I really hope Borderlands 4 won't make me a hostage of its characters' dialogue
I like the Borderlands franchise. Conceptually. Working on a job that requires constant use of your brain, it's nice to sit back and relax by shooting at enemies yelling silly things and acting in unhinged, violent ways. It takes my mind off stuff and I don't have to think too hard about what I'm doing. I remember playing the first game when it came out. I was living in another country, had a student visa but couldn't legally work, so I bought a pirated copy at a physical store with the little money I had. Crazy to think how things changed since then. A year later, I think, back in my home country, I "bought" an "original copy"1 on Steam, which was just becoming the "first"2 digital store for video games on PC.
And that game was great. I played a lot of it. It helped propel the concept of "looter-shooter"3. The wasteland-ish planet was great, the dark humor wasn't overdone, and the overall atmosphere of the game melded visual, sound, and gameplay pretty well. It wasn't perfect, but it was enough for some mindless fun in first-person, especially for someone who also likes ARPG and loot.
And then came Borderlands 2, which was pretty good too. But there are two issues I have with the game to this day:
- They overplayed the humor by a lot, repeating the same jokes over and over and over and over again.
- I wasn't possible to skip dialogues and cutscenes, something irrelevant for Borderlands 1 because it had almost none.
And don't get me wrong, I got almost 500 hours of play in this game, the gunplay was pretty good at the time (although not as good as, say, Titanfall, released a couple of years later), but the last 200 or so hours were played through sheer willpower because I. Just. Couldn't. Take. The. Dialogues. Anymore.
The story is ok. It was there. The retcon on Roland's personality was a bummer (at least considering how he acted in the first game), Handsome Jack was a good villain, and all of that. But I don't want to hear Claptrap going on his long joke for the Nth time, or having Sir Hammerlock start a monologue in the middle of a quest and having to wait for him to finish for the objectives to update so I could resume the shooting.
Because that is the issue: when the talking starts, you have to wait until it finishes.
And it really gets in the way of the shooting, the basic premise of the game, more than you would realize, until you're replaying the campaign for the 5th time with another character while advancing to the True Vault Hunter Mode. The story is ok up until the point you don't care about it anymore and just want to shoot things. Just imagine playing Diablo without being able to skip dialogues and cutscenes — it wouldn't be that enjoyable of an experience, especially after you already memorize what the characters would say.
In Borderlands 2, I got to a point where I instinctively knew which quests were worth it and which weren't just based on how long the NPCs would talk and how much shooting I would've been able to do during that time. Sometimes I was doing 3 quests at the same time, optimizing just from memory, so at the downbeats I could leave the characters running their dialogues while waiting for the objectives to update. Borderlands 1 didn't have this issue because everything updated instantly, which is the way things should be.
I'd say Gearbox needs to learn to streamline the action, or to separate it from the storytelling. Borderlands isn't a cinematic game — the story is ok, but that's not the focus. Hell, if the story on Borderlands 2 was just "4 Vault Hunters vault-hunting again", it would've been enough to carry the game, in my humble opinion. If the game must have a story, it shouldn't make you constantly stop doing what the game wants you to do: shoot stuff.
I don't even know what to say about Borderlands 3: the gunplay was even better, but the story there didn't hit anything for me. "Cringe" would be a nice way of putting it, and also just randomly throwing characters in for reference. I didn't have the energy to play that game more than once. I wanted to, but just going through all the dialogues in the first few minutes put me off.
And, I want to be clear here, I know this isn't necessarily the fault of the writers. Game production is a chaotic endeavor and things might change a lot. What I'm criticizing is a design aspect that makes you sit through dialogues without the option of skipping them, or quests in which the objectives update mid-play while characters talk and you have no choice but to wait for them to finish yapping.
I recently played a bit of Tiny Tina's Wonderlands and thought this issue was solved by having dialogue happen on the overworld and shooting happen in the battle maps. But nope. During the main quest, apparently, there are still lots of times when the player has to wait for characters to finish dialoging or monologuing before things move forward.
Borderlands 4 is on my wishlist, but I won't be playing it at launch because I know I'll be mad as the same thing will happen in this game.
I just want to shoot things and have fun while vault-hunting, man. I don't want to listen to a character do the same unskippable "joke" for the 99th time, see developed characters getting killed for "emotional impact", or be lore-dumped about corporate-level conflict justifying an open war that I'm unwillingly taking part of just because that's in the way of raiding a vault. Please, just let me shoot stuff.
It's funny to think this is less of an issue in the Pre-Sequel, although it's still somewhat annoying there. Someday I might try replaying it, or going back to Borderlands 1, to satisfy the itch I sometimes feel.
Anyway, rant over. Sorry. I just had to get this out of my system.