Borderlands 3: Sometimes Love Just Isn’t Enough

Borderlands 3 is a game I should love.

I waited for Borderlands 3 for years, and was lucky enough to be at the PAX East Panel where the game was revealed. After not playing the series for a few years, watching that (botched) reveal ignited my excitement for a series that I love and I went home and found friends to play Borderlands 2 with leading up to launch.

As launch got closer and the shittery that is Gearbox came to light, my excitement for the game dropped like a dead Rakk from the sky. At one point, I made a firm stand that I wasn’t going to buy the game out of solidarity with parties affected by Gearbox’s antics. However, I am a weak bitch.

Borderlands 3 came out on one of the worst days of my life. I was alone with my thoughts and needed something to distract my brain. Popping on Playstation, I saw practically everyone on my friend’s list playing Borderlands 3 and decided ‘fuck it, if I’m going to be miserable, I might as well as try to do something that will make me happy.’

And it did make me happy, at first. But after playing through the game, I walked away feeling incredibly underwhelmed, and I’m still trying to pinpoint why.

The most obvious suspect is my preferences have changed in the last seven years. Borderlands as a series is known for its often crude, over the top humor and maybe that doesn’t connect with me now that I’m approaching my thirties (I want to make it clear that this is a personal thing, and if you still vibe with Borderlands 3’s writing, then great!), but that doesn’t seem right. 

I adored Borderlands 2, and played the hell out of it when it launched seven years ago. In fact, I played it so much that I almost got kicked out of college my junior year because I have bad time management skills. Most nights, I would put off homework, make some cheap college kid dinner with Jess and one of our friends, and we would play until we couldn’t keep our eyes open. We experienced the entire game together, and despite my grades paying the price, it was a really special time during college.

This summer, I played through the entire Borderlands 2 campaign and a good chunk of the DLC to prepare and grind out what few remaining PlayStation trophies I had left to get. To my surprise, some of the jokes and writing still landed seven years later, and I even picked up some new stuff I hadn’t in the past. Okay, so my tastes haven’t changed enough to make that the issue, so what else could it be?

Borderlands as a series has always had a pretty strong cast of characters, with all their memorable quirks and bizarre quests. Borderlands 2 in particular took the storytelling and characters to the next level compared to its predecessor, and with Gearbox incorporating fan favorite characters from Telltale’s Tales of the Borderlands, I had hoped that we would see even more development in Borderlands 3. I was especially hopeful for the player characters from Borderlands 2 that mostly served as blank slate avatars in their game and had very little development or characterization to develop into leading characters, similar to how the player characters from the original Borderlands became well developed and utilized characters in the sequel.

This however, wasn’t the case. The story again focuses on Lillith from Borderlands and her cast of side characters, with the siren Maya and the assassin Zero from Borderlands 2 providing some supporting roles in the story. Throughout the game, the only character that had any development was Lilith as the rest of the characters continued to be static one note side pieces. New support characters were mostly forgettable and to be honest, I couldn’t name a single one of them right now. And perhaps the most disappointing character treatments were Vaughn and Rhys from Tales from the Borderlands, as they felt like completely different characters who were each assigned one joke and repeated them ad nauseam until the game ended. Their inclusion felt like fan service and cheapened the characters interactions with the two characters.

So the main cast of protagonists and side characters are a let down, but what about the antagonists? Handsome Jack from Borderlands 2 was a charismatic, minacial monster and was a huge part of why I loved Borderlands 2 so much. I knew going into Borderlands 3 that he would be hard to top, but the character design of Troy and Tyrene Calypso gave me some hope. They were cool and stylish in a way that Handsome Jack never really was from a design perspective, and seemed just as hell bent on causing destruction as he did. However, any excitement I had for the Calypso twins quickly faded as I moved through the beginning hours of the campaign. Their humor was meme-y to the point of being cringy, and they both double downed on being “streamers/influencers” whose following was a cult.

Normally this wouldn’t be a huge issue for me, since streamers and influencers are a huge part of the video games industry right now and poking fun at them seems like a timely thing to do. But the problem is that Borderlands 3 doesn’t poke fun at them, and rather uses their popularity with the inhabitants of Pandora and the rest of the galaxy to give them lame catch phrases like “like, subscribe, kill” and show the vulnerability of those who obsess over their streams.  Borderlands 3 ultimately has nothing interesting to say with its antagonists, and it’s made worse by Gearbox’s real world actions leading up to the launch of the game and in its PR efforts to support it.

Shortly after the reveal of Borderlands 3, Gearbox announced a Twitch extension that would allow popular Twitch streamers to raffle out in game loot for players who watched their stream. It was a brilliant marketing move as a way to engage a community that has been asking for a new main line game in the series for years. 

Along with the Twitch extension, Gearbox also hired Kinda Funny’s Greg Miller and Fran Mirabella to host The Borderlands Show, a monthly show where a Gearbox employee would help announce new content and give away prizes. So now Gearbox has streamers and influencers supporting a game to their audiences that depict streamers’ and influencers’ audiences as being cult like and blinding following their chosen celebrity, and this feels weird?

All I could think about while battling through the Calypso twins “Cult of the Vault” is how little Gearbox was actually saying with these characters. They were depicting these cult members as mindless and cruel all for the sake of pleasing their “God Queen” while having real life influencers promote the game to their audiences, and it all seemed like a joke that Gearbox would snicker about as they raked in the cash.

Am I looking too far into this? I don’t know, it’s entirely possible. But during a year where I attended my first PAX, met influencers and other smaller outlets trying to “make it” in the industry, and became disenfranchised with the whole system, the Calypso twins and Gearbox’s marketing campaign felt gross. Influencers and social media have distorted how we consume media to a point where it’s hard to have a conversation with someone who disagrees with your opinion because they have taken on their fandom as their identity. Influencers and streamers have created parasocial relationships with their audiences, to the point where some do feel like cults. This is the message Gearbox could have been saying with the Calypsos, but instead doubled down on the concept and using this problem to their advantage for marketing.

Maybe Borderlands 3 really is a great game. It got rave reviews and many called it “the best in the series”, so maybe I’m just the weird outlier here. But between characters and writing I didn’t vibe with, and Gearbox just being Gearbox, Borderlands 3 failed to leave the impression that either of the other two main line games did. Ultimately, what I think all of this means is that it’s time for Borderlands and I to go our own ways. Like a high you can’t quite reach, I don’t think Borderlands will ever be the game I need it to be again. We had our time together looking forward to the future, but I’m just going to go play Borderlands 2 again whenever I get the itch to go back to Pandora.