They’ve found a way to make SHIFT codes even more annoying.
Achievement Unlocked.
3 hour keys can fuck right off.
Thank you for posting them tho!
Yeah, with BL2, I at first spent an inordinate amount of time scouring for codes and frantically entering them before they expired, only to stop playing BL2 (after many hours of play, mind you) with many keys left unspent. It became a source of stress to try to not let any codes slip by, which is dumb, so this time I’m entering codes as I come across them, and while I’ll probably accumulate fewer, it will be much more pleasant overall.
Topic shift: Some quests in BL3 seem susceptible to bugging out. In addition to the one I experienced where the target got blasted off the map, tonight I had one where I killed everyone in an area, but the next phase did not trigger. Apparently there was someone somewhere still alive, but no red dot showed up and there was no one to be found. Teleporting to Sanctuary and back fixed it, though I had to fight all the bad guys one more time. Which wasn’t bad, as it’s fun, but it can get old if this stuff happens too often.
I had a quest bug out too where I was escorting a robot and it wouldn’t progress, thinking I needed to kill 1 more dude. Just left the game and rejoined, and was able to continue it.
Edit: 1 key: 5HK33-HFTZ3-SCBCC-TTTTT-H66C9
When you get right down to it, Golden Keys (at least in this quantity) really shouldn’t exist in the game at all. The ability to get a few codes a day for a chest full of like 5-6 free purple/orange items that are automatically leveled to your characters, kinda undermines the hunt for loot in the game. Especially when gear of that quality is far more rare in the game.
It’d be one thing if you could like, earn one every couple of weeks by completing some challenge in the game itself - but Pitchford just gives them out like candy on Twitter.
The golden key thing is such a bizarre thing to do to a game that is 100% based on acquiring loot…
It’d be one thing if the “best stuff” could only be attained from certain mobs, or certain missions. But because of the procedural nature of the weapons, there’s nothing to say a random Golden Key couldn’t give you one of the best ones in the game.
It’s not that bizarre. The initial marketing promised gazillions of guns. And they deliver. The only way to prevent the player from the tedium of sorting through that much loot is to give away lots of golden keys. That way you get your gazillion guns and you don’t bother the player with having to sort through it all.
Or having to play the game.
/shrug. I would have handed out tokens that increase your probability to get better rolls on drops. More motivation to play the game, same end result.
How these ARPGs handle loot is endlessly fascinating to me.
Like, for me it doesn’t make sense the sea of white weapons that are dropped in a game like Diablo or Borderlands. It would make much more sense to remove them directly, reduce the amount of loot in general, but make each piece more worthwhile, from a gameplay standpoint. Less endless garbage bin that is a bother to collect and sell.
Except the real reason people play these games are not because of the gameplay (mostly) but the addiction. It’s all psychology. The real reason white loot exists is to actually be mediocre garbage, that’s their whole reason for existence, that way when you finally find a good blue piece or something it will look so much better in comparison, because they have established a baseline with the white loot. Sifting through the white garbage is a punishment given the player so the eventual reward will taste (comparatively) sweeter.
That’s a much better idea, and you don’t even work for Gearbox as far as I know.
The actual developers of this game have had the Golden Key system for two straight games now.
The keys are dumb, first because in the last game I made sure to go out of my way to register every one they gave away. And second because I probably ended up using maybe 10 keys total.
:|
For a recent Borderlands 2 replay I went to the wiki and entered in every single key. Every level I would do a few golden keys.
Such a dumb mechanic. I really want to like these games but I am a loot whore and these games don’t understand loot. Finding out it’s in B3 made it an easy decision to wait for a sale.
The only thing that makes sense to me is that they think the social media uptick from giving these keys away outweighs the irreparable damage they have done to their game design. Probably why they are so time limited this go around as well.
Yeah, it’s pretty dumb. If they want to do this, I think Golden Keys should be rare and permanent. Release a new key at a Borderlands Con, or when doing a major announcement (new expansion or something). Maybe throw one out during the holidays. This constant drip-drip-drip time-limited stuff is the worst, in many ways.
On the other hand, I loathe lot farming. I just want to have weapons that work with whatever building I want to play. I don’t want to have to redo everything because I can’t find x sword that gives the one bonus that makes it all work.
Don’t get me wrong, cool items are cool, but how many Action RPGs have builds that require certain items to work? Grinding is boring.
Right, but the gold keys don’t guarantee anything specific. You’re just trading gameplay grinding for “grinding” via external sources like Twitter, wikis, this forum, etc.
Exactly. It’s so random that your chance of getting something annoyingly useless is very high, and the chance of getting anything actually useful annoyingly low. Yet, once the keys are there, you can’t un-see them, as it were. They prey on your subconscious all the time. As you are killing bandits and looting innumerable greens and blues, you keep thinking, hmm, why not just burn a key? Which devalues the in-game loot (a core part of the experience IMO) and focuses you on externalities.
Which, I guess, is the point; the money they can make from harnessing social media exposure may well be what drives these keys, pure and simple.
And now it’s worse because with BL2 you could ignore it until you went to a wiki or whatever and just uploaded a bunch of keys all at once. Now? Three-hour window!