Borderlands 3 Will Show Failed Looter-Shooters How It’s Done

Let’s take a trip back in time to roughly ten years ago. It was a time when the gaming industry was not yet overrun by milquetoast, half-finished looter-shooter titles. It was a simpler time, a better time. At the tail end of 2009 Gearbox Software released Borderlands, and it was unlike anything we had ever seen before. To be blunt, it was incredible and it had everything you could ever ask for in a game: leveling up a unique and exciting character, tearing through wasteland psychos and monsters, getting new and crazy guns, and mods…my GOD the mods. It was truly a new experience. Having always been a FPS player regularly since the N64, this new concept of a shooter was just what I – dare I say most gamers – needed.

Then in 2012, Gearbox Software did it again. Borderlands 2 was a masterpiece; peak looter-shooter heaven. The amount of hours I happily dumped into that game currently stands somewhere in the thousands, and I have no regrets.  Soon after, Gearbox had another stellar follow-up on its hands with Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. Fan favorite Claptrap was now playable and the game added new mechanics like Gravity Changes, and Oz Kits. Though it may not have reached the standard set by its predecessor, it was a solid title and well worth your time.

So what exactly makes Borderlands so damn good? Let’s break it down:

Plenty of Style: Artistically and personality wise, the game is fun and really colorful. It is at the same time beautiful to look at, and crudely offensive.  It’s an aesthetically pleasing game that your eyes won’t get tired of viewing for hours at a time.

Guns Galore: Loot is basically RNG’d out the wazoo like Pandora’s RNGesus is mainlining some serious steroids. There are endless amounts of possible stats and characteristics for each type of gun with  model and manufacturer having its own style. And the guns are EVERYWHERE. One minute you’re picking up a flame pistol, the next it’s a corrosive sniper rifle.

It’s Got Character:  Each Character has its own super unique skill trees, each with three diverse branches to max out or mix together. For example turning your Siren into a longe range elemental sniper who can heal her teammates while phase-locking baddies is one of many paths you can take. Or deciding the many ways to build up your Mechromancer’s own personal build AND Deathtrap. And let’s be real – Mechromancer is like the coolest fucking class ever.

But You Gotta Have Friends: It’s got a spectacular 4-player co-op option through the entire game. And there really is no better game to grab a bunch of your closest friends and have a badass time with.

It’s Fun AF: Enemies spawn from every corner and behind any door, keeping you on your toes. It really makes you think of new ways to tackle each of the enemy types. Most importantly, the combat almost never feels dull, and if it did you could just change how you’re doing things.

Gearbox created the perfect template for a looter-shooter. And yet since it’s release, we’ve seen AAA attempts in Destiny, The Division, and most recently Anthem, that fall short of the formula that Borderlands so easily created.

In Bungie’s departure from their own iconic series, and Microsoft Studios, Destiny was intended to join the pantheon of the greatest games ever made. I pre-ordered immediately, and even played in the closed and open betas. In short, I was pretty excited.  Beautiful as hell and boasting the most fluid and fun FPS action I’ve ever experienced, Destiny was supposed to be everything shooter fans wanted. But upon release I was quickly let down. With very little story or content, it quickly lost its edge. Destiny would eventually improve, but talk about your crushed expectations. I will wholeheartedly say that by the end of Rise of Iron – the last expansion for Destiny – the game was as close to perfect as could possibly be. However, the ride there was both frustrating and expensive.

Moving forward to 2016, when Ubisoft release Tom Clancy’s The Division. Having been hyped since seeing early clips of it many years before, I was stoked. To this day, the beta for The Division, is still the best beta I’ve ever participated in. It was truly an awesome and immersive experience. However, there were these little things that were “off” that hampered the overall experience. These weren’t issues you could just figure out yourself either, these were actual issues in the code. Things like putting +10% damage to head-shots actually doing -10% instead. Then there was the less than stellar endgame: repeating Daily Missions on varying difficulties, killing specific enemies in specific ways, and the Dark Zone – a PvP enabled arena full of PvE action. While the Dark Zone was enjoyable enough for me most gamers were very critical of it. This was especially true when the community started figuring out ways to break builds and do some pretty ‘interesting’ stuff. Anyone who has ever played the Dark Zone remembers some random asshole  doing 1-million damage on a headshot and taking all of your gear. To be fair all of this was eventually fixed. But between Destiny’s shortcomings and The Division’s issues, it was becoming obvious that many gamers were starting to become jaded. It didn’t help matters when Destiny 2 was released.

Destiny 2 addressed its lack of a narrative with ease, but it failed on literally everything else. Its loot was a bit underwhelming (whatever wasn’t re-skinned, mind you) and some of the newer things weren’t ‘new’ enough to make it feel like a proper sequel. It instead felt like an expansion of the first game. It was as if Bungie had once again released an unfinished game with the intention to of having gamers pay them to finish it with expansions. Speaking of expansions…where do I even begin? Curse of Osiris was – for lack of a better term – a complete clusterfuck.  Warmind was a bit better, but Forsaken was a huge slap in the face. Needlessly killing off the only good character in an attention-seeking move to stir up your fan base was not the way to go. I have not been back ever since. What’s the point when the grind is hardly ever worth it?  At least with Borderlands grinding for a few hours meant potentially HUNDREDS of new guns, mods, etc. to sift through and pick out the beautiful stuff. Grinding in Destiny or even The Division could at best amount to one or two worthwhile items. One would think that a company as well-known as Bioware could swoop in and redeem this particular genre of shooter with Anthem. But sadly, that too was another flop.

The response to Anthem was not pleasant. The game was riddled with bugs, bad netcode, and server/connection issues aplenty at launch. There were a few hotfixes that made some improvements for sure, but even as I write this I’m still currently having issues getting the game to play properly. That’s without even going into how it bricked a handful of PS4’s. I mean come on now…how does even happen in the current year?

Anthem’s botched and broken promises left me and many others feeling so done with the looter-shooter genre as a whole. I don’t even bother loading up Anthem and I still haven’t purchased The Division 2.  But the recent announcement of Borderlands 3 has sparked a bit of hope in me yet. Gearbox has the luxury of coming into this bruised and broken genre and make something great out of it again, just like it did a decade ago. If anyone can do it right, it’s Gearbox. We have dealt with mediocrity for far too long and gamers deserve better. Now is the time to show the likes of Bungie, Massive, and Bioware just how it’s done.