Bungie/Gearbox

The review embargo has lifted for Borderlands 3, and now I’m free to share my thoughts on the game from the two weeks or so I’ve had with it ahead of launch. I wrote a full, scored review yesterday, but going forward it will be time to get a bit granular. Namely, the inevitable question is going to come up: Is Borderlands 3 a real rival to Destiny 2, given that Destiny has been the major force in the loot shooter space for five of the seven years Borderlands has been missing from the scene it helped create?

I think there are many aspects of Borderlands that will feel attractive to Destiny players, certainly. Many current Destiny players are naturally old Borderlands players, and if you loved the last two, you’ll enjoy this one, I’m definitely confident in saying that. Even for new Borderlands players, this is a full campaign going up against Destiny’s somewhat smaller expansion this fall, and there’s a lot of content there, and a new grind and loot chase in this genre might feel good.

And yet for as much as I’ve played Borderlands so far, I think Destiny is able to retain one significant edge over its rival. If I had to boil it down a single word or gaming term, it would simply be “mechanics.”

Bungie

Back when Destiny first came out it was getting relatively rough reviews, until something arrived called the Vault of Glass. That raid set the standard for the entire genre, introducing something that had never been seen before in an FPS, and raids and raid-like mechanics would turn into a staple for both Destiny and the genre as a whole. Activities for players to work together to overcome, mixing puzzle solving and acrobatic challenges with combat, and with constant mechanical innovation showing players things they’d never seen before.

While Borderlands 3 remains a great co-op experience, in the last seven years it has absorbed…exactly none of this. I have gotten the question a few times if there is an equivalent to Destiny’s raids for Borderlands’ endgame. The truth is no, and really, most Destiny strikes at this point, or even Anthem’s Cataclysm, are much more mechanically complex than anything we see in Borderlands 3.

This may be par for the course for the series, as we may have seen tough, raid-like bosses in the game in the past, but there are no actual “raids” and no mechanics in the game that emulate anything like what we see in Destiny’s raids, strikes, forges, menagerie, really anything. Every puzzle is combat. Its’ combat arranged in different ways, perhaps, a tough boss, waves of enemies at the Slaughterhouse, a Diablo-like rift in Proving Grounds, but there are no mechanics here other than having the right gear and skills to clear a room of bad guys.

Gearbox

For many, this may be perfectly fine. I’ve certainly had fun with this format during my time with Borderlands 3. But it does make me wonder about the longer term appeal of the game when every encounter starts to blur together to some extent when it’s all just kill, kill, kill with very little focus on mechanics or tactics to overcome said mechanics. The most you really have to “think” is how to work with new, Nightfall-ish modifiers in Borderlands 3’s Mayhem mode, but even that’s mainly just things like “use an Incendiary gun instead of a Corrosive gun for this fight.”

While I have been enjoying Borderlands 3, this feels like the other side of the double-edged sword of “staying true to its roots.” Borderlands 3 will delight many that it has not gone full “games as service” and retains its hefty single player campaign and split-screen co-op and the ability to pause mid-fight. And yet it does not feel like it has learned much of anything from the loot shooter genre, be it Destiny, or to a lesser extent, Warframe, The Division, Anthem or a few others. It looked to Destiny to improve its shooting, which it has, and yet I think you will see a lot of Destiny players show up to Borderlands for either the first time, or first time in years, and find that it’s a game that feels a touch dated because of how little it draw from improvements in the genre.

I am of the firm mind that this can still be fine and fun and I really don’t need another game to throw 1,000 hours into, frankly. But I can also see how this may confuse some as they play and reach the Borderlands endgame, where there’s still nothing that even comes close to the Vault of Glass five years after its debut in this rival series.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Read my new sci-fi thriller novel Herokiller, available now in print and online. I also wrote The Earthborn Trilogy.

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