Harvey Randall, Staff Writer
This week I’ve been: Playing Silksong and writing PSAs about benches.
Last week I was: Getting back into Deadlock, because I just really hate having free time.
One thing I’ve seen repeated often in Borderlands 4’s interviews is the insistence that yes, we’ve learned our lesson with Borderlands 3, and we’re not going to give you a headache this time. We’ve got character motivations, stakes, and jokes not rooted in years-old memes!
Which is fair enough. Borderlands 3’s story (which, warning, I will be spoiling) was so atrocious it nearly spoiled what I otherwise found to be a great little game. I massively enjoyed zipping around as Zane with my movement speed build, and the moment-to-moment blasting was as consistent as ever. And then the story would happen and I’d start itching desperately to be shooting something again.
It wasn’t just the jokes, either. Borderlands 3 tripped over itself when it came to its serious moments, too. Maya’s death, its insistence that Ava was the chosen one, Lilith throwing herself into a moon for some reason, any time the Calypso twins, who could’ve been 1,000% more interesting, were on screen—it was a game that did not know how to stick the landing.
But the question is, was Borderlands’ story ever actually, y’know, good? The answer is ‘kinda’. I’ve been sticking with this series since I was—and I’m sorry to make you feel ancient—14 years old, and I don’t know if I can rightly say that there’s a ‘return to form’ to go back to.
Call me old-fashioned, but in order to go back to your roots, you need roots to begin with, and those foundations haven’t ever truly been solid. Borderlands has always been a mosaic, and that’s part of its charm, but let’s try and get the blueprint sketched out here:
Borderlands is high-concept science fantasy, but it’s also a space western, but it’s also post-apocalyptic Mad Max, but it’s also satirical dystopic cyberpunk, but it’s also TTRPG-style character drama. And there’s nothing wrong with mixing your genres, but if you throw too many into the pot, you start having a game that doesn’t really know what it’s about.
Actually, that might be the problem
Whenever Borderlands’ story has been ‘okay, with some very good moments’, it’s because it’s stuck to a couple of lanes and fleshed them out, using the rest of its madcap multitudes as garnish, not main ingredients. Let’s take a moment to rattle off a list of what each game actually focused on from the aforementioned genre grab-bag:
- Borderlands 1 was Mad Max with the barest splash of science fantasy at the end.
- Borderlands 2 was cyberpunk dystopic satire, little Mad Max thrown in there, and some solid character drama.
- Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel hammered home the science fantasy elements, and focused on character development.
- Tales From the Borderlands threw away most of the sci-fantasy heroics in lieu of character work and corporate satire.
One reason Borderlands 3 didn’t work—and there are many—was its effort to be everything all at once. It was tremendously unfocused. The galactic streamer (cyberpunk dystopia satire) bandit kingpins with a cult (Mad Max) were also briefly-conjoined twins with superpowers (science fantasy) but they were also children of Typhon DeLeon with barely-touched upon daddy issues (character work) and—do you see what I mean?
The reason Handsome Jack casts such a long shadow over the series is because his writer, Anthony Burch, knew what the guy was about. His entire defined arc was a narcissistic corporate megalomaniac yelling ‘I’m not owned!’ until he eventually turned into a corn cob. You simply cannot come up with a similar elevator pitch for the Calypso Twins. They’re undefined narrative mud from the word “go”.
It’s the same inconsistency that messed up Tales’ Rhys and Vaughn, who were hucked into Borderlands 3 because people liked ’em, I guess: Characters who were ostensibly interesting because they were complete randoms in a wild, weird space-west setting, reduced to hollow, Flanderized versions of themselves. Scattershot is the word.
You can see Gearbox starting to correct for this, even, in Borderlands 3’s DLC, all of which were a surprisingly big improvement on the base game’s story—because they all picked a vibe and mostly stuck with it.
You’ve got an Oceans-11 send-up in Moxxi’s Heist, a wild west adventure in Bounty of Blood, a lovecraftian parody in Guns, Love, and Tentacles, and a psychedelic trip into the mental state of Krieg in Fustercluck. None of these DLCs necessarily broke new ground, but they were all ostensibly fine—to the point where I’d recommend you actually go and play them if you bounced off BL3 because of its story.
So when I say that I hope Borderlands 4’s story is ‘good’, I also mean ‘focused’—and that could be what’s happening. Piecing together info from the story and character trailers, it looks like we’re grabbing cyberpunk dystopia and character-driven drama from the grab-bag, this time.
As long as its story stays focused on that (and has fewer irreverent memes that make you want to hurl yourself in front of the nearest Catch-A-Ride) I think we’re golden. Here’s to hoping Borderlands can find its groove again.
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