Harvey Randall, Staff Writer
Last week I was: Trying not to lose it over that one boss in Silksong. The guy with the maggots. You know who I’m talking about.
This week I’ve been: Playing around 47 hours of Borderlands 4. Send help, I’m trapped in the loot dimension.
I’ve been playing the Borderlands series since its inception, but I have something terrible to confess—I have never, not once, been tempted to engage in the endgame. The closest I’ve ever got was when I rinsed through Borderlands 3’s DLCs (many of which were shockingly good), and even then, that was more coincidental.
I’d simply run out of levels, so I was technically in the postgame. But I’ve never tried to get a build going, farm that all-important legendary, or so much as sneezed at a raid boss. I’m here to play 30 hours of a shooty RPG and then do something else.
Borderlands 4, though? Now I’ve chewed through the campaign, I’m severely tempted to get stuck back in. I would be, were it not for my professional obligation to actually write videogame words for this videogame website, so I’ll settle for nattering at you about wanting to play more BL4 instead.
It’s a partially conflicted feeling, mind. I’ve still got tons to do on Kairos because you should actually wait until after you’ve beaten the campaign to do most of those side quests: However, I also have to recognise the clever trick Gearbox has pulled off here.
While past Borderlands’ post-games would see you churning through the same stuff you’d likely just spent 50-odd levels gnawing at, BL4 makes the game the postgame, so you can do endgame while you game-game. Am I making sense? I’ve been shooting very loud psychos for 47 hours and I can hear Claptrap in my walls.
Let me put it another, less loot-addled way: All of the stuff you’d otherwise be doing in an open-world RPG also happens to be the best way to get your Specialisation levels—a post-campaign progression system fed by EXP—and legendary loot. The postgame is just playing an open-world RPG, mopping up sidequests and snagging collectables. In other words, exactly what I like.
Two other factors also help. Firstly, the game has co-op level scaling, so if I want to hop in with a mate and grind out some of those delicious progression points, I can do that by tagging along with a buddy, even if they’ve not completed their campaign yet or are a much lower level than me.
Secondly, you can now start a new character at level 30 if you’ve beat the main campaign. While this has given our illustrious guides writer Rory Norris cause for concern, I’m almost the opposite: I rarely try out other classes in these games, because that often-tedious starting grind is enough to put me to sleep. But now I can get stuck right in with the tinkering. There is, however, one obstacle: The Wildcard missions system.
A bad hand
Wildcard missions are cool in theory. Every week, you can up your world’s difficulty (and loot) by playing through a story mission with enemy modifiers slapped onto the mooks you’re shooting. Also, sometimes you get a Rainbow Vomit shotgun.
In practice, however, things are less peachy. My first Wildcard mission was the one in Carcadia where you need to re-route the water system—forcing me to spend the first 10 minutes flipping switches and listening to a long spiel I’d already heard before. Which, for Borderlands, is a criminal amount of time to spend not shooting somebody.
My second Wildcard mission I had to repeat two goddamn times. See, these story missions can last upwards of 40 minutes, often taking you between several locations—and while you can die on them without having to start over, if you quit out of the game, it bugs, or you crash? Then you’re screwed, bucko.
I experienced my second-ever crash in 47 hours playing this Wildcard mission. On my second attempt, an enemy got stuck in a wall (also the first time that had happened) making it impossible for me to kill it before moving on.
In a game this pockmarked with bugs—bugs that typically haven’t ruined my enjoyment until now—you simply cannot have a 40-minute time investment that requires you to start over if it breaks. It sucks all the momentum out of the game’s otherwise unerring loot, shoot, repeat momentum.
The monologue problem rears its ugly head again here, too. I just so happened to be doing the mission that introduces you to the trio of main villains in the game—and so I had to listen to Zadra describe who the Timekeeper’s lieutenants were for almost two straight minutes at the tail-end of the mission. Zadra, I like you, but I just spent like 30 hours finding and killing the Timekeeper’s dastardly rogue’s gallery. Me and the business end of my gun are intimately familiar.
Both seem like relatively straightforward, if time-consuming, things Gearbox could fix in future updates. Letting players pick up their Wildcard missions from where they left off if they crash, seems the less involved of the two—but it also wouldn’t hurt to do a quick dialogue-snipping pass, too. If Gearbox sorts that, then me and BL4’s endgame are golden.
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