His problem seems to be that he wants Borderlands to be Tales from the Borderlands, which it isn’t.
His expectations were just wrong.
Do any of the reviews mention solo play? Is the game still meant to be played co-op?
I don’t think he has a problem. Sounds like the game does. The series modernized the storytelling with Tales by including heart and drama as well as the dumb jokes. Now it’s back to just the dumb jokes, so it feels dated.
I think it’s a fair critique, and not an unreasonable expectation.
Usually, reviewers are playing the same game that everyone else will—just a week or two earlier.
In the case of Borderlands 3 , which comes out Friday for PC and consoles, things are unusual. Rather than sending out codes for the game, 2K gave reviewers special Epic Games Store accounts loaded up with early, work-in-progress builds of Borderlands 3 —a bizarre scenario that we’ve never seen before . As Polygon explained in their review:
2K Games and Gearbox didn’t send out review codes for Borderlands 3 . Instead, they set reviewers up with new Epic Games Store accounts with the game unlocked, and gave us a few warnings about the game being a work in progress. They asked us to stay away from the DirectX 12 implementation, for example, and told us that our progress in these builds may or may not carry over to the final game.
As a result, Polygon reviewer Ben Kuchera wrote, he and some of his colleagues ran into some severe technical issues including random crashes and, in one case, someone losing six hours of progress and having to start from scratch (!!!). Some other reviewers complained of technical problems; others did not.
Perhaps you were unaware but Borderlands 2 - which actually predates Tales from the Borderlands - had “heart and drama as well as dumb jokes”.
Also, did you get the phrase “modernizes the storytelling” from the back of a cereal box?
I was, thanks for clearing that up!
No, I’m just not as smart as you. Sorry.
Then one wonders why you suggested Tales of the Borderlands added those things to the series via an ill-defined concept known as “modernization”?
Honestly.
Also, this has nothing to do with intelligence. I don’t think you are unintelligent. But the phase itself is pablum.
Well, this is why you read the reviews, and don’t just look at the scores. For some folks, the things being criticized are big deals. For others, not so much. Me, I’m fine with poop jokes. I have three dogs, and whether they’ve pooped or not before we turn in for the night is a big deal around here! And I do not play a Borderlands game for incisive wit and polished story-telling so much as exactly the things it appears this game does–guns, Guns, GUNS! and lots of boom. Easy doesn’t bug me either, as I suck in general at hard games. And I found Borderlands 2 fine solo, and finished it at least twice I think.
For those of us who didn’t grow up in the ghetto, here’s the meaning of pablum:
No, Tales is not a part of the series, it’s an offshoot. Borderlands is a looter/shooter, while Tales is an adventure game. Very different games set in the same universe.
If a reviewer thinks a game’s writing is poo it is a worthwhile criticism to make and should affect review scores. As with most things relating to a videogame, it is a subjective statement and people are free to disagree but it has nothing to do with ‘expectations’ (past entries in the series somehow excuse crap writing?).
If it’s the same universe, it’s reasonable to expect similar style/theme/aesthetic regardless of the game genre. If one game elevates that style in some way and then the next reverts back to the same-old (or worse) then I think the reviewer is free to factor that without being accused that they’re reviewing the wrong game. That’s all. :)
I didn’t suggest it, the PC Gamer review did. I’m not qualified to suggest it.
My sentence with ‘modernizes the storytelling’ was meant as an interpretation or summary of the points made by the PCG reviewer about why they felt it was a step backwards, not as a statement of my own feelings on any of the games.
I haven’t played BL3, and I haven’t played Tales (though I have played other Telltales). I have played lots of BL2 and I honestly don’t recall much substance to the narrative. But it was a while ago now and I rarely pay attention.
If this version have poor or less writting, it will be sad waste, but theres still everything else in the game. I still hope hidden in some audiotape theses the crumb of lore that give everything else a new layer of context.
I like Tannis.
My (mildly) hot take in this is
-yes, BL2 had heart and drama, it was in fact one of the improvements of BL2 over BL1.
-Tales was great, and it had even more heart and drama, thanks to being more character-driven, and having great characters in general.
-While one always should ask for the best possible story/characters/etc in a game, it’s also a bit unfair to ask a looter shooter FPS like BL3 to be at the same level as Tales. Tales had great heart and drama… and nothing else. There is no gameplay beyond some qtes. They can be hyper focused on the good stuff, then.
BL3 development focus as a game is in first being a good action RPG, then other stuff. It a game is 90% shooting, 10% story, then your review should give more importance to the shooting than to the story.
-I (we?) haven’t played BL3. No idea if the heart/drama is better or worse than BL2 or Tales, or it’s in some point in the middle.
All I want is great gameplay and interesting loot and character builds. Heart and drama mean about as much to me in this as it would in DOOM or Diablo 3.
Which is to say, you can’t please everybody. I’m just glad that thus far it sounds like the negative reviews have been in regards to that, not the gameplay.
that’s not an expectation that the vast majority of people hold and with good reason. Can you name an instance where it applies? There aren’t a ton of games that get wildly different genre enteries (I am excluding mobile from this list for obvious reasons; sticking to “Pc/console” releases/genres), granted. I can’t think of any off hand where this applies.
Tales is an entirely different sort of game from Borderlands 2. I appreciate Tales for what it is but wouldn’t want that much dialog in a Borderlands game. Back to Tales, it would be an utter failure without that much story telling and that kind of story telling as the only mechanics are the tracked story choices (a more sophisticated version of a CYA book) and the occasionally barfy QTE elements. Borderlands, OTOH, has an entire massive mechanics you can’t find in the Tales games. Shooting and looting and driving and such. it’s the focus of the Borderlands series. Tales is not part of the main Borderlands series. It’s a side game. It’s not lesser for it, but that’s still true.
This doesn’t make the statement not pablum. It still is. And you seem to be agreeing with the point (to some textent), but @Grifman’s point stands. It simply isn’t a realistic or reasonable positon to have expected Borderlands 3 to do anything different, in terms of how the story is told, from Borderlands 1 and 2. Borderlands 2 isn’t even different from 1. It’s just a much better told story. But it’s a statically told story, not the sort you would find in an old-Bioware or Obsidian RPG where choice radically changes the gameworld. It’s not that sort of game.
[quote] I have played lots of BL2 and I honestly don’t recall much substance to the narrative. But it was a while ago now and I rarely pay attention.
[/quote]
Not liking the Borderlands 2 story is fine; different’ strokes for different folks. It cannot be argued that it lacked heart/drama. It’s a position with no basis in reality. Argue the execution all you (this is really the editorial/royal you, understand). Prefer other sorts of approaches to story telling.
But this is what we knew we were going to get. And not every game should take the CRPG approach to story telling.
It seems weird to argue that BL 3 is deficient for not incorporating more story elements while also noting that you didn’t pay attention to the BL 2 story.
I have no idea if BL 3 is any good (and I have some concerns at this point for obvious reasons), and the thing about humor is it is hard to explain exactly why some if works or doesn’t work so it’s silly to argue that point when none of us have played it.
That all said, it is silly to act like Tales brought a narrative that Borderlands 2 didn’t have at all. I would argue that BL 2 often did it better because you find out a lot about the story by finding things out through the game play and missions (like all the Tiny Tina stuff which was great) unlike Tales which is a lot closer to a movie.
Again, that’s not what I’m arguing and it’s not even what PCG dings the game for in the review.
The review claims the style of humour in BL3 is dated, and that Tales showed how it could be not-dated.
My argument is they should be free to mark the game down for that.
Halo series is an example. There was an expectation (mentioned by some reviewers) that Halo Wars 2 should have a similar level of story, character, and art to that in the main FPS games.
Well, that’s not like the situation we’re talking about here. We’re talking about a side series with a very different genre getting incorporated back into the main series somehow, not the other way around (never mind that it was written by an entirely different studio so, you know. . . yeah). And we’re not talking about visual aesthetics here. The Borderlands/Tales share the same visual aesthetic.
I didn’t follow Halo Wars. But it sounds like you are saying people were upset the sequel in a side series with a very different genre than the main series was not like the main series in terms of asthetics. I don’t really understand the issue, it’s an RTS. Are we talking about very different visual designs of “shared” things like say this or that unit/solider/whatever? Was this different from the first Halop Wars? Because if this was true in the first Halo Wars I think it would have been crazy to expect the sequel to be different since it sounds like that might have mailed that aspect in once and then gotten enough results to get a sequel which makes the expectation that it would stay the same the logical one. But like I said I didn’t follow Halo Wars, I don’t know. This all sounds sort of crazy.
I’m not talking about people being upset, I’m talking about the thing I’ve been talking about the whole time. Reviews, and critiquing a game aspect (story in this case) common across different genres within the same series. And how doing that seemed valid to me regardless of how unhappy I am with the score outcome.
I mentioned style/theme/aesthetic (confusing, sorry) because that was in the quote but I am specifically talking about story in this instance. The first review of Halo Wars 2 I opened was comparing the quality of the story with that in the preceeding FPS games.
This may not be exactly the same circumstance but I thought it illustrated the point of a review judging the story based on previous games in the same series but from a different genre.