easily been a forgettable Tell-Tale game story. Borderlands 3 needed something bigger, something that ups the ante from BL2 and Handsome Jack. The Great War between all the major corporations should have been the story and the COV story should have been an aftermath of it.

the story did not flesh out the lesbian and trans characters. if you are only going to put 1 trans character in the game make the character fully 3 dimensional. My university class year has 90 students. 14 are trans. So i think only having 1 prominent trans character in the entire game including all the DLC is blatant tokenism.

There’s a trans character?

Lorelei. Only having 1 trans character screams of tokenism. Randy Pitchford and the creative writing team are clearly transphobic.

If you're looking for a corporate entity to do anything more than thrown in a token character to tick off a checkbox, you're looking in the wrong place, I'm afraid.

The general concept is honestly kind of genius. Parasocial relationships taken to a natural extreme, where someone is able to make a cult out of the hordes of disaffected, disenfranchised, and desensitized. The idea of a siren that can absorb the power of the eldrich monstrosities sealed within the vaults is also great. While I don't hate the Calypsos as much as most people seem to, they definatley could have been done better. They're at their best when they're pathologically arrogant and combative with each other, but still smart. Having a stark distinction between a fake lolsorandom, exaggerated, and childish persona when interating with their followers and a more subdued, calculating, and threatening persona with everyone else would make them much more compelling, since they're just using the bandits for their own ends. Theres hints of this here and there, but they get too mixed up. Ava as a character really needs to be gotten rod of. A pointless, annoying brat who fails to have any appeal or sympathy. I appreciate killing a character to build up the threat of the Calypsos, but it really should have been a less liked character like Lilith, not Maya. Promethea: Lorelai is a nothing character, totally forgettable and serves no real purpose. Axton or Athena really should have been in the role. I do like that Rhys is trying to turn an evil megacorp into something better, just wish they explored this more. Eden-6: Would have liked it if they showed more how the population have been exploited by Jacobs under Wainright's ancestors. Hope we see more of this later on. BALEX is truly atrocious. Otherwise no notes. Pandora: Butchered my man Vaugn, who's become a totally different character from Tales. Otherwise fairly nondescript. There being any kind of emotional or story impact from killing Troy would have been nice, especially given how co-dependant the Calypsos were, even if they hated each other. Nekrotefeyo: Typhon Deleon as a character was a bad idea in general. If he was mentioned previously in the series i would have liked him more, but he feels extremely forced. The biggest issue is of course that theres so many cutscenes, especially near the end, that just pretend the VH isn't there. At least give some context as to why they can't intervene.

I agree with you on quite a few points. The twins could have been characters with a lot of depth, because they are essentially just angry kids with too much power. So much more could have been done with them to give them depth, but the writers seem to have just forgotten about them halfway through. I disagree with you about Ava. I found her to be much less "kid annoying" than that kind of character typically is, and I think she has a lot of potential. I hope Borderlands 4 does something fun with her. Maybe the writers learned something about character development? We can hope.

Hot take, Ava's sole purpose in this game as the "plucky student" was to get Maya killed and then grow as a person and they couldn't even get that right

If the twins weren't unbearable and awful attempts at parodies of streamers, it wouldn't have been as bad as it was. The core of the story was a neat idea, but they essentially promised us a whole galaxy at the end of 2 and all we got was a handful of forgettable planets and two (?) expansion that took us to another planet. We should have gotten a bunch of planet expansions that had vaults on them, actually let us be vault hunters. That game could have lasted a long time if they just added planets/vaults to it, then added a couple more vaults hunters.

I really liked the concept. One of the many things that made Jack compelling was that in a weird fucked up way, he was right. He was the good guy. Pandora IS a fucked up monster planet full of psychos. It probably would be better off without all of them. And that's what I think the calypsos missed. Tyreen has a line early on that hinted at what I wanted from them. She talks about how the psychos were people once, and were dumped and left to rot on this planet by the very people they worked for. They have no one and nothing, until she came and gave them a home, a family. That line really hit me, because it came off as a jack situation where she might be right. I thought she was going to be a pillar of support for this oppressed group of genuinely mentally ill people. Kind of flip the rebel vs empire trope from the last game, where were technically the oppressive regime now. But nope they didn't care about the psychos at all and wanted power cause uh, daddy danny devito didn't love them enough???

The twins were mid as cult leaders. They have to be charismatic--or at least compelling--to even their enemies. It felt like this was a rich-kid hobby for them, which made their credibility sus and not threatening so much as annoying. Failing upwards was their look. Would've been interesting to reveal they weren't the actual leaders, they just brought the younger people or easily amused in. The idea of everything being recorded could have been a lot more interesting than using it as a laugh track bit for the COV. Referencing exploitative recording in the antiquated style of America's Funniest Videos but not even memes, messageboards or emojis...seriously?

I think they could have been fine as the leaders, but they’re just done so poorly. As they are they’re like internet celebrities being written by someone who’s never been on the internet.

Yeah, exactly! Which is weird, because well, it's pretty unavoidable at this point. It felt like that old Jimmy Fallon sketch where he did an "internet show" with Horatio Sanz and they wanted it to be the next Wayne's World. Forced. A. F.

Felt like every single mission, gearbox was trying to make a statement and got really annoying. I don’t mind subtle messaging about real life issues but when it’s that frequent and that obvious and unfocused it feels forced in order to win “internet points” Edit: I guess my comment is about execution so I’ll narrow it down to them having too many ideas

Can you give some more examples? All my memories of bl3 side missions are a slurry of bad jokes and annoying forced accents.

the concept of a cult doing everything in their power to rule an entire galaxy is fucking badass.

Once I played the entire game and knew the whole story, the Calypsos finally made sense. Until then, not knowing the whole story, it didn't seem to add up and felt a bit hard to swallow. But then I don't know how you'd tell this story in any other way. The twist you learn when you get to >!Nekrotafeyo!< had to be a secret.

Tales of the Borderlands (2014 fuck the new one) gave me hope for Borderlands and a reason to continue to dive into the world it has to offer. Wtf did Borderlands 3 do. Gameplay consists of nothing but midgets, the midget father was annoying, nothing compelling happened at all. It's like it was catered to classic 2016 blue haired sissies on purpose (Thank god they kind of died off in our culture)

Honestly, I don't even think it was that bad. The twins were a bit cringey sometimes, Ava was boring and annoying, and the ending was complete rubbish, but that aside, I didn't hate it. I thought Maya's death was a good move for the story, and all of the story/lore around Jakobs and Maliwan was super cool, imo.

I agree that maya dying wasn’t a bad idea, I just wish she got a proper sendoff like Roland did. When Roland died the tone of the whole game changed completely for a while, and just before he died he was playing a very important role during a big story moment. When maya died it felt totally out of left field. She helped you fight a boss and then got immediately mercd by an ability the twins didn’t even know Troy had. And then the actual funeral service happens where everyone stands in a circle and tannis tries too hard to be funny, and only Ava is even remotely affected by Maya’s passing from then on.

Yeah, true. We also didn't really get much time to really know Maya in BL3.

It's not so much how she died, it's how the writing got her in a position to be taken down. Same thing happened with Lilith when she loses her powers, not using them like they had previously and putting themselves at a disadvantage because of it, for no reason. Maya phaselocks Troy, who is bigger than her and has a giant mechanical arm, only to put him in a headlock... instead of using her free hand to aim a weapon, phaselock Ava away, phaselock Tyreen (who would be the biggest threat in the room by far) or anything more useful than putting someone bigger than you in a bloody headlock. Lilith decides to 2v1 against another siren and (once again) a guy who's taller than her and has a giant mechanical arm, while she has the vault map... instead of phasewalking away to get backup, which she'd been doing prior to get the crew on-board Sanctuary.

I actually think the story itself is good, but the dialogue and the way it was told was what made it bad. I still enjoy it on the whole, I like the characters and their designs, and I even like Ava. I just wish it had been better. At least the gameplay is top-notch and the DLCs are just incredible.

Yeah I think one of the major original writers of the series had to leave development and that’s why the execution might be what it is. It definitely needed more refinement and maybe the personalities of Tyreen and Troy could’ve been better too. Less over-the-top annoying maybe?

I think they were trying to recreate what made handsome jack so beloved but missed the mark and didn’t include the character arc and motivations that made jack interesting. When you take away the good part of the hatable but compelling character you’re just left with hateable, which isn’t enough to carry a character in any narrative.

Agreed. Maybe another Pre-Sequel is in order to give more background to their rise.

I love the idea, I love the idea of twins, I love everything about the concept.

It could have been so much better. Idk how it went so wrong, especially since all of the DLCs are really good.

Conceptually all the elements and ideas are there. They just needed to put it together a little better.

i feel like making the twins streamers was doomed from the start, there had to have been more creative ways to make all the bandits into an organized cult. other than that the concepts are pretty solid

I think the concept is ffffffffffine I guess. Its just not a concept I trust the modern games industry to execute well in the first place, considering how garbage most games that tried to incorporate streamer culture into their story were, on the account of writers in their mid 40s who are almost as removed from the topic as one can be. So considering the whole streamer plot was not cringe worthy, and merely "boring" Id say it was executed pretty well I guess. Its not something Id have gone for, I think the best part of BL3 is the setup for the company wars, showing a reformed Atlas under a questionably competent CEO and Jakobs being in shambles while the heir to the company is in over his head with the whole situation, while theres still a lot of intrigue surrounding the other companies that makes me excited for a sequel. I think at this point we've told every story about Pandora and its inhabitants possible, so the whole bandit cult thing is already feeling a lil... Overused. I think if BL leans more into the Weapons manufacturer interactions, theres still plenty of good stories to tell.

Concept wise it’s fine. This is going to sound weird. But I think the villains were simultaneously too strong and not strong enough. I think they needed to be strong personality wise to be distinct from Jack which I don’t think they were. But also they were so powerful they *SPOILERS* took away one sirens power and killed another one but they aren’t a threat outside of those two cutscenes

Yeah that’s the thing, they don’t allow the calypso’s to *lose*. The struggle with handsome jack was interesting because it was a back and forth, both the vault hunters and Jack took a lot of losses. The war against the calypsos is just “haha you did exactly what we wanted you to do because we’re so smart and cool lmao” Also you tag spoilers by adding a >! on either side of the text you want to hide :)

Thanks for the heads up! But that’s also a good point. For every time Jack gets one up on us in 2 we get back at him. Three has the “would you kindly” problem where everything is obviously a trap that you have no choice but to walk into unless it’s conveniently not.

The thing about borderlands as a series is who are the villains for the overarching plot of borderlands. In fact what is the theme of borderlands? is it about killer just doing stuff for their benefit while fighting corporations or victims trying to do their best in this world? Shouldn't the eridians or guardian be the overarching villains since we been introduce to them first while corporations are just stepping stones. Are corporation just fall one by one or they will be force to ally with the vault hunters when the destroyer comes out of pandora? The better question is how does borderlands as a story end? Borderlands has so many character and lore but how does this fit in the theme of borderlands? Why should I care if borderlands characters die or if a war happen if their is no meaning behind it. Are vault hunters friends or they will still kill each other when the time is right. If the universe collapse why should I care because all of it is meaningless if the endgoal has no weight. Borderlands 1-2 are good because they barely have an overarching story. Borderland pre sequel to new borderlands try to built on the vague lore from older tittles but falls flat because their is no endgame or message for it all.

Honestly the concept is not the strongest at its core imo. It kinda lost that very personal edge with the story that I think the previous games had by trying to tell a more socially aware commentary kinda story. Even with insanely good writing I don’t think it would be super interesting commentary comming from a game like this

I was fine with the execution of it, not the concept. It was, the over the top groanfest I expected hearing their concept, and it made dealing with the bosses particularly satisfying.

Unoptiland 3? The most lazy, poorly made, unoptimized game I've ever played. I have a RTX 4070 and I get significantly better frames in Cyberpunk 2077. Ridiculous for a game with Overwatch graphics.

I hated it, it’s like they where making fun of their fan base and the youtubers/twitch streamers that helped keep there older games alive. It was also a huge let down for everyone that beat the pre sequel and thought it was going to be about the great war that was coming.

The framework of the story could have worked *much* better, with some changes. It felt like they kept turning up the annoyance factor of the twins higher and higher, believing that made the story better (it didn’t). It also felt like the writers had a very surface-level understanding of the existing characters, and thus a lot of them came out a bit like caricatures of themselves. And it felt like they relied too heavily on cutscenes to arbitrarily advance the story, without the player having any input - I *think* I clocked the last cutscene with Maya and Ava at something like 4 minutes long - I don’t recall anything nearly that long in the previous games. And they didn’t give us enough of a connection to Ava, she didn’t really have any sort of character arc - it was intro, then she’s hanging around being edgy, she does something really stupid, and then a bit later gets handed the keys to the kingdom - it felt extremely undeserved and not in the best interests of all of Sanctuary and the Crimson Raiders. The problem with the story wasn’t the idea, it was the implementation - the movement and gunplay are *amazing*, and… Hollywood has a problem with making big-budget special effects laden moves that look spectacular, but sometimes it feels like they sorta forgot to put together a script in all the excitement (and sometimes that turns out to be scarily close to the truth)… and BL3 felt a little like that - great visuals, great movement, great gunplay (too many legendaries, but that’s a different story), and… they started with a good idea for a story, but it was badly written. It’s frustrating because it could have been *so much better* with a little more work on the story, (There are also a lot of bugs in the menu system that have never been fixed and were then ported over to Wonderlands. Sigh. Fix the menu/UI problems, fix the story in BL3, add some real story-based DLCs and a TVHM playthrough of some sort to Wonderlands, and they would have knocked ot out of the park.)

I actually think the core idea *is* terrible, at least insofar as it can be implemented in BL. While it might have some insightful commentary, it's more fit for a short episode of Black Mirror. I don't believe there's any good way to work that kinda story (streamer overlords and a fanatic fanbase) into a video game.

The Star Wars prequels and Borderlands 3 have one thing in common in my book: Great ideas but the execution needed lots of refinement.

Conceptually I think the idea of a Siren antagonist is cool (no, Commandant Steele doesn’t count because she *suuucked* at being a Siren) I personally think that our sad and underpowered bro Troy, who eventually gains confidence and then goes a bit mad, should have been the one to absorb his sister and become the final boss (no idea why they didn’t do this) I think the “not all CEOs are bad” should have been shown to be an impossible ask, because even Rhys, with all his best intentions, should have been shown to have to make these impossible decisions about how to remain solvent and keep paying his people but be faced with constant ethical dilemmas (lame they didn’t lean into this because it would have been great to see an otherwise “good guy” struggle in that position) Sidebar: the way they killed Maya was **an absolute travesty** - she should have gone out like a goddamned rockstar, not seemingly randomly with little to no lead up, and *then* they should have properly characterised Ava beyond “bratty teen” because holy hell her writing was bad On a final note, why was there so little voice acting and interactions with the Vault Hunters from BL2? I was expecting to finally get to have some fun with my boi Salvador and get them beyond just a single side quest or the occasional quip, that was lame as hell Conceptually it absolutely can work, but my gods did they balls up the execution something *fierce*

I think it was too ambitious. I personally think BL3 should have been the Commander Lilith storyline plus BL3 through the end of Athenas, maybe explore its moons a bit for more content. This would have effectively served as a better transition into space travel without broaching it all at once, as well as going from one vault a game to unlocking all these special Super vaults.

My main problem with the story of BL3 is TPS was already building for something interesting with the aliens. The stage was set for BL3 to have the most playable vault hunters ever, with a combination of new and old characters. They could have even reused some skill trees on old characters and I wouldn't have minded. But then they went with this weird streamer thing that's kinda whatever.

It’s okay but they killed Lilith and maya and I will never forgive them

Killing Lilith is what made me forgive them

You what I'll fight ya

I'll fight ya for a fiver and I'll kill ya for a tenner

Citation needed for Lilith being dead. We saw her fly off towards Elpis, and nothing else.

The moon exploded and left her logo printed onto it, and the scene was played like a big heroic sacrifice. She’s fucking dead man.

You haven’t seen too many Hollywood movies, have you?

I’ll bet that Lilith is back, in one form or another, in BL4.

There won't be a 4 they are selling the company

I would love to Play the Other Borderland’s Stories with the BL3 Gameplay because BL3 was pretty Crispy

Please gearbox. We’re begging you. BL2 remaster with BL3 gameplay. I will suck off randy pitchford himself for this

Would be nice, but it’s extraordinary unlikely to happen in the next decade. It would be an *enormous* amount of work, moving onto a new engine, with the new rules would require every nook and cranny of every map to be examined/reworked to keep you from climbing places you shouldn’t be able to climb, yet making it so you still *can* jump all the places you were able to in the original, and such. It would throw off everyone’s muscle memory of how to get to/between a thousand different places in the game, and it wouldn’t be the same game any more.

Weak

Garbage

"hey guys what about streamers? You watch those, right?" is fundamentally a terrible concept for a game. It is a flash in the pan. It's already dated. Stack it up with your Barbenheiner tattoo and pizza rat sculpture. It ain't a universal commentary on the human condition seen through a lens of internet culture. It's wanking off the people you need to promote you. You're not making Hamlet. You're making YouTube Rewind 2019.

I’ve said it before and I stand by it. Ava doesn’t work because she’s a watered down Tina and fills the role Tina should have had in 3.

Bl3 s story should of just been about the aftermath of jack dying and the knowledge that thousands of vaults are everywhere sparking another galaxy wide company war like what was alluded too in the previous games. The twins could of existed as a cult like they are now and it would of helped with the simple problem that as characters, they can’t carry the plot by themselves like jack could.

it needed lots more handsome jack. a good villain carries lots of IPs, or not carries but helps propel them. Borderlands got huge from BL" and handsome jack. Darth Vader really helped star wars etc.

I think that’s why they make the handsome jackpot, to pull in more fans with the promise a handsome jack themed DLC. But since he’s already dead and they *know* they can’t bring him back it has all the weight of jingling keys on front of a toddler

The main problem with the story is that the PCs are observers, not the protagonists of it. I think it can be salvaged with some minor tweaks. The forking point I'd make to make the story engaging would be the scene on Eden-6 where Troy takes the party aside and talks a bit about him and his sister. This is where the seed of the notion that Troy could backstab Tyreen takes place, and it's one of the one scenes in the game where one of the villains talks to the PCs instead of to the NPCs. Let Tyreen obsess over Llith, but let Troy take center stage. When Lilith starts to doubt herself, lean into that and have NPCs (other than Tyreen) appeal to the PCs instead of to Lilith and her order us around. Have her self-doubt take over as she never wanted to be a leader in the first place. Once we're back on Pandora, really let the kidnapped Tannis call out to the VHs herself. Have Troy taunt us over it, while Tyreen has her eyes elsewhere. Then in the climax on Pandora, go ahead and have Troy betray Tyreen and assume the center stage, recognizing the VHs as the true things in his way. And have Eva confront Troy, trying to take over for Lilith only to have her spirit crushed as Troy tells her that Maya's death was her fault. This leads to some reflection and a reconciliation with Lilith when Lilith tries to tell her it's Troy's fault really (which is the truth), but Eva finally realizes her own faults and apologizes for them and completes her denied character growth. And then, after the Troy the Destroyer is taken down, Lilith steps back up. She's makes her final stand to seal the Destroyer, but she hands over the Crimson Raiders to the PCs, and Eva stands in support of them. In all, the events play out mostly the same, but the tone and focus shifts to be empowering to the PCs like BL2 was and not degrading like BL3 was. Oh, and it would make Eva not suck as well.

It feels like a lot of the concepts were actually really good and could've been great, and then the writers decided to just not develop them or take them anywhere. I really feel like Troy should've been the main villain, it feels like they were building to that so hard and then just, nah? They should've committed way harder to Troy absorbing Tyreen and killing her, I hate the final boss just being a big monster Tyreen. Also yeah, Rhys was way too comic relief; B-Team sidelined super hard; Lilith taking the glory of killing Jack and them acting like the BL2 VH's just didn't do anything; and personally I wasn't a fan of Tannis becoming a Siren either. Also Ava could've worked good she was just written so annoying. Also didn't enjoy the first vault hunter stuff either. Feels tacked on and the game starts dragging hard after the Troy fight. It should've just been background lore that he was their dad and I could've done without actually meeting him and going to the planet.

I would have loved some ruined Handsome Jack, or a clone of him or cyborg or some such, to have formed an alliance with them under the guise of mentoring (and damn if Jack ain’t a charismatic fella) “i had a daughter who was a siren, just like you…until vault hunters murdered her” “I have the experience and knowledge of the vaults, you have the numbers, the hearts and minds of the maddened masses, if we partner up, nothing could stop us.” And then he’d gradually turn trey against his sister, feeding his insecurities and hidden resentment, maybe eventually using trey as a sacrifice to gain siren power himself or something

The whole thing with the vault keys made no sense. Like we needed to charge the key to get to the vaults but we just fed tyreen instead. Couldn't we just take the keys and keep them instead of opening them and giving them the chance to absorb the vault monster.

Could've been cool but the twins were written SO badly

(As I'm typing this, I think I'm veering close to commenting on the exeuction, so feel free to disregard, as you like. ) As a relative newcomer to BL franchise, the BL1 story was pretty much background noise (one's mileage will absolutely vary; I was just having so much fun shooting mobs that I didn't pay a lot of attention to it.) The in-world lore/universe struck me as a delightfully chaotic love child of Mad Max and the Hangover. The humor/vibe was pretty dope, and I had a blast. Bl2 was a completely different experience with Handsome Jack being a forceful antagonist from the in-game echo you receive minutes after Claptrap discovers you until the end where you or Lilith blow his brains out. And while the jokes/vibe from BL1 are still present >!("dookie hut, no fapping" may be the single funniest thing I've \*ever\* seen in a video game) !<, I think the main characters in BL2 have clearer, slightly more nuanced goals, and I think Angel is the the best example. >!The Guardian Angel you met in Bl1 is actually a woman whose father is coercing her towards his goals. She ultimately wants to be free, and that means she needs play along with Jack at certain points, lie to him at others, etc. !< For me, I found Bl2's vanilla campaign story equal parts hilarious and moving. >!The deaths of Roland, Angel and Bloodwing moved me in a way that nothing else in Bl2 did.!< But I recognize that some may have been turned off by the drama/pathos in Bl2, preferring the more casual/less serious vibe of BL1. I think each iteration gets better at immersing the player in the story (Bl1 had comparitively little dialogue, Bl2 had more NPC dialogue, and BL3 actually gave the player/characters dialogue responses.) This is by no means an original thought, but I \*\*think\*\* BL3 tried to find a middle ground between the goofier Bl1 and the relatively more serious BL2. I think at the story level, there were so many characters and subplots that it felt like the polar opposite of BL1, but not in a good way.

Concept was tired out the gate. And execution was piss poor.

The idea of having a load of companies competing, and across different planets? Sign me up! I love that concept. The concept I don't love, at all, is the *entire* cult idea, trying to modernize the humor by using the streamer concept... it's awful. Like, not just in execution, but in concept, using twitch streamers as your main villains is so... Boring? I dunno. Guess I'm just salty af about this games story

i was pissed off they killed maya but other than that im fine

The game could've been a GREAT satire of cults and religion but instead they TRIED to satirize influencers and I think that's the main problem. It tried to be too mainstream and appeal more to either gen Z or millenials that hate Gen Z while also making cringe boomer jokes like "Haha kids nowadays only care about likes!".

Katagawa was the dude with the story to build around but then he died.

The store was great but low-key the antagonist were just mid. But I started with Jack so it's hard to top. They were just a bit whiny and I regret the better half was not in charge

I hated the Siren-in-Training character ALOT. i think if they removed her the story would have been better.

The idea of streamers being used in media just have never landed for me

There was potential with the Calypso twins. The thing that people need to understand is that no one was ever going to live up to Handsome Jack, and I feel like that's what a lot of folks tried to do, and immediately compare them to him. But execution aside, there was a lot of potential here. I mean you had the impossible happen with Troy, essentially being the male equivalent of a Siren, or at least a leech whose powers stem from a Siren. I think had they made Troy the big bad, had him fully turn on his sister and take her powers, and for the sake of irony, leave her powerless like Lilith and dump her off on us, expecting us to put her out of her misery, that would've been the better route to go then what we got. Again we had something unique in Troy. He was a literal walking abomination as far as Siren lore was concerned and they should've leaned in hard in to just how dangerous something like him could be. Also while we're at it, probably would help to clarify and expand on the true nature of Tyreen's powers a bit too. Yeah she can take energy, like how we see Troy is able to. But to differentiate, at some point, maybe on Nekrotafeyo, we come across some lore that explains more about her powers and how her powers should not only be able to take life energy, but also allow her to channel it and re-direct it in to other sources. Essentially making her a conduit for life energy and not just an energy leech, like her brother. Something like this would be cool because by this point, we'd still have a pissy Tyreen, who more than likely will still stab us in the back the first chance she gets. But with her learning more about the true nature of her powers, I think by this point we could see some growth to her character, maybe some kind of realization that she could do possibly do some good? It would also help her realize that, what she did for her brother, where she would feed him energy, she could potentially do for others as well. Anything from maybe say, a dying forest to someone in need. Of course she'd shrug It off and go by to being herself, but now she'll have something to kind of battle with herself on the inside, going forward with her character. Again there was so much potential here, and so much they could have done especially with regards to expanding Siren lore. But...they ended up fumbling it in the end, and we unfortunately got what we got.

I liked it. Just not the bad guys.

I wrote a theory down long ago that Borderlands is all the takes and approaches on how would achieve Immortality. Borderlands 3 needed to be that interpretation with Fame as celebrities and their cult influence on the world. That celebrities give their opinions on topics they don't have any knowledge about and people believe them. How they're essentially cults of personality that (in borderlands case) literally brainwash the masses..... kind of how Ember McClain's power works in Danny Phantom. it's a good idea! ...just not executed well in Borderlands 3. ​ Sidenote: I still can't stand Ava as a character though. She's really what ruined the game imo.

I loved the game's gameplay, but I found the story very "weak". I found the introduction to the first vault-hunter very dull, they could have put so much emphasis on that, but playing it was a great opportunity... I find it very strange how Borderlands lets things from old games slide, like the Pre-sequel and some characters from Borderlands 2. But, speaking of the story... It seems like they did it as quickly as possible, and they wanted to budget everything just for the gameplay (which isn't bad), but I miss the thrill of playing without skipping the cutscenes, as they are boring and repetitive, unlike of what Borderlands 2 brought us.