Borderlands 3 (

2019

)

Borderlands 3 is the latest mainline installment in the series that, against my better judgment, I just cannot bring myself to hate. It's certainly not for want of trying on the game's part! This is after all the grand-daddy of the looter shooter genre, the genre that married the most annoying aspects of FPS and RPG to create a Frankenstein's monster of tedium. Never once did I play Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare [2007] and find myself wishing that enemies would take five minutes to kill as I gradually plinked off their health bars, nor did I long for a break in the action so I could stare at a glorified excel spreadsheet for a few minutes to find out which new gun I picked up had the best stats. Nor did I long for the day when every action would be drowned out with a cascade of lame jokes delivered by annoying NPCs I was unable to shoot. I certainly never dreamed of a day when playing a video game felt like a soul-deadening dopamine feedback loop more akin to a Skinner box or a Roulette wheel. Indeed, despite all that, I still feel a glimmer of positive emotions while playing these games, though Borderlands 3 comes closer to throttling that tentative love than anything else, save perhaps the shameless cash-grab that was Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep: A Wonderlands One-shot Adventure [2021].

Any prospective player will be able to tell that this game has taken a nose-dive in quality right from the beginning. Borderlands 2 [2012] begins with the player being berated and mocked by Handsome Jack, the game's main antagonist. Jack is a bit over-hyped as a character, suffering from the series' usual problem of giving a zany character a tragic backstory and assuming that will make them deep and compelling. That said, his constant instance that he is the hero of the story, the playful way he manipulates the player character, and the superb voice-acting of Dameon Clarke made him memorable.

Borderlands 3 tries to pull the same trick with their new main antagonists, The Calypso Twins: Tyreen and Troy. The problem is, neither of these guys has anything approaching Jack's gravitas. They feel like basic mooks that have been accidentally promoted to lead antagonists. To make matters worse they have got to be the lamest concept for villains of all time, as they are a pair of evil streamers. Who will be the final boss of Borderlands 4? Some dude who makes viral TikToks? An incredibly handsome guy with a film review blog?

It's annoying because a more compelling characterization is just sitting right there. In addition to being streamers, the twins are also the leaders of a cult called the Children of the Vault (COV) that have incorporated all the disparate bandit tribes of Pandora under one banner. This is a development that while plausible, demands a bit more explanation. As far as we could tell in previous games the bandits were all psycho killers, and even the most tight-knit clans were likely to turn on each other at a moment's notice as a result of greed, blood-lust, or boredom. Yet there was always a hint of something tragic about the bandits; like they were the forgotten detritus of human civilization or the symptom of some galaxy-spanning insanity that left them broken beyond all recognition. How they could be redeemed, reformed, and transformed into a coherent army with a shared goal is actually a rather interesting question and one that would further humanize the waves of expendable enemies you mow down as you progress through the game. While Borderlands 3 does make a few feeble attempts at just this concept it spends far longer making out the cult leaders as a pair of wacky Twitch streamers that are impossible to take seriously as a threat. Not for the last time, Borderlands 3 wastes a promising concept in order to tell a joke that is not particularly funny.

The menace of the Calypso twins is further undercut by the fact that Tyreen's Voice actress sounds exactly like the voice actress for Lilith, the commander of the Crimson Raiders and the lead friendly NPC. Whenever they are both onscreen, which is fairly often, it sounds like one actress having a conversation between two sock-puppets. The voices are so similar that at first I just assumed that Borderlands 3 was taking a page out of The Elder Scrolls' playbook and using the same voice actor for multiple roles. I was downright surprised when I checked the credits and saw that the two characters were indeed voiced by different actresses. This begs the question of why would Gearbox cast two actresses who sound the same for their two lead female roles. Does Randy Pitchford have a very specific audio fetish? It would certainly explain why one of the player characters, Moze, sounds just like Lilith and Tyreen trying their best to sound like an extra in Saving Private Ryan (1998).

The twins are trying to open a series of vaults in order to devour the energies of the monsters contained within, in the belief that this will transform them into Gods. The player and the rest of the Crimson Raiders are trying to stop them, though for some reason their plan for stopping them involves opening the vaults and killing the monsters sealed within. One would think it would be better to keep the vault's defenses intact rather than strip them all away to make it as easy as possible for the twins to bust in. Hell, even gathering the vault keys into one place (which you spend most of the campaign doing) seems like it is running counter to the whole objective. Why not spend all this time and effort simply hunting down and killing the Kalypso twins? Still, this idiocy is at least the sort that I have grown to expect from a video game, and there are plenty of things about Borderlands 3's writing that deserves considerably more scorn.

Like, for instance, the insufferable characters, who are seemingly incapable of shutting up for five minutes and letting me enjoy the combat. Previous Borderlands games had this issue as well, but Borderlands 3 has dialed it up to 11, and now on every step of every mission, characters will yammer unfunny jokes at you. It doesn't help that the Borderlands writers are under the impression that the surest way to make a character funny is to make them insufferably loud and annoying. They also seem to have adopted the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 [2009] approach to mission design, so if you take longer than fifteen seconds to reach an object the quest giver will begin constantly telling you to get to the objective. One time this happened when I reached an objective that was surrounded by enemies and the quest giver proceeded to shout at me even though I was clearly busy dealing with the enemies. When he ran out of unique lines of dialogue he just started repeating them.

Every single NPC with a name and a few lines of dialogue is a miserable chore to interact with. The developers seem to have no idea what constitutes annoying, as one side quest has the quest giver warn you that the robot you have to interact with is very obnoxious. I braced myself, terrified of what an especially annoying character in Borderlands 3 would look like but it just turned out to be a robot that spoke in a flat mono-tone and added the phrase “or whatever” to the end of every line of dialogue. It got to the point that I dreaded being introduced to any new characters because I knew ahead of time they inundate me with unfunny, wacky jokes. Halfway through the game, I decided I had had enough and I stopped doing all side quests. I never found myself under-leveled for the main quests, so I would recommend anyone unfortunate enough to play the game do the same and save yourself the probable aneurysm. Though the main quest offers little refuge from these antics, in particular anytime you have to interact with the reformed bandit-chief Vaughn is downright soul-deadening.

Speaking of annoying characters who can't shut up, we should probably talk about Ava. I had studiously avoided spoilers for the game before playing, but I had heard that the character of Ava was absolutely despised by fans. At first, I couldn't understand why, sure the little brat is annoying but this is Borderlands, every character is annoying! Tiny Tina in Borderlands 2 [2012] made me want to deafen myself with an ice pick every time she opened her mouth, and she is beloved by the fan base! Indeed, compared to some quest-givers and NPCs Ava is almost pleasant to deal with. I didn't think that Borderlands fans had suddenly grown standards just for this character, so I assumed that this brat was probably related to an extremely annoying plot development.

Sure enough, halfway through the game, the player is sent to open a vault with Maya (the siren from Borderlands 2 [2012]), Ava's mentor. Ava asks to come along and Maya tells her that it is too dangerous. Ava sneaks along anyway and gets captured by the Calypso Twins. As a result, they get the edge on Maya, and Troy kills her. Now, I could see this bothering some people, as even though Maya was dull as dishwater, she's still one of the player characters from the best entry in the series; of course, people are going to be upset at her death. However, if you look at it objectively there's nothing wrong with this as a plot twist. Maya was killed as the result of Ava's stupidity but this stupidity is the result of Ava's youth and inexperience, exactly the reason why Maya didn't want her there in the first place. It's preventable, stupid, and even tragic but it's surprisingly strong writing for this game. The death of Maya gives the writers a lot of options for what to do with Ava next, and some of them could result in a compelling character and storyline.

Emphasis on the word could. After you get back from the mission Ava blames everything that happened on Lilith for sending Maya on the mission in the first place. Ignoring that Lilith initially offered to go herself and only relented after Maya insisted that they needed a Siren with full powers for the job. Worse, Lilith says that Ava is right and takes sole responsibility for Maya's death. There's a problem here that should be obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together (so nobody in the Gearbox writers' room), and that's that Ava was the one most responsible for Maya's death! Having her lash out at Lilith is fine, as she's trying to find a way to protect herself from the fact that Maya's death is all her fault. However, Ava never takes any responsibility and none of the other characters in the game call her out on it either. I seriously don't understand how anyone can screw up a simple setup and pay-off this badly. There should be a moment where Ava reflects on how her own impatience and stupidity got her friend and mentor killed, a moment that causes her to grow, change, and accept responsibility. The audience, even those with an emotional attachment to Maya could walk away from this with an investment in Ava. Instead, this stupid little brat pretends everything is Lilith's fault and stubbornly refuses any character development of her own.

Even that could be fine but the game is not interested in presenting Ava as a selfish little brat, no instead the writers are trying to set her up as a heroic figure! In a final insult, at the end of the game when Lilith makes her heroic sacrifice, she pauses for a moment to designate Ava as the next leader of the Crimson Raiders and Sanctuary. So she chooses the teenage dolt whose soul accomplishment is getting Maya killed over the player character who has been carrying the entire mission since the start of the game. Then again the player characters tend to vanish for the cut-scenes, but even given that there were plenty of better options to leave the Crimson Raiders too. There's Tannis who has the best understanding of the vaults and the Eridians who built them and there are old veterans like Mordecai and Brick. In the worst-case scenario, she could just hand Sanctuary over to one of the still-living player characters from Borderlands 2 [2012]. Hell, even Calptrap would be a better option than Ava, as he seems at least capable of acknowledging his mistakes and learning from them.

Still, it's one thing to add in an obnoxious character and have the existing characters in the game lavish her with undeserved praise and accolades; it is quite another to take a character that fans actually like and completely hamstring them. Rhys, the president of the Atlas Corporation who serves as the main quest giver on the planet Promethea, is the main character in Tales from the Borderlands [2014] made by Telltale Games (the guys who did The Wolf Among Us [2013] and all those Walking Dead adventure games). As a result of having different (and more competent) writers, Rhys is actually a compelling character. In Tale from the Borderlands [2014], he's a person with good nature who has internalized an evil system, looking up to Handsome Jack and Hyperion and imitating their actions without really understanding the damage that he is causing. As a result of his journey in the game, he has the chance to reject those values, culminating in a scene where he deletes the Handsome Jack AI that has been advising him along the way. In the end, he inherits the remains of the old Atlas corporation and vows to rebuild it without recreating the horrors of Jack's Hyperion. It's hardly the most original character arch in video gaming, but it is an arch at least and it's handled with a degree of skill and nuance.

The Borderlands 3 writers saw all that and decided that the best way to continue Rhys' story was to make him loud, incompetent, and have him grow a mustache. Indeed, the characterization of Rhys in this game is so bad that it feels less like incompetence (which seems to be the reason behind the other insufferable characters) and more like deliberate spite. They saw the skillful writing of Telltale and were so jealous and angry at being shown up in their own universe that they decided to symbolically take a dump over their rivals. Yet even here they display their gross incompetence, as they don't meaningfully critique the Telltale in any way, they just make one of their characters dumb and obnoxious. A good writer looking to mock Telltale games would have worked a subtle critique of the Telltale formula of storytelling into their depiction of this character. These games are ripe for parody, but aside from one lame “Rhys will remember that” joke Borderlands 3 doesn't even make an attempt.

The game cannot even seem to keep basic aspects of its own lore consistent with the previous titles. Here, we're told about the adventures of Typhon DeLeon the first Vault Hunter, who is a celebrity that opened vaults years before the events of Borderlands [2009] and was consequently aware that the vaults contained monsters, not treasure. However, if he knew that the vaults were just full of beasts and danger, why the hell wasn't he the last Vault Hunter as well as the first? It seems to be common knowledge that the vaults do not contain any treasure, so why are people still trying to open them? Moreover, why is everyone in Borderlands [2009] surprised when they open the Vault and find a tentacled monster?

Borderlands is not a series that can boast the meticulous background details of Lord of the Ring or hell, even the rough mechanical rules of Star Wars. Very little is explained about the setting's technology, culture, history, or even the fundamental rules of reality. Since we know so little about the rules of the setting, very little can happen that would be genuinely impossible by that set of rules. How does their space travel work? We don't know. How did mankind colonize six galaxies and what is stopping them from colonizing more? We don't know. What is the source of the Siren's powers? Not sure. Who were the Eridians and what did they want? Your guess is as good as mine. What little setup is usually in small background details as well, so the vast majority of players won't notice if they are contradicted. It's downright impressive given all this that the writers of Borderlands 3 have managed to screw up in such a way that it undermines the very limited lore of their setting.

Of course, as Orwell sagely understood “it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer.” Shitty writers will always exist in every literate society, for as long as mankind has been writing they have also been writing poorly. However, it's only in societies with deeply sick political or economic systems that shitty writers are put in charge of massive projects (this game is rumored to have a $100,000,000+ budget). Perhaps once or twice could be written off as a fluke, but this shit just keeps happening, and at a certain point you need to ask yourself why. Moreover, while grammatical errors, misspellings, and plot contrivances can afflict any writer, some writing sins are only carried out by those with particular political viewpoints.

The most obvious example of this political rot present in Borderlands 3 is the decision to rename the midget enemies as “tinks” because the term midget is “not super sensitive.” This decision baffles me because "midget" is a neutral descriptor that I have never heard bandied about as a slur while tink actually sounds like it is a deliberately pejorative term. Even if we accept midget was an offensive term it would be better to just call the midget sub-types of enemies “small” or “little” than to invent a new slur for them. At the very least you could call them “manlets” and that would at least be mildly funny. It's doubly bizarre as the enemies called “Psychos” are still around, despite that being an actual pejorative and amusing there are plenty of “Psycho Tinks” as well. Indeed, the really sensitive thing to do for the vertically impaired was to not turn them into a parade of easily killable enemies for the sake of a cheap joke. Not that I'm offended or anything on behalf of the wee people, it's just that the attempt here at sensitivity seems to be at odds with itself.

This is the problem at the heart of, what can be charitably described as, Borderlands' humor. On the one hand, the games want us to think that it is transgressive with its punk rock aesthetic and crude, often violent humor; while on the other you have a cloying desire to be as politically correct as possible and not say anything that would upset the board of a Fortune 500 company, the faculty of an Ivy League university, the staff of a major media corporation, or (most crucially of all) the HR department of Gearbox. You cannot do both of these at the same time, and whenever I see modern writers try to pull it off I cringe from secondhand embarrassment. There is nothing so pitiful as the would-be rebel who desperately conforms to every social convention lest he accidentally brushes against some social taboo or upsets some protected class.

On that note, it shouldn't surprise anyone to see that Borderlands 3 embraces the usual gender politics of current-year entertainment. Every female character without exception will be a highly capable girlboss while every straight white male will be either sidelined (like Mordecai) or turned into the butt of a joke (like Vaughn and Rhys). Indeed, the most shocking moment in the game for me was not the death of Maya or the revelation that Typhon DeLeon was the father of the Calypso twins. No, what surprised me the most was when the game introduced Wainwright Jakobs, a white man modeled on old Southern aristocracy, as a capable and courageous leader. I thought for a second that I had misjudged the game and fallen into the trap that so many conservative or iconoclastic commentators do by lazily labeling a piece of art as woke. Then, in the first dialogue he has he loudly announces Jakobs was gay for Sir Hammerlock. I would be disappointed if it weren't so predictable. Still, this is just the model that all stories written in the modern year are required to follow, its presence here is unremarkable even if that fact alone is faintly depressing at how unsurprising it has become.

That said, there is something far more insidious lurking behind Borderlands 3's sexual politics. Take for instance the side-quest where Moxi has you hunt down and kill Killavolt, an ex-boyfriend of hers who is now running a Battle Royale and offering a night of lovemaking with him as the grand prize. This is pretty standard fair for Borderlands side quests, though it seems the developers at Gearbox don't understand what a Battle Royale is (here's a hint guys they don't unleash a million mooks into the arena who are not competing in the Battle Royale) and indeed if the quest left it there I probably would have forgotten about it. However, like all Borderlands 3 quests, the quest-giver is constantly jabbering at you every step of the way and here Moxxi spends the entire mission alternating between telling you how she is not bitter about the breakup and implying that Killavolt has a tiny penis. I don't know Moxxi, you sound pretty bitter about it. It really feels like a writer at Gearbox is using this mission to work through a bad breakup, and while I'm sorry that some Chad pumped and dumped you, my role as the player shouldn't be to provide you with therapy. As always, the more politically correct a game is the more likely the creators are to be broken in some fundamental way, and the more likely this brokenness will become obvious to the poor gamer sooner or later.

The only time that Borderlands 3 creates an interesting male/female dynamic is with its twin antagonists Tyreen and Troy Calypso, yet this is squandered for no good reason as well. At the start of the game, Tyreen is clearly the dominant figure of the two. She is the one who is constantly berating the player, is obviously the leader of the Children of the Vault, and is the featured star in their insipid streaming show. Troy, for his part, is meek and mild, and only really provides logistical support for his sister. He's also a leech, who needs Tyreen to feed him energy, an act that Tyreen only does with some reluctance and disgust. It's obvious that she both pities and loves her brother at the same time.

Halfway through the game though, Troy kills Maya and adsorbs her powers, suddenly becoming as powerful as his sister. This creates a conflict between the two villains as the dynamics of their relationship begin to break down. They squabble with each other and Troy begins to get impatient with his sister's presumed leadership of the cult. I assumed that this was being set up for some reason, perhaps a civil war as Troy's followers split from Tyreen's or perhaps Troy would kill Tyreen and take her place as the main antagonist. However, this was based on the foolish assumption that Gearbox had competent writers. Instead, they opt to do nothing of any significance with this development. Troy and Tyreen keep working together until the end of the game where you kill Troy in the penultimate boss battle and then kill Tyreen in the final boss battle. What even was the point of any of this?

Perhaps we should at least touch briefly on the game aspect of this video game. Things have not really changed much since Borderlands 2 [2012]. The overall combat loop of the game remains as soul-crushingly addictive as always. I found myself against my better judgment sliding into the familiar Skinner box and feeling the dopamine flow whenever I found a slightly better gun. It is game design at its lowest and most insidious, made to numb the player rather than entertain, enlighten, or even stimulate him. I find that I hate it on moral grounds, even though I cannot fault its slick and faultless application. Borderlands 3 when looked at as just a looter shooter is not a bad game, but it is an evil one.

Balancing is more than a little bit fucked though. I played through the game as the Gunner class because I wanted to use the mech, little did I realize that the mech mode was little more than an “I win” button you can press if you don't particularly like the boss you're fighting. I didn't even min-mx or anything, I just loaded up with twin Gatling guns and found that halfway through the game I was less fighting enemies with them than deleting them. It became almost comical, as most bosses will turn briefly invincible as they transition between phases but in my murder-mech, these brief transitions became the bulk of all combat! When a boss lacked any such transition periods they died almost before their introductory title cards vanished. Apparently, the gunner is a trade-off class as it's much weaker in normal combat but supercharged in the mech. If this is really the case, then the combat in this game is way too easy, as even in my vulnerable form I plowed through the enemies with barely a need to take cover.

Part of this is due to the familiar issue of enemy AI being effectively brain-dead. They run around like chickens with their heads cut off, giving only the faintest impression of any neural activity above the brainstem. They fire wildly and miss half the time, and often will just stand around while you murder them. In past entries, it was not much better, but at least it was more disguised by the fact that you had different enemy types popping up in each new environment. Here you will be fighting the same COV cultists for the entire game and boy does it turn into a slog after a while. The only way the game has to increase the difficulty is to increase the damage and health of the same handful of enemies, but since you're getting better guns and shields as the game progresses it always feels exactly the same. You could swap out any encounter in the first hour of the game with one from the last and not notice anything different aside from bigger numbers.

I have heard it argued that Borderlands 3 is tolerable if you just ignore the story and focus on the combat. To me this is baffling because the combat is the same dull slog as always; it's a serviceable looter shooter that is held up by some genuinely nifty weapons and little else. Moreover, tuning out the story is easier said than done. Normally all you would have to do is skip the cutscenes but Borderlands has plenty of non-cutscene dialogue that is completely unskippable. I hope you like reporting back to Lilith on the bridge of Sanctuary between each mission because you're gonna be doing that a lot! Moreover, as noted above characters will constantly call you on the radio during missions to yammer at you and tell more lame jokes. There is nowhere to hide!