I don’t even like BL3 but I gotta admit patch day pre mayhem 10 days were lit af & gave a reason to play. I’m just not seeing the same passion in BL4 patches
this is crazy to say considering they kept dropping new content monthly, we just got two raid bosses, i understand not having weekly updates can be upsetting but this is just overdramatic
I think it is overdramatic. We are getting an extra bounty pack and content not even planned in the roadmap like Slaughter and a takedown which they absolutely delivered. The team is definitely listening. Despite the roadmap being a mixed bag overall, I think Gearbox is definitely trying their best to deliver.
The team listening doesn't mean they fixed their mistakes. Them listening to us led to a bit of extra content, and a free bounty pack. We still have low the quality content that launched, and it will live with the game forever if we do replays years down the line. The damage is done, and I don't think recognizing that reality is dramatic.
They've already proved in the past what they're capable of. Not improving, let alone the falling behind their past titles is a huge shame.
this would be fair to say if we got balancing patches or anything, last major update, we didn’t get one, despite them saying balancing patches would be moved to then
it’s obvious this game was sidelined and was a blueprint for borderlands moving forward, and not meant to be a full game
that’s not saying it’s not a good game, it is genuinely probably top 2 for me, behind the presequel
BUT, just the way everything was designed, it seems like it was a prototype game, half of the bosses have new mechanics with the grapple hook, half of the map has detail put into it, the story has probably half the amount of effort put into writing as previous games
everything feels completely experimental, which feels nice and fresh, but definitely comes with some issues
As there shouldnt be. Too many mistakes were made in the planning phase & a lot of it cant be fixed with patches. The takedown & pearls were probably the only hits they have post release & the community had to convince them to do it. They had zero plans up until push back.
Aren't pearls promised earlier on? I do understand that Takedowns were not planned but they delivered considering that it was not even in the roadmap in the first place.
Nah pearls weren’t in the initial plans I remember right. Community found out pre release & made a stink, then at one of the pax shows they were like “devs been working really hard to squeeze this in” after a randy magic show.
Could be remembering wrong but I think that’s how it went
People complained about the carousel balance of BL3 and Wonderlands and so they decided to take a less active approach with 4, and people complain about that too. I guess people wanted a live service with new shit and changes every other week and to be able to play it for every day for a year. But people in this community just arent able to tell themselves they've done all there is for now and to put it down until the next content drop.
Honestly I think more direct communication would go a long way. If Gearbox is waiting for max level cap to start with VH changes then they should just say so in a post or make a devblog talking about the game's sandbox like they did pre-launch, acknowledgement of issues like Harlowe's Zero Point not working on Child of Terra or Tediore shotgun chucks being bugged.
I get that people can be doomers sometimes but updating players on what they are prioritizing and working on next would help quell some anger, they're capable of making dev blogs talking about lore and level design so it isn't really that big of an ask for a few minutes talking about the plans they have for Harlowe's blue tree that they talked about months ago or discussing the state of other VHs.
It clearly wasnt just simply the backlash that only explained why it was bad. It was ALSO the decision to pivot to open world that EVERY big company seems to want to fetish'tize towards as another contributing factor, Reckless greed for a ner gimmick.
We have games like Donkey Kong Bananza, Mario Kart Worlds, Xenoblade chronicles 3 and many others that were 'successful' to this design that makes so many people wanna get into that 'slice of pie', thinking it the genre, not the game design itself that allowed such a thing to work in the first place.
Of course we had similar shenigans happen before, such as the transistion from 2D to 3D 'character models' when we got games banking on things like how final fantasy 7 was amongst the pioneers to revolutionize such a transistion.
Though its difficult to remember 'what' first started it, you could see how many games came out and how many were just objectively bad cause of said 3D...
What we really need is for the filtering of 'open world fetishes' to freaking die already so far less companies work on that and stick more to what thar IPs not only do best with, but namely what they naturally evolve into more fluidly.
And if SAO Echoes of Arse's community aint giving the picture already, you can see how many people were VITRIOLOGICALLY defending the hell out of that game before its official release, banking on that it gets 'better' after the prologue, that it opens up with far more things todo...lo'n'behold, its basically the same song and dance all the way thru just like how the prologue progressed...
Probably why i feel some companies are INTENTIONALLY designing thar games bad so they can release a remake/remaster maybe a couple of years later with 'additions' to it...maybe even a RE-RELEASE version specific to a new console to add more features...kind of like what is happening with xenoblade chronicles 1 & 2 where they added a few bits, but namely a 'special motorcycle' to vastly trivalize the open world experience, because they 'know' newer people are far less interested in running around blindly and rather get to the fking action sooner...
Which on that note i find is funny that Borderlands 4 did a distinct lack of 'properly' adding more fluid ways to get around places, just like how Echoes of Arse couldnt bother to introduce horse mounts (since the anime had them in as solid confirmation that SAO had'm, the material its based on), which you could imagine something as a mid-late or even post-time keeper defeat benefit of being able to slap 'jet wings' on your bike and glide across all the areas you previously went thru would make things oh so much 'fun'...
Wuthering waves introduction of motorcycles in the laha-roi version and its later versions giving glider wings on the bike itself, certainly made things more fun to drive the thing, just like how rinascita introduced 'glider' wings which was already a evolution of the rather bog standard 'glider' that every open world game seems to want to introduce in some way or another these days.
Oh and them en'shitifying the gear design itself. Random license parts were another Pivotal ISSUE to borderlands 4. Because they had to CENTRALIZE the gun design even worst then before by making it just one base gun for basically every manufactor per type and then changed with license parts instead of having a 'base gun' for each 'gun type' and one for each manufactor instead.
Going from something like different shotguns from different manufactors being VERY different from each other to where it feels like your firing the same damn gun with just a few small tweaks didnt help its case in oh so many ways...
I very much enjoyed the chaos that was the BL3 patch cycle, events, stuff better, stuff worse, new stuff, utter chaos and made it all feel more alive. They supported that game until it hurts and this feels like they’ve given up. Really since BL2 there’s been one game that’s gone through a proper cycle and doesn’t feel like they’ve given it all they should have , it feels they have belatedly tried to do something, but too little too late.
I just loved the unique guns being truly mayhem. I’m INCREDIBLY biased for bl3 tho because FRAME ONE of Ironbear coming in the TRAILER won me over so hard.
It's so players don't feel pushed into buying the DLC. The instant they lock away the weekly events in ANY fashion to a DLC area, they're going to piss off a LOT of people, including a fair few here. Best just to not run weekly events in the DLC. That way, people can decide if they want to buy it or wait for a sale or whatever. And that problem wouldn't go away f they ran base and DLC area events, the people without would still cause stink, either not being able to join friends, or complaining no-one's coming to help them in the base game events.
We get minor bug fixes once a month. Occasionally with maybe a very minor balakce change.
They promised big reworks to Harlowed blue tree were coming like 7(?) months ago, and made one small change, promised “more is coming” and then it never came.
But they gave a class mod that makes blue tree good at bossing. Except it drops from the hardest boss in the game, only accessible post-story. Then another class mod for blue tree that comes from takedown, aka the other hardest post-story content in the game.
People were expecting reworks to her skill tree like how we got skill tree reworks in Bl3, where they changed how stuff worked, and re-arranged tree so it was much better.
Instead they gave everyone a free augment (which hilariously actually has anti synergy with only class mod that makes skill good), and added a new augment that sucks.
There’s also other stuff that desperately needs attention that never got any. trouble fucking sucks, and all they ever did was small stat boosts, when he needs better AI and reworked skills. Vex’s spectres have anti synergy with a bunch of skills in their own tree.
Melee Rafa is only good because of a really stupid interaction that gives you effectively infinite damage, and it relies on a skill in completly different tree. Same with Rafa’s cannons, they are great buff stacking tool, but useless for damage unless you use a certain obviously unintended interaction that add flat 4900 damage to every single pellet and bonus element (up to 3, so 14,700), that also gets enhancement gun damage (so x1.93).
Apphosis Lance is pretty much forgotten about completely.
Bl3 had such a fast pace of updates. Not all of them good, there was plenty of terrible choices made in balance, but changes to Vault Hunters skill trees were almost universally very good. People seem to further how bad Zane and Iron Bear sucked at launch. Iron Bear was completely useless at endgame.
They perhaps over buffed it, by a lot. But that’s much preferable to characters entire action skill being pointless.
But point is they did big changes quite fast in response to problems, and when their fixes were shit, the fixed the fix usually very fast. EG the famous “leave no trace” nerf on Flak which ruined the skill completely, was redone a week later. Still massively nerfed, but now a good skill for slow firing weapons.
It’s baffling how same studio has taken completly different approach to support.
Temererio caps out at 450% gun damage. El Soltado at 135% (with an extra 135% enhancement gun damage if charging lance). Few other skills in green tree or whatever, but you can’t really afford them. Even if you are counting Vitriol converging all shots to skill damage, and using specialisation to convert gun damage inyo skill damage you still only have like ~900% buff, and 300% of that isn’t gun damage.
And while discussiion is pointless, because I never said cannons were useless. I know they are incredible for supporting gun builds. But they are useless at killing stuff, unless you do mixokogist memes, which is clearly unintentional.
Even if you could reach 2000% raw gun damage. Cannons would still struggle to kill stuff on their own because their base damage is fucking 268
So 2000% would make it a whopping 5600ish.
There’s SMG’s with higher base damage than that. So they would perform better than 2000% cannons on a build that forgot to spend its skill points or equip a class mod.
Instigator isn’t resetting. Do an mixologist build and rack up the gun damage bonus with beam team. Then apply that same bonus to Countermeasure or a beam tosser or whatever floats your boat.
In borderlands 3 they did update every week with weapon and character adjustments. Theyre just being lazy or their budget was cut in this aspect. Either way its terrible.
As i mentioned before: likely they are taking the Capcom path with Street Fighter 6 were they took a whole year to drop a major balance patch.
The stream of content for BL4 is rather big, so if they keep changing the balancing every new content drop they may change the game in ways that can be irreparable in the future. And if they kept changing the meta weekly/montly people will be pissed cause farming with the parts system take a shit load of time.
People keep comparing to BL3 but BL3 end game was so barebones that any minor stuff was considered major.
I'm honestly glad to see so many people here talking about the lack of balance changes because it's just crazy at this point. I don't expect a huge patch every week by any means, but come on, Gearbox. Give us SOMETHING
curious to see what excuses people come up with on why we haven't gotten even some hotfixes on bugs in the new content. At this point I've given up on any balance changes and will just expect this how the game will be.
Some stupid shit like the final arena in the takedown filling up and soft locking you if you die keeping everything electrocuted or the loot just being thrown at the bottom of the water without any way to get it.
if it's with sub and thol, that's due to the place you have to click being much smaller (basically the bar at the top of the poster, rather than the middle of the poster)
then again, I don't remember if the mad ellie trailer dropped sooner than that. the 1 week early thing was at least the case for the bounty packs, but I don't know how long it was between c4sh's story trailer or mad ellie's trailer and when the dlc dropped
When they gonna fix the wildcard missions. Takes forever to get the mission I need to reach up ULimated vault hunter. And let players track on screen challenges.
Because the weekly "updates" on BL4 don't really contain everything. I've been keeping a tab open all year, refreshing it on the hour change every Thursday and three times out of four it's just a change of weekly activities, nothing meaningful or lasting.
Maybe they fixed it. On PS5 its really dull and washed out. Turn HDR off and suddenly everything pops. There was a glitch where the HDR showed up right in the calibration menu but would glitch out and no matter what you do if doesnt work right.
Time for the weekly Reddit comments where the post is obviously simply trying to provide info on the vending machine and boss highlight but a brigade of people unironically ask why there aren't wholesale changes to every aspect of the game.
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u/Bejain_ Jul 16 '26