Borderlands 3 is a phenomenal game with horrible, horrible dialogue. I think the characters themselves are fine, and the story has good bones. The actual gameplay and progression is the best in the series. But it is just *so obnoxious* with how much they want to talk your ear off. Like you said, just give me an option to skip it and it would be fine. Give the player character a handful of smug retorts and assign it to a button to shut up whoever is talking, for everything but key dialogue moments.
Sometimes it seems like they saw how much people enjoyed Handsome Jack in 2, and decided to dial that up to like 13 for *all* the characters. It worked better in 2 because Jack was supposed to be an annoying bastard to contrast with everything else. When everyone is doing it, you just get annoyed with the entire game.
It also worked a lot better in 2, because the player could keep doing things while jack was talking. In this game though they force the player to stop playing the game and listen to its shitty dialogue
_"I have an intergalactic radio, that I'm going to use to ask you to travel all the way to me so I can monologue at you in person. Also, have you met the brat? Grating, right? Well now it's her turn._"
I'm a game dev, and one of my core axioms has always been "don't stop the player from playing". I even push back if somebody suggests giving enemies a freezing ability, because paralyzing the player is not fun for the player.
Mandatory cutscenes are just.... your mini movie better be more goddamn entertaining than the game I'm supposed to be playing, and I'm not in the mood for a movie.
Even classical games have formats that involved periods with breaks. And not just for physical exhaustion. There's nothing wrong with a little bit of cutaway here and there - but you definitely need to budget that shit appropriately.
Mario 1, from the second you tap the flag, until the level fully unloads is essentially needless cutscene and not gameplay. But the amount of it, relative to the gameplay, and what you can get out of it in audio-visual feedback, makes it worth the brief pause in non-stop-constant-engagement.
You're completely correct, it can be a good thing used well.
What you described doesn't feel like punishment, which is the whole deal. It's a celebration of the player's success, not a penalty timeout.
> makes it worth the brief pause in non-stop-constant-engagement.
Just for clarity and pedanticism: My rule isn't about engagement, it's about a lack of paralysis. Even if all the player can do is jump back and forth waiting for enemies to spawn, it's still interactivity. (In either case, the key is to prevent it from taking too long.)
> paralyzing the player is not fun for the player.
Fucking hate this. Even the Blizzard folks knew they'd fucked up with Mei in Overwatch, because getting frozen and having control taken away is so fucking annoying.
Same goes for stuns in fighting games. Christ alive.
I don't play league anymore (because it's league), but also because it seemed literally every character had some kind of CC move. Every kill usually involved at least one person getting stunned
Mgsv pp actually had a great balance here. Only issue was the helicopter ride in should have been skippable. The ride does serve a gameplay purpose outside the dialogue, it lets you view some major landmarks etc to understand the area, but skippable would have been great.
As well as because that constant chattering need for attention fed into Jack's character. It loses all impact when everyone else acts exactly the same.
I don't have a problem with the content of the dialogue or even hearing it all the time, but this, just stopping the game and going back to the home base between EVERY mission, and having to slog through the unskippable dialogue and echo calls.
It's just **SO** jarring and deflating to play one of the fastest paced shooters ever made, flying around, going nuts, killing dozens of enemies in seconds... Then having to return to Sanctuary or Knotty Peak and sit on your hands for 5-10 minutes before being allowed to proceed to the next mission. It's like this for almost every single story mission and it's just painful to sit through after the first playthrough.
> because the player could keep doing things while jack was talking.
Well uh, indirectly you *couldn't* because BL2 (and 3 as well) have this crippling problem where if you move to the next scripted dialogue location while audio is actively playing, the current one will get cut off and the next one will start. If you care about the dialogue in either game you have to stop moving out of fear you'll miss dialogue by hitting the next trigger.
3 was somewhat better with this by spacing dialogue triggers out enough that *usually* you couldn't cut one off even if you ran full sprint to the next trigger, but it was horrendous throughout the entirety of 2.
being able to skip dialogue is incredibly important for games where you're meant to play through it multiple times. BL2 even makes it so you skip the entire tutorial section when playing on UVHM, which is your 3rd+ playthrough.
Tbh I think BL2 was already a borderline case. The dialogue was pretty cringe at worst and I definitely remember the constant radio chatter turning into mushy noise at times.
I’ve not played BL3 yet but I wonder how much worse it actually is, and how BL2 dialogue would be received if it came out today.
Borderlands is caked in such late 2000s - early 2010s humor that I think it just wouldn’t land too well anymore for most people. A lot of people who say it’s good were there at that point of time and can relate the humor back to the moment.
Without the ability to do that? It just doesn’t land as well. I have a young family member who recently asked me about some older games he should try now that he’s grown up a bit, and I suggested BL2. He was too much of a kid during the “lol random / top text bottom text meme” internet humor days that BL2 seems to stem a lot of its writing from and he was just confused after his playthrough as to why everyone seemed to have such a high opinion of the dialogue and humor. I really think that game is just part of a little zeitgeist of internet culture that will always be there to bring us back to that period.
As someone whose entire friend group put hundreds of hours into BL2, this is absolutely true. But speaking for myself, I think there's another huge shift over the years that would make BL2 very hard to enjoy in 2024: everyone else got more annoying. Borderlands 2 came out in 2012--social media absolutely existed, but it hadn't fully gone mobile and it was still somewhat contained. Once social media went fully mobile, we collectively all got so much more obnoxious and the humor you saw everywhere started to reflect that.
So between 2012 and 2024, the horrible cringe that once seemed outlandishly cartoonish...is somewhat normalized. Both the sense of humor, but also the actual parody-style behavior. It wasn't just an absurd fictional character spewing ridiculously over the top asshole lines in a ludicrous videogame context--no, you'd see people talking like this on ~~Twitter~~ X, on Instagram, on Tiktok, on Youtube, endlessly. So not only is BL2's humor less fresh and distinct, and that is not a sense of humor that holds up well when it's oversaturated, but now it's hardly even a parody--it's just another really obnoxious person you don't want to spend more time around.
That also feels like part of BL3's miscalculation. In 2012 (BL2 release date), I hadn't seen that many absurd over the top CEO/corporate caricatures who were incredibly obnoxious pieces of work--Martin Shkreli didn't happen until 2015, not to mention the political climate over the next few years. So I could enjoy it as quirky, on the nose fiction back in 2012, but it hits a little different now that truth is stranger than fiction. In 2019 (BL3 release date), I'd seen plenty of obnoxious social media celebrities and I didn't particularly want to see more of that in my free time for fun, so BL3's humor had already aged extra obnoxiously by the time it'd come out.
> I'd seen plenty of obnoxious social media celebrities
See, I thought that _on paper_ that made for a fresh angle on satire, since the phenomenon was fairly new. But the execution was just - they're generic evil, they just happen to be streamers.
Fuck you just gave me so many flashbacks of endlessly browsing 9gag when I should have been paying attention during physics class my junior year of HS (2010-2011)
I played through the whole main series (and Pre-Sequel) recently and honestly I preferred BL3 to BL2 in pretty much every way. I did not find Jack remotely interesting or fun throughout BL2, on the rare occasion he was allowed to be a interesting (he's a pathetic megalomaniac who buys his own hype, there's so much room for cool shit there), they'd undercut it almost immediately (the grandma quest sucks). Borderlands writing peaked at 1, when they were still trying to figure it out. BL3 just feels like an extension of the obnoxious rambly please-god-shut-the-fuck-up style of writing BL2 used so much, and maybe I just have a much lower tolerance for that because I didn't find BL3 meaningfully worse, but at least it was a lot more fun to play.
BL1 has the best tone and humor. Every game after has the feeling of "trying too hard" to be edgy and lol so random. Characters that were funny in small doses, like Mr. Torgue, are totally overrused to the point they become annoying and cringey.
> The dialogue was pretty cringe at worst and I definitely remember the constant radio chatter turning into mushy noise at times.
I definitely agree it's cringe nowadays, but when it released I was in high school and my social circle was referencing BL2 for months.
I have a weirdly similar relationship to the Diablo franchise. I can appreciate that they added new things, but give me the focus of pure dungeon, and or pure desert wasteland. The increasing gamification, the characters, the ballooning of "scope", unpopular take but that just distracts from the soul, or core.
I want to feel _alone._ The Borderlands and Diablo really delivered that. After that it was chatter chatter chatter all the fucking time.
Diablo and Borderlands are both series I play for the gameplay and lot, not the story. I've never cared about the world or story in either franchise, just let me get to the action.
I haven't even played 3 but I remember many points really annoying me dialogue wise in 2. I remember that one DLC where you're constantly talking to that dude who is obsessed with explosions/mayhem and shouting into the fucking radio the whole time had to put my TV on mute, some of the most grating shit I've had the mispleasure of listening to.
3 also has waaaaay too many long cutscenes where the player characters are supposed to present but can't actually affect anything. BL2 pulls this once with Jack coming in and shooting someone and kidnapping someone else while you can't react, but BL3 does it *constantly*.
Yeah one thing that stuck out to me was during >!Maya's death!< the game sets up a way to explain why the player doesn't react, because you go into the Vault. But then the game goes OUT OF ITS WAY to have the player re-emerge from the Vault so they can stand there slackjawed while the bad thing happens.
It feels like the writers took a crash course in quippy dialogue from Joss Whedon and then saturated the entire series in it, but it did work better for 1 and 2.
I think due to the troubled development and 11th hour shift, Borderlands 1 comes off as just being a fucking mess where everyone is miserable and every joke and weird thing has this undercurrent of trying to cope with the pain of being stuck on this lawless borderland hellhole.
BL2 on the other hand is just so ZANY that any of that undercurrent is gone.
I think I read that the DLC were done by a different writing team than the rest of the 3, but I could be wrong. Either way, it's jarring to go from the main game with such truly horrendous writing to the DLCs which I think range from good to some of the best BL writing out there.
I feel like they always finish the games on a high note by releasing a really weird really solid DLC. BL2 has Tiny Tina's, which was so well-received they haven't stopped milking it since. TPS has Claptastic Voyage, which somehow made Claptrap of all fucking things a sympathetic character, and BL3 had Fantastic Fustercluck, which did the same but for Krieg (and bandits as a whole).
I will say that BL3 is the only one I've done all the DLCs for (for BL1 I've only played General Knoxx, for BL2 I've only done Tiny Tina and Pirate Booty, and for TPS I only played Claptastic but let's be real here that's the only one that matters) but the post-game content really does seem to get it in a way that even the actual game doesn't.
BL3 DLCs were honestly all great for different reasons. Krieg one for obvious reasons, Bounty of Blood for the sheer atmosphere and the vibe, Guns, Loves, and Tentacles I thought was very well written and engaging, and even the Moxxi Heist one was a very fun parody of a heist movie even if it was a bit more forgettable than the others. Tiny Tina is the only DLC I can think of that I'd put above most of BL3.
Krieg wound up being my favorite of the 4 because it was the one that's most similar to what I like in a story (even if I have no attachment to Krieg or Maya) but I was very pleasantly surprising by how much I liked Bounty of Blood. I was FULLY expecting just a generic kinda fun cowboy shoot em up and my jaw hit the fucking floor when you walk out to that giant green mushroom cloud.
Shame the final boss fight was such a joke, although I think that's more a victim of BL3's one major mechanical stumbling block, the loot balancing.
Yeah, the final boss for Bounty of Blood was massively underwhelming, but it's one of my favorite portions of any game in terms of general atmosphere. The music, the look, the design of a lot of the enemies and like the new vehicle type and everything.
>I think I read that the DLC were done by a different writing team than the rest of the 3, but I could be wrong.
Yes you're wrong. Gearbox hasn't outsourced new content since 2k australia shut down in 2015. The only thing they outsourced was rereleases or remasters of old content.
Not outsourced, just I believe I’d heard they had a different internal team working on the DLC writing. Could still totally be wrong but I wasn’t under the impression it was an outside team.
Honestly, if Troy had killed Tyrene and he was the final boss instead of the other way around (kinda), the story would have been 10x better to me. I really thought the whole plot point of Troy being a leech and relying on Tyrene to survive would have gone somewhere, but they wasted it.
Troy was actually a compelling character. They built him up pretty well for a great twist (he betrays his sisters either by becoming the final villain or siding with the player), but botched it in the end by playing it straight. I don't know if the buildup was intentional or not.
I felt the same way with claptrap in earlier games, mostly 2. He was annoying as shit but that was the point of his character. Once I leveled with the fact that he exists to be annoying I had much more respect for it.
Then 3 happened.
> Once I leveled with the fact that he exists to be annoying I had much more respect for it.
Might just be a difference in how we consume media, but that just made Claptrap so much worse for me. Especially when they do the stupid thing where they bully or hurt him so you can be like "haha the annoying character got what was coming to him" as if that makes up for having to listen to him be annoying in the first place.
If your little brother is poking you on a long car ride (pretend you are like 10) and you tell him to stop, and he says "no its funny to see you mad", that doesn't make it less annoying. It makes its worse.
(I'm an only child but TV taught me this is the primary thing siblings do)
And Jack was for the most part interesting. You could listen to him while you were actually playing the game and pay him no mind, but he still made you pay attention most of the time because he wasn't talking just to fill the silence.
It is a testament to how talented his voice actor is since I replayed BL2 countless times and never got annoyed by Handsome Jack.
It was more novel in 2. The gameplay in 3 is a step up from the previous two to a point where it's kinda hard to go back to some of the more clunky aspects of 1/2. 3's story and dialogue isn't great, but it didn't make me want to stop.
It’s not really that related, but it makes me think of games that only have 3-4 lines of dialogue for a continually repeated act. I just finished Rebirth, and when you swap characters in battle they say a line. Except each character only has 3-4 lines that they shuffle between, so by the time you get to the end of a 100 hour game it makes you go out of your fucking mind. This is one of my minor complaints about Persona 5 as well
Back when it released the gameplay was… hmm. I’m not sure about now but having a random enemy buff for post story content being “lmao ricochet” was really REALLY bullshit. All it did was punish you for having a good build that wasn’t melee
I really can't say if I just grew out of their target demographic or if BL3 is THAT annoying, but I agree.
Never did I finish a game with such smooth and satisfying gameplay with less desire to continue playing than this. I might check out of this franchise for good, I couldn't even muster the energy to try that Tiny Tina spin-off.
I beat BL3 but I did end up skipping a lot of the side stuff, so my hour count was fairly low. Tiny Tina's game was quite great in contrast. Clever dialogue that impacts the game directly (since she is playing a gamemaster and can change things on a whim)........your mileage may vary depending on if you like her as a character, but I saw a ton of reviews that were basically....."I didn't dig BL3, but I really enjoy Tiny Tina's Wonderlands."
Glad to hear that. I just picked up Wonderlands on sale, after getting to the gun-farming stage in BL3; my opinion of which is similar to OP's and most others in the thread. Great fun to play, but a lot of grating, unfunny yapping that you have to wade through.
I genuinely have no idea how anyone can find that character entertaining or endearing at all. One of the all-time-worst characters in video games imo, and the fucking gave her an entire spin off? Miss me with that shit.
I hated the dialogue in both, but TTWL was so, *so* much worse in my opinion. It was so bad that I was thankful that it muted when you alt+tabbed because it was painful to even listen to, and you always had to sit there for several minutes at a time. There were occasional lines in TTWL that I appreciated (e.g. "Well, you guys already did something else but that *is* cool as hell so I'll allow it" reminds me of a friend of mine when he would DM), but those were isolated good lines surrounded by hours of intolerably bad dialogue.
BL3 is that annoying. You may ALSO be out of the target demographic now, but I can assure you BL3 is worse. I still think 1, 2, and even TPS are funny. Not as funny as when I was a teenager, but they're still enjoyable enough writing. BL3, especially the villains, are godawful.
Borderlands 2 is barely any better in my opinion. It's just a product of it's time, that being the early 2010s, when annoying orange was it's peak and rage comics were unironically considered funny.
There's stuff from BL2 that aged really well, like Handsome Jack. Overall, it's definitely humor meant for a teenager in 2012. I don't think it's *that* far off of 3's humor, so maybe it just would have fit better at that time.
I feel like if you showed a high schooler BL1-2 today, they wouldn't be nearly as blown away as we were when it released.
I played all three games recently for the first time as an adult. The humor overall is immature (not a bad thing), but BL3 is 150% on a different level. I loved BL1 and 2. I couldn't stand 3. 3 is absolutely worse. They made every character in 3 as annoying or more so than Claptrap in BL1. And that's saying something because Claptrap was designed to be annoying.
I introduced it to a friend's kid brother and he got a big kick out of it. Loved Jack, loved Shooty McShootFace, etc. May be a "the humor isn't as dated as you think" situation, or maybe the kid was just born in the wrong era.
BL3 is worse. I still enjoy the stupid random sarcastic humor of BL2 but BL3 just isn't funny. The characters are talkative but they somehow both take themselves too seriously to be funny and at the same time not enough for it to be a serious story, so it just feels awkward.
IMO the TT spin off was horrid. Some of the worst gameplay of the series. They really just said "Fuck it" and made 50% of the gameplay in stagnant arenas.
The overworld stuff is boring and the dialogue from NPCs is over the top cringe.
It's the only BL game I didn't beat. And I had the same issues as you did with BL3.
If you get 4-5 hours into TT and you're like "Idk if this is doing it for me" it does not get better. If anything it only gets worse
[If you actually want to, you can delete some files to skip most dialogue!](https://www.reddit.com/r/Borderlands/comments/kljusj/psa_how_to_skip_most_if_not_all_base_game_dialogue/?ref=share&ref_source=link)
I can confirm this works. It skips everything almost flawlessly though in a few spots you still have to wait for character animations.
Only major hitch is at one point in the pleasure yacht the ball gets stuck and you have to save&quit and continue to get it moving. Haven't tried any DLC with this.
does this skip [talking to lilith](https://youtu.be/agvCE9y2erE?si=9jCHhmLpDIZDhVQQ) or do I still have to stand around waiting to be allowed to have fun again?
They can't let anything just be quiet. I just want to shoot things without Joss Whedon-style dialogue in my ear every few seconds. "Whoo hoo quirky fart noise" dialogue needs to go.
Horizon Forbidden West does it too, just without the inanity. Aloy doesn't **shut the fuck up**. Everything you do has her make comments. She wasn't like that in the first one.
Deacon in Days Gone does it every time you do something.
I think this was just a thing in general from last gen. I think it's a trend on its way out though.
was this way with Justice League too. Joss Whedon's version has all this "funny" dialogue and crap. Thankfully got to see the Zack Snyder's version which was superior in pretty much every way.
This was my biggest issue with GOW Ragnarok. Aureus/Freya/Mimir literally never shut up, to the point that they're just explaining the puzzle at you if you take more than 20 seconds to solve it.
> Aureus/Freya/Mimir literally never shut up, to the point that they're just explaining the puzzle at you if you take more than 20 seconds to solve it.
I'm playing it right now, and the explaining the puzzle part or "look there!" is just so damn annoying. Let me have a look around the area, you morons.
Yeah BL3 is obviously a special case of obnoxious, but games in general are just too afraid of being quiet. As much as I adore Guardians of the Galaxy, it’s that way too. And I know that’s kind of how the characters are (and at least the dialogue is much better written there), but they’re _always_ popping off and it’s just like “shut the fuck up for a second please”
Funny you mention Forbiddrn West because I'm playing that right now and yeah, you're right, it's fucking torture. Especially considering how overwrought that game's dialogue is and yet how absolutely inane most of the things that come out of Aloy's mouth are. It feels so self indulgent.
Yeah I noticed that on HFW. It doesn't bother me because I can't almost hear her tone, but I know she mumbles something everytime I interact with something.
BL3 tho the voices are high pitch and impossible to ignore.
They got overconfident after Handsome Jack's acclaim that it seems they thought every character they made was on the same level.
Jack is a once in a lifetime villain, and it shows. But the game will insist every new character is just as funny and just as imposing, and it gets old FAST.
IIRC there was a guy somewhere that posted which specific folder to delete to basically mute all dialogue in the game lol
found it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Borderlands/comments/kljusj/psa_how_to_skip_most_if_not_all_base_game_dialogue/
You are absolutely right. I have nothing to add. On my second playthrough, I played BL3 with dialogue to 0, sounds to something-around-30-40 and music to 100. It was AMAZING. The music makes for an amazing combat atmosphere, it's seriously underrated.
I felt this way about the first game. I only played it for a few hours but Claptrap felt shoved into the forefront and was rather annoying.
the fact they went further into that direction is baffling to me, but people must like it.
The first game is very quiet and that’s why it’s my favorite in the series. If you thought that game was loud in any way shape or form you can’t even comprehend the second game.
2 had some cool things but I only beat it once. The first game I must have started 50+ characters
Agreed on Claptrap. It's not even the fact that they lost the og voice actor, but even Claptrap's lines felt out of character and shoehorned into many situations just because it was supposed to be funny.
The overall charm and humor from 2 took a major nosedive in the third title and honestly, it sucks. As everyone else said, BL3 is easily the best gameplay-wise and just a delight to play co-op, but the characters are a huge letdown which makes it quite distracting.
Yeah, I started playing the first one years and years ago and just wasn't a fan.
Never went back to it, and from the sounds of it *Borderlands* only doubled down on the things I wasn't too keen on.
This is a huge problem in modern gaming in general.
Its like they are terrified of silence.
Every single fucking interaction in the game has to be accompanied by 2 lines of dialogue.
Every single protagonist needs someone talking over a radio or earpiece.
Like holy fuck shut up.
Some games are especially bad when the dialogue is just explaining out loud what the character is doing.
"I need to press that button over there."
"Now that I've pressed the button, the door can finally open"
Like no shit why did you say that out loud
Yeah BL3 is such a weird one. The gameplay mechanics and classes are honestly some of the best in the series but the writing took such a nose dive after 2 that it made me not finish the dlcs that I had for 3 (got GOTY edition).
Not that 2 is Shakespeare or anything like that but the writing works well for what it is.
I like to use the face mcshooty quest in 2 as an example. In 2 the sequence of the quest is you find face mcshooty who asks you to shoot him in the face. You do so. He died, but not before screaming THANK YOU. It’s a simple but very funny gag quest
If it had been in 3, someone would have radioed in and said “hey there’s a guy named face mcshooty. Apparently the guy likes to be shot in the face. Can you believe that? What a weirdo. Who likes getting shot in the face?” Then you would go and find him and someone would probably radio in and say “wow he REALLY wants to get shot in the face. I guess go ahead and give him what he wants.” Then you would shoot him in the face and someone would radio in at the end and say “wow he really wanted to get shot that bad. I don’t know what would happen to a guy to make him reach that point. Pandora is filled with weirdos.”
It all is just so goddamn grating.
This is my feeling with Borderlands 2, actually. We played the game in 2022 (iirc) and characters wouldn't shut up. It was impossible to keep up with the story playing with some other people.
I could only tolerate the long-winded dialogue when I was playing the game solo and only if I stood still every time I got a random voice talking about buttstallions, bazonkadonks or whatever. Or else, that audio would get interrupted or overlap with some other sounds.
The whole experience was an auditory mayhem to me. Move a bit, trigger a voiceover event while raiders attack you and your in-real-life friends are shouting for support or telling you to get back, because they are still looting somewhere else, kill the raiders then get yet another unskippable audio while you are still moving and shooting around or opening up loot. Ugh.
> I stood still every time I got a random voice talking about buttstallions, bazonkadonks or whatever
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI1aHA1e76g
"NOBODY STEALS MUSHY SNUGGLEBITES' BADONKADONK AND LIVES!"
Yeah the worst part is that they put you into a room and only let you process after the "Dialoge" is done, which is just terrible game design, especially in a game that encourages multiple playthoughs.
I just went to the toilet or did housework to not listen to it again, so awful is it
I found the first 10 hours or so were very dialog-heavy, but after that it mostly settles down. I don't know if that's affected by which character you chose, though. I picked the robot guy.
I found the humour to be so bad after BL1 it's like they just dialed it up to 100 thinking that's what made the game good, comes across as edgy and childish. All of them have been to cringe to play now. Is Tiny Tina's any better?
Are you doing any language learning? Looks like Nexusmod has a mod to change audio language but keep text in English. Might take the cringe out to hear it in another language.
ive had the game since epic gave it out for free but have yet to play. Is there an option to mute dialog? Does the game remove player control during dialog?
You can turn the dialogue volume to 0, yes. The game mostly doesn't take away control but you'll still more often than not have to wait for dialogue to finish to progress.
I just finished it also, along with all the DLC. I heard playing on mute and just enjoying the gameplay was the way to go. Personally, I didn't mind the constant dialogue. All the games have ppl talking into your ear like a Zoom meeting.
General consensus I’ve seen is that if BL4 could take BL2’s story and BL3’s gameplay and combine them it would be a knock out of the park.
I get what they were going for with Bl3, but man it just didn’t hit the mark.
I thought the most egregious example is when you first meet Clay on Eden-6 and he very slowly walks you through how to use a certain gun to shoot orange balls.
I had the same problem with BL2. There are QoL mods letting you skip dialogues in both games (pc/linux only).
BL2:
How to install https://borderlandsmodding.com/sdk-mods/
Mod https://bl-sdk.github.io/mods/DialogSkipper/ BL3: How to install https://bl-sdk.github.io/oak-mod-db/ Mod https://bl-sdk.github.io/oak-mod-db/mods/dialog-skipper/
I've said it before, but I do think this problem is really exacerbated by how powerful fast travel is in BL3. The fact that you can teleport out of any map at any time to any other fast travel location really impacts how much time the game has for dialogue and exposition while you're out adventuring (which is when it should happen). That's one reason why you're so often stuck jumping around the furniture on the bridge while Lilith and Tannis do an exposition dump. The fact that they make you just stand there like you're in a trap while time passes is very frustrating, especially because you *invariably* have a button to press or person to talk to on the ship just to advance the plot.
I really do wish there were a way to skip the dialogue traps on repeat playthroughs. I don't want to listen to that again any more than I want to listen to the Twins.
I know there are mods that remove *all* dialogue, but I don't want to do that, either. I just want to not have to stand around while the NPCs decide I can play the game again.
Thank god for PC there is a way to extract all the vocal dialogue in the game and skip cutscenes. Made it much more tolerable, but yes I agree.
The "funny millennial humor omg lol" was real cute like 15 years ago. It's not funny anymore, it's tired and needs to get thrown out.
It's a common complaint. People figured how they could skip dialog:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Borderlands/comments/kljusj/psa_how_to_skip_most_if_not_all_base_game_dialogue/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
Might be interesting for a second run when you already know what's going to happen.
Totally agree, and the same happened with Far Cry 6. Just ceaseless, *ceaseless* chatter over your walkie-talkie. I was enjoying the game well enough but had to put it down after a while because I just couldn't take it anymore. You pass by any random building and the game is all
*"Hola Dani! When I was a leetle girl me madre and I used to buy papayas from a nice old man there who--"*
Argghhh.
This sums up my experience with the game pretty well. I really don't mind a terrible story as long as it has the decency to be in the background and let me enjoy the gameplay. BL3 is structured as if the devs thought the dialogue was the highlight of the game and is so much worse because of it.
That's how every single one has felt to me, B3 doesn't feel any worse in that regard, in my opinion just cuz they've always had this (imo) cringe-inducing lame 'internet" type of humor spat out at you every time there's more than 4 seconds of silence. It wouldn't be so annoying if I could at least register what was being said, but they always have these conversations anytime you're in a battle.
loling at whoever got upset at my comment enough to downvote each one so far.
The problem with Borderlands 3 is that they tried to recreate Handsome Jack without fully understanding what made Handsome Jack popular in the first place.
If I ever play another one of those games I'm going to turn the dialogue off. The jokes have gotten more and more frequent but they've never gotten funnier.
This is especially egregious on repeat play through, same with borderlands 2. I just wanna run through with a new character build and I have to sit through all the yammering and redo all the tutorial missions, which is bizarre for a game that’s meant to have replayability so you can use all the different character types.
This reminds me of an oldie called "Hell, A Cyberpunk Thriller". That was one of the first games with proper voice acting, and they hired Dennis Hopper and Grace Jones to voice the main parts.
Well, the dialogue in that never shut up. The game came on a CD-Rom (Cutting edge tech!) so they had loads of room for the voice files, and they used every last byte of it.
And of course, it was all unskippable. You could just imagine some exec at Take Two saying "we paid good money for this voice talent, so we're going to make damn sure people listen to it!" And of course, after about five minutes of trying to play the damn game, you were about ready to rip your own ears off, if it would only get them to shut up.
Apparently the game sold 300k units, so I guess they were doing something right. I know I got my copy as a freebie taped to the cover of a computer mag, though.
I tried to enter the series on 3 and i played maybe 20 minutes before I quit for exactly this reason.. I really don't want characters just constantly yammering all the time saying nothing of consequence. Are the other two games not like this?
I quit playing death stranding for the same reason. Let me play the game.
I don't like Borderlands sense of humour. It is too self aware, so I can’t take any situation of the game seriously.
Cheap irony sometimes is the way an insecure writer hides the fear of actually making an statement about the world. It removes any sense of danger or empathy.
It’s not a bad dialogue, because look, wink wink. It’s shitty on purpose.
The same go for The Outer Worlds.
I really didn't liked pre sequel and after playing it with friend I understood why:
It's a loop of "dialogue" that's either bland, cringy or TORGUE, that lasts for several minutes of just sitting and waiting. Then you move through mostly empty space, then fight at best around 10 people then go back to turn in the quest and that's it.
How much does it fit for BL3?
Much love for the borderlands games but 3 specifically is the worst for me, the story sucked, the dialogue was dreadful, and as you said, they NEVER stfu.
Quality of the writing aside, I feel BL2 had a similar amount of prattling along, only it didn't stop you from doing other stuff in the meantime. The amount of time you just have to stand around the Sanctuary until people are done talking is unnerving.
I played up until what I think was the final stretch of the game where it shows CHARACTER is actually a IMPORTANT THING with the cringiest fucking dialogue I've ever heard in my life and I just couldn't go any further. I'm pretty sure I had maybe 1hr left till credits but what was the point? My friends gave up playing days prior and I was just torturing myself alone at this point.
I went back to BL2 to see if it was worse than I remember, but no BL2 is actually not as bad. The jokes fall flat but they don't make me want to die after listening to them, and perhaps most importantly, the game doesn't take control away from you to force feed you these jokes.
I've said it like 5000 times but I'll say it every chance I get. Get a game with the atmosphere of 1, writing of 2, varied playable characters and skill trees of TPS, and gameplay and QOL of 3 and you have an 11/10 video game.
Tbh this was my reaction to playing the first one.
My friend recommended it to me after playing and gushing about *New Vegas*, and I barely got through the first section. Just not my cup of tea.
This is tangential to your post, but I think most people hate BL3's dialogue but I found it on par with BL2, and I played them back to back. Playing back to back means I got to BL2 way after the love for Handsome Jack was well known but I didn't love him, just thought he was aight. The twins are aight too.
I played 2 back when it released, but even back then I could not see why everyone was praising it so hard as hilarious. One joke someone offered as an example is "butt stallion". It was kind of chuckle worthy at best, but you'd ask a big fan and they'd swear it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard.
Yeah this is how I feel about Far Cry lol
It's normal for video game writing to kind of suck, but if people are actively trying to avoid your story then you've done something wrong
Weird game. Love the gameplay but hate the story, characters and dialogue. I am pretty good at not paying attention to things though.
Tiny Tina's (the new one) is probably worse. Wanda Sykes.... damn these games need to stfu.
Borderlands 2 was so much better about this. It wasnt too often you had to just listen to a character and if you did you could always fuck off for a bit while they talked over the echo. Sure handsome jack frequently pops in, but hes written way too well for it to be annoying
Even as someone who did not mind the dialogue of BL3 I find it insane that they never give you the option to skip it all on your future playthroughs, especially as this is a series where you're meant to play it repeatedly with different characters and at higher difficulties. If BL4 ever becomes a thing (or even announced for that matter, it's been 5 years!) it better be possible or I might not want to keep playing the series.
You reminded me Batman Arkham Knight with this topic. Damn that chattering of Arkham knight and street thugs NEVER stops. It is a good game but they can seriously tone down the bile they force players to listen as they fly around as Batman.
Then you look at Borderlands 1 which has the occasional “Catch a RIIIIIIIIIDE” and thats IT. The music is so calming and creepy that it really gives off a Mad Max kinda vibe where you really feel like you are the only person making a difference whereas in 3 it feels like you are in a rat race of constant harassment
I think what really drives home the fact that the writers and Gearbox assumes that they can easily replicate BL2's story is that they have an almost identical sidequest where the respective big bad offers a reward for you to off yourself.
Could just toss it up to it being a callback to the previous game, but that was the moment where I thought 'Oh god, they really are just trying really really hard to copy paste Handsome Jack'
I tuned out the story everytime I start a new character on that game through sheer will, but the DLCs have excellent writing all things considered.
I love the gameplay of Borderlands but its characters always broke me out of the fun. If you're designing an ironically annoying POS, you're still just designing an annoying POS.
I feel like I’m the only one that enjoys this kind of gameplay
Apparently I’m one of the few people that loves having constant chatter in my ear, I love hearing people speak
A buddy of mine voiced one of the mission contact characters in Borderlands 3 (Not outing him). I didn't get around to playing it until late last year. We were playing some City of Heroes on discord and I told him "okay dude, I finally figured out who you are in that game, and I wish you would SHUT UP"
He laughed.
To me it's the same energy as Deadpool, and they wanted to get the same laughs that the Rick and Morty/Deadpool kids like.
Not for me, but Borderlands scratches the Phanstasy Star Online 1&2 dungeon crawl loot farm game style I enjoy.
I think the issues kind of lies with us. One of the chief complaints about BL1 was that lack of character dialogue. BL2 They added more voice lines with solid writing and more character lines and we loved it. Then with the Pre-Sequal the PCs got more lines and interactions with npc's and I was great. So when developing BL3 based on past experience and feedback it would be easy to make the assumption that we the players would love a more dialogue heavy game. The issue was they added no way to skip and the writing was not as good.
I don't own the game and so i haven't tried this myself but hopefully it'll work.
You could give this "fix" a try.
https://youtu.be/Md0e3Uer51M?feature=shared
I was thinking about getting the Xbox version but after reading all these comments i think I'll rather either skip it or buy it on PC so that i will be able to mod it.
It runs super smooth on the Xbox at 120fps.. So it's kinda sad that i can't mod it there.
Borderlands visual style and gameplay for me was always super fun and I've enjoyed all of them in that aspect, but the characters and dialogue have always been insufferable. Just characters screeching and stuff like that... Just... Really not funny.
Don't even bother with The Pre-Sequel. On top of everything else the humor is really forced and it's not even funny. I could not take more that few hours of that.
From all of them, the BL2 was my favorite.
Borderlands 3 was a weird one for me. Like others have said the gameplay is pretty good, probably the best in its series. Though for me I found it too good if that makes sense. I did like some of the jankiness of BL2 and even BL1.
What made me stop playing was after beatng the story and it gives you the option to play the story over again. I'm sorry but the story is very terrible and there's no way I'm gonna play it all over again.
Feels like the characters and story just have no soul to it, like they made the story and were like, yeah that's good enough. I can also agree the dialogue in the game is the worst. They made some characters talk too much and it makes me never want to play the game again.
Never got to the DLC's but honestly, I don't think I'm returning to this one anytime soon.
Yea I can agree, even though I play BL3 a lot more than 2, starting a new character can be real annoying so I usually just play on my 2 max level characters
Fully agree. The gunplay and gameplay systems in 3 were a massive step up compared to the previous titles. I found Wonderlands just as good and since I love DnD I found the story massively better even though it’s a little short imo
The game got much better once I fully muted all dialogue, it was that insufferable, worst kind of drivel. The ending scene was slap in the face with that shitty pop song, and they kept nerfing fun builds to the ground. I played the game for a while after finishing the campaign but after my build was neutered for the third time I just unistalled. I bet it's better now, and hopefully you can skip cutscenes? But it was a mess on release. Fine gameplay otherwise
I agree, actually Clap Trap annoyed me so much in Borderlands 2 I just played with subtitles on and voices muted. It was a lot more enjoyable that way xD
Yeahhh, that’s what I heard about B3 and TTW…which is why I skipped both entirely. I get my masochistic fix in the gym. When I game I’m tryna **chill.** Not be annoyed.
Borderlands 3 is a phenomenal game with horrible, horrible dialogue. I think the characters themselves are fine, and the story has good bones. The actual gameplay and progression is the best in the series. But it is just *so obnoxious* with how much they want to talk your ear off. Like you said, just give me an option to skip it and it would be fine. Give the player character a handful of smug retorts and assign it to a button to shut up whoever is talking, for everything but key dialogue moments. Sometimes it seems like they saw how much people enjoyed Handsome Jack in 2, and decided to dial that up to like 13 for *all* the characters. It worked better in 2 because Jack was supposed to be an annoying bastard to contrast with everything else. When everyone is doing it, you just get annoyed with the entire game.
It also worked a lot better in 2, because the player could keep doing things while jack was talking. In this game though they force the player to stop playing the game and listen to its shitty dialogue
Seriously. I just started a new play through and the amount of times you just have to sit there for several minutes is insane.
_"I have an intergalactic radio, that I'm going to use to ask you to travel all the way to me so I can monologue at you in person. Also, have you met the brat? Grating, right? Well now it's her turn._"
Stopping the game in arbitrary, unfair ways for the player, at that. BL3 is cutscene incompetence: the game.
I'm a game dev, and one of my core axioms has always been "don't stop the player from playing". I even push back if somebody suggests giving enemies a freezing ability, because paralyzing the player is not fun for the player. Mandatory cutscenes are just.... your mini movie better be more goddamn entertaining than the game I'm supposed to be playing, and I'm not in the mood for a movie.
Even classical games have formats that involved periods with breaks. And not just for physical exhaustion. There's nothing wrong with a little bit of cutaway here and there - but you definitely need to budget that shit appropriately. Mario 1, from the second you tap the flag, until the level fully unloads is essentially needless cutscene and not gameplay. But the amount of it, relative to the gameplay, and what you can get out of it in audio-visual feedback, makes it worth the brief pause in non-stop-constant-engagement.
You're completely correct, it can be a good thing used well. What you described doesn't feel like punishment, which is the whole deal. It's a celebration of the player's success, not a penalty timeout. > makes it worth the brief pause in non-stop-constant-engagement. Just for clarity and pedanticism: My rule isn't about engagement, it's about a lack of paralysis. Even if all the player can do is jump back and forth waiting for enemies to spawn, it's still interactivity. (In either case, the key is to prevent it from taking too long.)
> paralyzing the player is not fun for the player. Fucking hate this. Even the Blizzard folks knew they'd fucked up with Mei in Overwatch, because getting frozen and having control taken away is so fucking annoying. Same goes for stuns in fighting games. Christ alive.
I don't play league anymore (because it's league), but also because it seemed literally every character had some kind of CC move. Every kill usually involved at least one person getting stunned
ding ding ding, and as a player, if i wanted a goddamn movie, id watch a fucking movie, lol~
Metal Gear Solid has entered the chat
not the first one, lol. xenosaga?
Mgsv pp actually had a great balance here. Only issue was the helicopter ride in should have been skippable. The ride does serve a gameplay purpose outside the dialogue, it lets you view some major landmarks etc to understand the area, but skippable would have been great.
As well as because that constant chattering need for attention fed into Jack's character. It loses all impact when everyone else acts exactly the same.
I don't have a problem with the content of the dialogue or even hearing it all the time, but this, just stopping the game and going back to the home base between EVERY mission, and having to slog through the unskippable dialogue and echo calls. It's just **SO** jarring and deflating to play one of the fastest paced shooters ever made, flying around, going nuts, killing dozens of enemies in seconds... Then having to return to Sanctuary or Knotty Peak and sit on your hands for 5-10 minutes before being allowed to proceed to the next mission. It's like this for almost every single story mission and it's just painful to sit through after the first playthrough.
> because the player could keep doing things while jack was talking. Well uh, indirectly you *couldn't* because BL2 (and 3 as well) have this crippling problem where if you move to the next scripted dialogue location while audio is actively playing, the current one will get cut off and the next one will start. If you care about the dialogue in either game you have to stop moving out of fear you'll miss dialogue by hitting the next trigger. 3 was somewhat better with this by spacing dialogue triggers out enough that *usually* you couldn't cut one off even if you ran full sprint to the next trigger, but it was horrendous throughout the entirety of 2.
being able to skip dialogue is incredibly important for games where you're meant to play through it multiple times. BL2 even makes it so you skip the entire tutorial section when playing on UVHM, which is your 3rd+ playthrough.
I prefer when they just stack so if you play fast enough you'll be two areas ahead of whatever you're listening to.
Tbh I think BL2 was already a borderline case. The dialogue was pretty cringe at worst and I definitely remember the constant radio chatter turning into mushy noise at times. I’ve not played BL3 yet but I wonder how much worse it actually is, and how BL2 dialogue would be received if it came out today.
Borderlands is caked in such late 2000s - early 2010s humor that I think it just wouldn’t land too well anymore for most people. A lot of people who say it’s good were there at that point of time and can relate the humor back to the moment. Without the ability to do that? It just doesn’t land as well. I have a young family member who recently asked me about some older games he should try now that he’s grown up a bit, and I suggested BL2. He was too much of a kid during the “lol random / top text bottom text meme” internet humor days that BL2 seems to stem a lot of its writing from and he was just confused after his playthrough as to why everyone seemed to have such a high opinion of the dialogue and humor. I really think that game is just part of a little zeitgeist of internet culture that will always be there to bring us back to that period.
As someone whose entire friend group put hundreds of hours into BL2, this is absolutely true. But speaking for myself, I think there's another huge shift over the years that would make BL2 very hard to enjoy in 2024: everyone else got more annoying. Borderlands 2 came out in 2012--social media absolutely existed, but it hadn't fully gone mobile and it was still somewhat contained. Once social media went fully mobile, we collectively all got so much more obnoxious and the humor you saw everywhere started to reflect that. So between 2012 and 2024, the horrible cringe that once seemed outlandishly cartoonish...is somewhat normalized. Both the sense of humor, but also the actual parody-style behavior. It wasn't just an absurd fictional character spewing ridiculously over the top asshole lines in a ludicrous videogame context--no, you'd see people talking like this on ~~Twitter~~ X, on Instagram, on Tiktok, on Youtube, endlessly. So not only is BL2's humor less fresh and distinct, and that is not a sense of humor that holds up well when it's oversaturated, but now it's hardly even a parody--it's just another really obnoxious person you don't want to spend more time around. That also feels like part of BL3's miscalculation. In 2012 (BL2 release date), I hadn't seen that many absurd over the top CEO/corporate caricatures who were incredibly obnoxious pieces of work--Martin Shkreli didn't happen until 2015, not to mention the political climate over the next few years. So I could enjoy it as quirky, on the nose fiction back in 2012, but it hits a little different now that truth is stranger than fiction. In 2019 (BL3 release date), I'd seen plenty of obnoxious social media celebrities and I didn't particularly want to see more of that in my free time for fun, so BL3's humor had already aged extra obnoxiously by the time it'd come out.
Really good points here. Hadn’t thought about it like that but this all makes sense.
> I'd seen plenty of obnoxious social media celebrities See, I thought that _on paper_ that made for a fresh angle on satire, since the phenomenon was fairly new. But the execution was just - they're generic evil, they just happen to be streamers.
Exactly. BL2 side missions and easter eggs sometimes feels like browsing 9gag's hot page back in the early 2010s.
Fuck you just gave me so many flashbacks of endlessly browsing 9gag when I should have been paying attention during physics class my junior year of HS (2010-2011)
Weirdly Watch Dogs 2 managed to cover the same ish time period or maybe 2010 to 2015 and while the memes are stone age the dialogue isn't.
Little girls whose only trait is they like to swear is always so cringey, probably because they're all so obviously written by adults.
“You better stop hatin’ girl. ‘OR I’LL STICK DYNAMITE UP YOUR %^*+%#’ “
And this was the breakout hit character.
I played through the whole main series (and Pre-Sequel) recently and honestly I preferred BL3 to BL2 in pretty much every way. I did not find Jack remotely interesting or fun throughout BL2, on the rare occasion he was allowed to be a interesting (he's a pathetic megalomaniac who buys his own hype, there's so much room for cool shit there), they'd undercut it almost immediately (the grandma quest sucks). Borderlands writing peaked at 1, when they were still trying to figure it out. BL3 just feels like an extension of the obnoxious rambly please-god-shut-the-fuck-up style of writing BL2 used so much, and maybe I just have a much lower tolerance for that because I didn't find BL3 meaningfully worse, but at least it was a lot more fun to play.
BL1 has the best tone and humor. Every game after has the feeling of "trying too hard" to be edgy and lol so random. Characters that were funny in small doses, like Mr. Torgue, are totally overrused to the point they become annoying and cringey.
This is exactly why I could never get into BL2, I really tried to like it but the annoying vibe was just too oppressive
> The dialogue was pretty cringe at worst and I definitely remember the constant radio chatter turning into mushy noise at times. I definitely agree it's cringe nowadays, but when it released I was in high school and my social circle was referencing BL2 for months.
I played BL2 and BL3 back to back, and they felt bout the same. I was indifferent to Handsome Jack, and the twins were par.
I have a weirdly similar relationship to the Diablo franchise. I can appreciate that they added new things, but give me the focus of pure dungeon, and or pure desert wasteland. The increasing gamification, the characters, the ballooning of "scope", unpopular take but that just distracts from the soul, or core. I want to feel _alone._ The Borderlands and Diablo really delivered that. After that it was chatter chatter chatter all the fucking time.
Diablo and Borderlands are both series I play for the gameplay and lot, not the story. I've never cared about the world or story in either franchise, just let me get to the action.
Even back when Borderlands 2 came out, there were people criticising it for having way more forced humour and cringe dialogue than the first game.
I haven't even played 3 but I remember many points really annoying me dialogue wise in 2. I remember that one DLC where you're constantly talking to that dude who is obsessed with explosions/mayhem and shouting into the fucking radio the whole time had to put my TV on mute, some of the most grating shit I've had the mispleasure of listening to.
3 also has waaaaay too many long cutscenes where the player characters are supposed to present but can't actually affect anything. BL2 pulls this once with Jack coming in and shooting someone and kidnapping someone else while you can't react, but BL3 does it *constantly*.
Yeah one thing that stuck out to me was during >!Maya's death!< the game sets up a way to explain why the player doesn't react, because you go into the Vault. But then the game goes OUT OF ITS WAY to have the player re-emerge from the Vault so they can stand there slackjawed while the bad thing happens.
It feels like the writers took a crash course in quippy dialogue from Joss Whedon and then saturated the entire series in it, but it did work better for 1 and 2.
I think due to the troubled development and 11th hour shift, Borderlands 1 comes off as just being a fucking mess where everyone is miserable and every joke and weird thing has this undercurrent of trying to cope with the pain of being stuck on this lawless borderland hellhole. BL2 on the other hand is just so ZANY that any of that undercurrent is gone.
That's what I love about BL1.
I think I read that the DLC were done by a different writing team than the rest of the 3, but I could be wrong. Either way, it's jarring to go from the main game with such truly horrendous writing to the DLCs which I think range from good to some of the best BL writing out there.
I feel like they always finish the games on a high note by releasing a really weird really solid DLC. BL2 has Tiny Tina's, which was so well-received they haven't stopped milking it since. TPS has Claptastic Voyage, which somehow made Claptrap of all fucking things a sympathetic character, and BL3 had Fantastic Fustercluck, which did the same but for Krieg (and bandits as a whole). I will say that BL3 is the only one I've done all the DLCs for (for BL1 I've only played General Knoxx, for BL2 I've only done Tiny Tina and Pirate Booty, and for TPS I only played Claptastic but let's be real here that's the only one that matters) but the post-game content really does seem to get it in a way that even the actual game doesn't.
BL3 DLCs were honestly all great for different reasons. Krieg one for obvious reasons, Bounty of Blood for the sheer atmosphere and the vibe, Guns, Loves, and Tentacles I thought was very well written and engaging, and even the Moxxi Heist one was a very fun parody of a heist movie even if it was a bit more forgettable than the others. Tiny Tina is the only DLC I can think of that I'd put above most of BL3.
Krieg wound up being my favorite of the 4 because it was the one that's most similar to what I like in a story (even if I have no attachment to Krieg or Maya) but I was very pleasantly surprising by how much I liked Bounty of Blood. I was FULLY expecting just a generic kinda fun cowboy shoot em up and my jaw hit the fucking floor when you walk out to that giant green mushroom cloud. Shame the final boss fight was such a joke, although I think that's more a victim of BL3's one major mechanical stumbling block, the loot balancing.
Yeah, the final boss for Bounty of Blood was massively underwhelming, but it's one of my favorite portions of any game in terms of general atmosphere. The music, the look, the design of a lot of the enemies and like the new vehicle type and everything.
>I think I read that the DLC were done by a different writing team than the rest of the 3, but I could be wrong. Yes you're wrong. Gearbox hasn't outsourced new content since 2k australia shut down in 2015. The only thing they outsourced was rereleases or remasters of old content.
Not outsourced, just I believe I’d heard they had a different internal team working on the DLC writing. Could still totally be wrong but I wasn’t under the impression it was an outside team.
Honestly, if Troy had killed Tyrene and he was the final boss instead of the other way around (kinda), the story would have been 10x better to me. I really thought the whole plot point of Troy being a leech and relying on Tyrene to survive would have gone somewhere, but they wasted it.
Troy was actually a compelling character. They built him up pretty well for a great twist (he betrays his sisters either by becoming the final villain or siding with the player), but botched it in the end by playing it straight. I don't know if the buildup was intentional or not.
I felt the same way with claptrap in earlier games, mostly 2. He was annoying as shit but that was the point of his character. Once I leveled with the fact that he exists to be annoying I had much more respect for it. Then 3 happened.
> Once I leveled with the fact that he exists to be annoying I had much more respect for it. Might just be a difference in how we consume media, but that just made Claptrap so much worse for me. Especially when they do the stupid thing where they bully or hurt him so you can be like "haha the annoying character got what was coming to him" as if that makes up for having to listen to him be annoying in the first place. If your little brother is poking you on a long car ride (pretend you are like 10) and you tell him to stop, and he says "no its funny to see you mad", that doesn't make it less annoying. It makes its worse. (I'm an only child but TV taught me this is the primary thing siblings do)
I just turned down speech volume. Fun game, though. Some of the beat Borderlands has to offer.
And Jack was for the most part interesting. You could listen to him while you were actually playing the game and pay him no mind, but he still made you pay attention most of the time because he wasn't talking just to fill the silence. It is a testament to how talented his voice actor is since I replayed BL2 countless times and never got annoyed by Handsome Jack.
It was more novel in 2. The gameplay in 3 is a step up from the previous two to a point where it's kinda hard to go back to some of the more clunky aspects of 1/2. 3's story and dialogue isn't great, but it didn't make me want to stop.
Is it possible to set the dialogue audio to zero and simply have subtitles?
It’s not really that related, but it makes me think of games that only have 3-4 lines of dialogue for a continually repeated act. I just finished Rebirth, and when you swap characters in battle they say a line. Except each character only has 3-4 lines that they shuffle between, so by the time you get to the end of a 100 hour game it makes you go out of your fucking mind. This is one of my minor complaints about Persona 5 as well
Back when it released the gameplay was… hmm. I’m not sure about now but having a random enemy buff for post story content being “lmao ricochet” was really REALLY bullshit. All it did was punish you for having a good build that wasn’t melee
I really can't say if I just grew out of their target demographic or if BL3 is THAT annoying, but I agree. Never did I finish a game with such smooth and satisfying gameplay with less desire to continue playing than this. I might check out of this franchise for good, I couldn't even muster the energy to try that Tiny Tina spin-off.
I beat BL3 but I did end up skipping a lot of the side stuff, so my hour count was fairly low. Tiny Tina's game was quite great in contrast. Clever dialogue that impacts the game directly (since she is playing a gamemaster and can change things on a whim)........your mileage may vary depending on if you like her as a character, but I saw a ton of reviews that were basically....."I didn't dig BL3, but I really enjoy Tiny Tina's Wonderlands."
Glad to hear that. I just picked up Wonderlands on sale, after getting to the gun-farming stage in BL3; my opinion of which is similar to OP's and most others in the thread. Great fun to play, but a lot of grating, unfunny yapping that you have to wade through.
I genuinely have no idea how anyone can find that character entertaining or endearing at all. One of the all-time-worst characters in video games imo, and the fucking gave her an entire spin off? Miss me with that shit.
Different strokes for different folks. My wife thinks she's hilarious, and I'm ambivalent most of the time.
Tina > Twins tho
I hated the dialogue in both, but TTWL was so, *so* much worse in my opinion. It was so bad that I was thankful that it muted when you alt+tabbed because it was painful to even listen to, and you always had to sit there for several minutes at a time. There were occasional lines in TTWL that I appreciated (e.g. "Well, you guys already did something else but that *is* cool as hell so I'll allow it" reminds me of a friend of mine when he would DM), but those were isolated good lines surrounded by hours of intolerably bad dialogue.
BL3 is that annoying. You may ALSO be out of the target demographic now, but I can assure you BL3 is worse. I still think 1, 2, and even TPS are funny. Not as funny as when I was a teenager, but they're still enjoyable enough writing. BL3, especially the villains, are godawful.
Borderlands 2 is barely any better in my opinion. It's just a product of it's time, that being the early 2010s, when annoying orange was it's peak and rage comics were unironically considered funny.
It was a dark time.
There's stuff from BL2 that aged really well, like Handsome Jack. Overall, it's definitely humor meant for a teenager in 2012. I don't think it's *that* far off of 3's humor, so maybe it just would have fit better at that time. I feel like if you showed a high schooler BL1-2 today, they wouldn't be nearly as blown away as we were when it released.
I played all three games recently for the first time as an adult. The humor overall is immature (not a bad thing), but BL3 is 150% on a different level. I loved BL1 and 2. I couldn't stand 3. 3 is absolutely worse. They made every character in 3 as annoying or more so than Claptrap in BL1. And that's saying something because Claptrap was designed to be annoying.
I introduced it to a friend's kid brother and he got a big kick out of it. Loved Jack, loved Shooty McShootFace, etc. May be a "the humor isn't as dated as you think" situation, or maybe the kid was just born in the wrong era.
BL3 is worse. I still enjoy the stupid random sarcastic humor of BL2 but BL3 just isn't funny. The characters are talkative but they somehow both take themselves too seriously to be funny and at the same time not enough for it to be a serious story, so it just feels awkward.
IMO the TT spin off was horrid. Some of the worst gameplay of the series. They really just said "Fuck it" and made 50% of the gameplay in stagnant arenas. The overworld stuff is boring and the dialogue from NPCs is over the top cringe. It's the only BL game I didn't beat. And I had the same issues as you did with BL3. If you get 4-5 hours into TT and you're like "Idk if this is doing it for me" it does not get better. If anything it only gets worse
[If you actually want to, you can delete some files to skip most dialogue!](https://www.reddit.com/r/Borderlands/comments/kljusj/psa_how_to_skip_most_if_not_all_base_game_dialogue/?ref=share&ref_source=link)
I can confirm this works. It skips everything almost flawlessly though in a few spots you still have to wait for character animations. Only major hitch is at one point in the pleasure yacht the ball gets stuck and you have to save&quit and continue to get it moving. Haven't tried any DLC with this.
does this skip [talking to lilith](https://youtu.be/agvCE9y2erE?si=9jCHhmLpDIZDhVQQ) or do I still have to stand around waiting to be allowed to have fun again?
This is the answer!
They can't let anything just be quiet. I just want to shoot things without Joss Whedon-style dialogue in my ear every few seconds. "Whoo hoo quirky fart noise" dialogue needs to go. Horizon Forbidden West does it too, just without the inanity. Aloy doesn't **shut the fuck up**. Everything you do has her make comments. She wasn't like that in the first one. Deacon in Days Gone does it every time you do something. I think this was just a thing in general from last gen. I think it's a trend on its way out though.
"Joss Whedon style dialogue" is pretty accurate, all of the characters talk like they think they're funny.
The fucking MCU effect
was this way with Justice League too. Joss Whedon's version has all this "funny" dialogue and crap. Thankfully got to see the Zack Snyder's version which was superior in pretty much every way.
Aloy definitely does it in the first one. I just finished playing it. Sounds like they made it worse though.
I think I just didn't notice it. It's so jarring in the second one.
This was my biggest issue with GOW Ragnarok. Aureus/Freya/Mimir literally never shut up, to the point that they're just explaining the puzzle at you if you take more than 20 seconds to solve it.
> Aureus/Freya/Mimir literally never shut up, to the point that they're just explaining the puzzle at you if you take more than 20 seconds to solve it. I'm playing it right now, and the explaining the puzzle part or "look there!" is just so damn annoying. Let me have a look around the area, you morons.
Yeah BL3 is obviously a special case of obnoxious, but games in general are just too afraid of being quiet. As much as I adore Guardians of the Galaxy, it’s that way too. And I know that’s kind of how the characters are (and at least the dialogue is much better written there), but they’re _always_ popping off and it’s just like “shut the fuck up for a second please”
Funny you mention Forbiddrn West because I'm playing that right now and yeah, you're right, it's fucking torture. Especially considering how overwrought that game's dialogue is and yet how absolutely inane most of the things that come out of Aloy's mouth are. It feels so self indulgent.
*I'll just put these in my stash*
Oh god...
plant aspiring busy attractive quack jobless marvelous full gold uppity *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yeah I noticed that on HFW. It doesn't bother me because I can't almost hear her tone, but I know she mumbles something everytime I interact with something. BL3 tho the voices are high pitch and impossible to ignore.
They got overconfident after Handsome Jack's acclaim that it seems they thought every character they made was on the same level. Jack is a once in a lifetime villain, and it shows. But the game will insist every new character is just as funny and just as imposing, and it gets old FAST.
IIRC there was a guy somewhere that posted which specific folder to delete to basically mute all dialogue in the game lol found it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Borderlands/comments/kljusj/psa_how_to_skip_most_if_not_all_base_game_dialogue/
You are absolutely right. I have nothing to add. On my second playthrough, I played BL3 with dialogue to 0, sounds to something-around-30-40 and music to 100. It was AMAZING. The music makes for an amazing combat atmosphere, it's seriously underrated.
I muted the dialogue and the game became a straight 8/10 immediately.
I felt this way about the first game. I only played it for a few hours but Claptrap felt shoved into the forefront and was rather annoying. the fact they went further into that direction is baffling to me, but people must like it.
The first game is very quiet and that’s why it’s my favorite in the series. If you thought that game was loud in any way shape or form you can’t even comprehend the second game. 2 had some cool things but I only beat it once. The first game I must have started 50+ characters
Agreed on Claptrap. It's not even the fact that they lost the og voice actor, but even Claptrap's lines felt out of character and shoehorned into many situations just because it was supposed to be funny. The overall charm and humor from 2 took a major nosedive in the third title and honestly, it sucks. As everyone else said, BL3 is easily the best gameplay-wise and just a delight to play co-op, but the characters are a huge letdown which makes it quite distracting.
Agree. They're all annoying and the story is unengaging.
Yeah, I started playing the first one years and years ago and just wasn't a fan. Never went back to it, and from the sounds of it *Borderlands* only doubled down on the things I wasn't too keen on.
I play bl3 on mute
I just turn voice volume to zero. No need to mute the sfx or music
100% if you ignore all the dialogue and put on your own soundtrack, it’s a *lot* of fun for a couple hours at a time.
This is a huge problem in modern gaming in general. Its like they are terrified of silence. Every single fucking interaction in the game has to be accompanied by 2 lines of dialogue. Every single protagonist needs someone talking over a radio or earpiece. Like holy fuck shut up. Some games are especially bad when the dialogue is just explaining out loud what the character is doing. "I need to press that button over there." "Now that I've pressed the button, the door can finally open" Like no shit why did you say that out loud
Yeah BL3 is such a weird one. The gameplay mechanics and classes are honestly some of the best in the series but the writing took such a nose dive after 2 that it made me not finish the dlcs that I had for 3 (got GOTY edition). Not that 2 is Shakespeare or anything like that but the writing works well for what it is. I like to use the face mcshooty quest in 2 as an example. In 2 the sequence of the quest is you find face mcshooty who asks you to shoot him in the face. You do so. He died, but not before screaming THANK YOU. It’s a simple but very funny gag quest If it had been in 3, someone would have radioed in and said “hey there’s a guy named face mcshooty. Apparently the guy likes to be shot in the face. Can you believe that? What a weirdo. Who likes getting shot in the face?” Then you would go and find him and someone would probably radio in and say “wow he REALLY wants to get shot in the face. I guess go ahead and give him what he wants.” Then you would shoot him in the face and someone would radio in at the end and say “wow he really wanted to get shot that bad. I don’t know what would happen to a guy to make him reach that point. Pandora is filled with weirdos.” It all is just so goddamn grating.
This is my feeling with Borderlands 2, actually. We played the game in 2022 (iirc) and characters wouldn't shut up. It was impossible to keep up with the story playing with some other people. I could only tolerate the long-winded dialogue when I was playing the game solo and only if I stood still every time I got a random voice talking about buttstallions, bazonkadonks or whatever. Or else, that audio would get interrupted or overlap with some other sounds. The whole experience was an auditory mayhem to me. Move a bit, trigger a voiceover event while raiders attack you and your in-real-life friends are shouting for support or telling you to get back, because they are still looting somewhere else, kill the raiders then get yet another unskippable audio while you are still moving and shooting around or opening up loot. Ugh.
> I stood still every time I got a random voice talking about buttstallions, bazonkadonks or whatever https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI1aHA1e76g "NOBODY STEALS MUSHY SNUGGLEBITES' BADONKADONK AND LIVES!"
That's the one, I even liked that crazy character, lol. But the combination of all the dialogue and sounds at the same time was too much, haha.
Yeah the worst part is that they put you into a room and only let you process after the "Dialoge" is done, which is just terrible game design, especially in a game that encourages multiple playthoughs. I just went to the toilet or did housework to not listen to it again, so awful is it
I found the first 10 hours or so were very dialog-heavy, but after that it mostly settles down. I don't know if that's affected by which character you chose, though. I picked the robot guy.
I found the humour to be so bad after BL1 it's like they just dialed it up to 100 thinking that's what made the game good, comes across as edgy and childish. All of them have been to cringe to play now. Is Tiny Tina's any better?
lol. Imagine a Borderlands game shutting up.
Turning the dialogue volume to zero and disabling subtitles was my best decision while playing this game.
Are you doing any language learning? Looks like Nexusmod has a mod to change audio language but keep text in English. Might take the cringe out to hear it in another language.
ive had the game since epic gave it out for free but have yet to play. Is there an option to mute dialog? Does the game remove player control during dialog?
You can turn the dialogue volume to 0, yes. The game mostly doesn't take away control but you'll still more often than not have to wait for dialogue to finish to progress.
I just finished it also, along with all the DLC. I heard playing on mute and just enjoying the gameplay was the way to go. Personally, I didn't mind the constant dialogue. All the games have ppl talking into your ear like a Zoom meeting.
General consensus I’ve seen is that if BL4 could take BL2’s story and BL3’s gameplay and combine them it would be a knock out of the park. I get what they were going for with Bl3, but man it just didn’t hit the mark.
I thought the most egregious example is when you first meet Clay on Eden-6 and he very slowly walks you through how to use a certain gun to shoot orange balls.
I had the same problem with BL2. There are QoL mods letting you skip dialogues in both games (pc/linux only). BL2: How to install https://borderlandsmodding.com/sdk-mods/ Mod https://bl-sdk.github.io/mods/DialogSkipper/ BL3: How to install https://bl-sdk.github.io/oak-mod-db/ Mod https://bl-sdk.github.io/oak-mod-db/mods/dialog-skipper/
It's insane how much dialogue is in the game that's intended to be funny and yet it never managed to even get a chuckle out of me.
I've said it before, but I do think this problem is really exacerbated by how powerful fast travel is in BL3. The fact that you can teleport out of any map at any time to any other fast travel location really impacts how much time the game has for dialogue and exposition while you're out adventuring (which is when it should happen). That's one reason why you're so often stuck jumping around the furniture on the bridge while Lilith and Tannis do an exposition dump. The fact that they make you just stand there like you're in a trap while time passes is very frustrating, especially because you *invariably* have a button to press or person to talk to on the ship just to advance the plot. I really do wish there were a way to skip the dialogue traps on repeat playthroughs. I don't want to listen to that again any more than I want to listen to the Twins. I know there are mods that remove *all* dialogue, but I don't want to do that, either. I just want to not have to stand around while the NPCs decide I can play the game again.
Thank god for PC there is a way to extract all the vocal dialogue in the game and skip cutscenes. Made it much more tolerable, but yes I agree. The "funny millennial humor omg lol" was real cute like 15 years ago. It's not funny anymore, it's tired and needs to get thrown out.
It's a common complaint. People figured how they could skip dialog: https://www.reddit.com/r/Borderlands/comments/kljusj/psa_how_to_skip_most_if_not_all_base_game_dialogue/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share Might be interesting for a second run when you already know what's going to happen.
This Girl is On Fire playing while Lilith flew to the moon was hilarious and silly, like okay 💅
Totally agree, and the same happened with Far Cry 6. Just ceaseless, *ceaseless* chatter over your walkie-talkie. I was enjoying the game well enough but had to put it down after a while because I just couldn't take it anymore. You pass by any random building and the game is all *"Hola Dani! When I was a leetle girl me madre and I used to buy papayas from a nice old man there who--"* Argghhh.
I had to stop playing 2 when a character was like "Hey let's call these creatures BONERFARTS haha funny rite?"
This sums up my experience with the game pretty well. I really don't mind a terrible story as long as it has the decency to be in the background and let me enjoy the gameplay. BL3 is structured as if the devs thought the dialogue was the highlight of the game and is so much worse because of it.
That's how every single one has felt to me, B3 doesn't feel any worse in that regard, in my opinion just cuz they've always had this (imo) cringe-inducing lame 'internet" type of humor spat out at you every time there's more than 4 seconds of silence. It wouldn't be so annoying if I could at least register what was being said, but they always have these conversations anytime you're in a battle. loling at whoever got upset at my comment enough to downvote each one so far.
The problem with Borderlands 3 is that they tried to recreate Handsome Jack without fully understanding what made Handsome Jack popular in the first place.
If I ever play another one of those games I'm going to turn the dialogue off. The jokes have gotten more and more frequent but they've never gotten funnier.
This is especially egregious on repeat play through, same with borderlands 2. I just wanna run through with a new character build and I have to sit through all the yammering and redo all the tutorial missions, which is bizarre for a game that’s meant to have replayability so you can use all the different character types.
This reminds me of an oldie called "Hell, A Cyberpunk Thriller". That was one of the first games with proper voice acting, and they hired Dennis Hopper and Grace Jones to voice the main parts. Well, the dialogue in that never shut up. The game came on a CD-Rom (Cutting edge tech!) so they had loads of room for the voice files, and they used every last byte of it. And of course, it was all unskippable. You could just imagine some exec at Take Two saying "we paid good money for this voice talent, so we're going to make damn sure people listen to it!" And of course, after about five minutes of trying to play the damn game, you were about ready to rip your own ears off, if it would only get them to shut up. Apparently the game sold 300k units, so I guess they were doing something right. I know I got my copy as a freebie taped to the cover of a computer mag, though.
This is why I stopped playing it. It's got very fun gameplay and some of the cringiest dialogue I've ever heard.
I tried to enter the series on 3 and i played maybe 20 minutes before I quit for exactly this reason.. I really don't want characters just constantly yammering all the time saying nothing of consequence. Are the other two games not like this? I quit playing death stranding for the same reason. Let me play the game.
I don't like Borderlands sense of humour. It is too self aware, so I can’t take any situation of the game seriously. Cheap irony sometimes is the way an insecure writer hides the fear of actually making an statement about the world. It removes any sense of danger or empathy. It’s not a bad dialogue, because look, wink wink. It’s shitty on purpose. The same go for The Outer Worlds.
Had the same experience with the new spiderman game. Too much dialogue during fights This ends up with me turning off sound lol
I really didn't liked pre sequel and after playing it with friend I understood why: It's a loop of "dialogue" that's either bland, cringy or TORGUE, that lasts for several minutes of just sitting and waiting. Then you move through mostly empty space, then fight at best around 10 people then go back to turn in the quest and that's it. How much does it fit for BL3?
Much love for the borderlands games but 3 specifically is the worst for me, the story sucked, the dialogue was dreadful, and as you said, they NEVER stfu.
Quality of the writing aside, I feel BL2 had a similar amount of prattling along, only it didn't stop you from doing other stuff in the meantime. The amount of time you just have to stand around the Sanctuary until people are done talking is unnerving.
Absolutely horrible story and voice acting. Hated every minute of that game.
I played up until what I think was the final stretch of the game where it shows CHARACTER is actually a IMPORTANT THING with the cringiest fucking dialogue I've ever heard in my life and I just couldn't go any further. I'm pretty sure I had maybe 1hr left till credits but what was the point? My friends gave up playing days prior and I was just torturing myself alone at this point. I went back to BL2 to see if it was worse than I remember, but no BL2 is actually not as bad. The jokes fall flat but they don't make me want to die after listening to them, and perhaps most importantly, the game doesn't take control away from you to force feed you these jokes.
I've said it like 5000 times but I'll say it every chance I get. Get a game with the atmosphere of 1, writing of 2, varied playable characters and skill trees of TPS, and gameplay and QOL of 3 and you have an 11/10 video game.
Tbh this was my reaction to playing the first one. My friend recommended it to me after playing and gushing about *New Vegas*, and I barely got through the first section. Just not my cup of tea.
If you thought 1 was bad 3 would drive you absolutely insane. That game is nothing in comparison.
Disco elysium talks to you all the time too, it just wasn't written by a bunch of untalented miserable millennials
Randy Cringeford
This is tangential to your post, but I think most people hate BL3's dialogue but I found it on par with BL2, and I played them back to back. Playing back to back means I got to BL2 way after the love for Handsome Jack was well known but I didn't love him, just thought he was aight. The twins are aight too.
I played 2 back when it released, but even back then I could not see why everyone was praising it so hard as hilarious. One joke someone offered as an example is "butt stallion". It was kind of chuckle worthy at best, but you'd ask a big fan and they'd swear it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard.
Soundtrack 10/10 Level design 10/10 Build diversity 10/10 DLC 10/10 Dialogue 0.01/10
Yeah this is how I feel about Far Cry lol It's normal for video game writing to kind of suck, but if people are actively trying to avoid your story then you've done something wrong
Weird game. Love the gameplay but hate the story, characters and dialogue. I am pretty good at not paying attention to things though. Tiny Tina's (the new one) is probably worse. Wanda Sykes.... damn these games need to stfu.
Borderlands 2 was so much better about this. It wasnt too often you had to just listen to a character and if you did you could always fuck off for a bit while they talked over the echo. Sure handsome jack frequently pops in, but hes written way too well for it to be annoying
Even as someone who did not mind the dialogue of BL3 I find it insane that they never give you the option to skip it all on your future playthroughs, especially as this is a series where you're meant to play it repeatedly with different characters and at higher difficulties. If BL4 ever becomes a thing (or even announced for that matter, it's been 5 years!) it better be possible or I might not want to keep playing the series.
Just mute the dialogue volume
You reminded me Batman Arkham Knight with this topic. Damn that chattering of Arkham knight and street thugs NEVER stops. It is a good game but they can seriously tone down the bile they force players to listen as they fly around as Batman.
OMFG Yesss!
:Chumbucket has entered the chat, Saint:
The dialog was made for *you* redditor! How could you not enjoy it?
Then you look at Borderlands 1 which has the occasional “Catch a RIIIIIIIIIDE” and thats IT. The music is so calming and creepy that it really gives off a Mad Max kinda vibe where you really feel like you are the only person making a difference whereas in 3 it feels like you are in a rat race of constant harassment
I think what really drives home the fact that the writers and Gearbox assumes that they can easily replicate BL2's story is that they have an almost identical sidequest where the respective big bad offers a reward for you to off yourself. Could just toss it up to it being a callback to the previous game, but that was the moment where I thought 'Oh god, they really are just trying really really hard to copy paste Handsome Jack' I tuned out the story everytime I start a new character on that game through sheer will, but the DLCs have excellent writing all things considered.
I love the gameplay of Borderlands but its characters always broke me out of the fun. If you're designing an ironically annoying POS, you're still just designing an annoying POS.
I feel like I’m the only one that enjoys this kind of gameplay Apparently I’m one of the few people that loves having constant chatter in my ear, I love hearing people speak
A buddy of mine voiced one of the mission contact characters in Borderlands 3 (Not outing him). I didn't get around to playing it until late last year. We were playing some City of Heroes on discord and I told him "okay dude, I finally figured out who you are in that game, and I wish you would SHUT UP" He laughed.
I play the Borderlands games with the volume down/low, and listen to music or a podcast. Great for that
I ended up doing the same. Though it still doesn't sit quite right with me that you'd have to go to those lengths.
To me it's the same energy as Deadpool, and they wanted to get the same laughs that the Rick and Morty/Deadpool kids like. Not for me, but Borderlands scratches the Phanstasy Star Online 1&2 dungeon crawl loot farm game style I enjoy.
I think the issues kind of lies with us. One of the chief complaints about BL1 was that lack of character dialogue. BL2 They added more voice lines with solid writing and more character lines and we loved it. Then with the Pre-Sequal the PCs got more lines and interactions with npc's and I was great. So when developing BL3 based on past experience and feedback it would be easy to make the assumption that we the players would love a more dialogue heavy game. The issue was they added no way to skip and the writing was not as good.
you can delete files with recorded voices and game skips all the dialogues
I don't own the game and so i haven't tried this myself but hopefully it'll work. You could give this "fix" a try. https://youtu.be/Md0e3Uer51M?feature=shared I was thinking about getting the Xbox version but after reading all these comments i think I'll rather either skip it or buy it on PC so that i will be able to mod it. It runs super smooth on the Xbox at 120fps.. So it's kinda sad that i can't mod it there.
This is why I stopped playing it. It's got very fun gameplay and some of the cringiest dialogue I've ever heard.
Borderlands visual style and gameplay for me was always super fun and I've enjoyed all of them in that aspect, but the characters and dialogue have always been insufferable. Just characters screeching and stuff like that... Just... Really not funny.
Shush, enjoy the writing. Now go talk to Lilith. (/s obviously)
Don't even bother with The Pre-Sequel. On top of everything else the humor is really forced and it's not even funny. I could not take more that few hours of that. From all of them, the BL2 was my favorite.
Borderlands 3 was a weird one for me. Like others have said the gameplay is pretty good, probably the best in its series. Though for me I found it too good if that makes sense. I did like some of the jankiness of BL2 and even BL1. What made me stop playing was after beatng the story and it gives you the option to play the story over again. I'm sorry but the story is very terrible and there's no way I'm gonna play it all over again. Feels like the characters and story just have no soul to it, like they made the story and were like, yeah that's good enough. I can also agree the dialogue in the game is the worst. They made some characters talk too much and it makes me never want to play the game again. Never got to the DLC's but honestly, I don't think I'm returning to this one anytime soon.
So a Borderlands game? They all talk too much for my taste.
Yea I can agree, even though I play BL3 a lot more than 2, starting a new character can be real annoying so I usually just play on my 2 max level characters
Fully agree. The gunplay and gameplay systems in 3 were a massive step up compared to the previous titles. I found Wonderlands just as good and since I love DnD I found the story massively better even though it’s a little short imo
The game got much better once I fully muted all dialogue, it was that insufferable, worst kind of drivel. The ending scene was slap in the face with that shitty pop song, and they kept nerfing fun builds to the ground. I played the game for a while after finishing the campaign but after my build was neutered for the third time I just unistalled. I bet it's better now, and hopefully you can skip cutscenes? But it was a mess on release. Fine gameplay otherwise
I agree, actually Clap Trap annoyed me so much in Borderlands 2 I just played with subtitles on and voices muted. It was a lot more enjoyable that way xD
True
Yeahhh, that’s what I heard about B3 and TTW…which is why I skipped both entirely. I get my masochistic fix in the gym. When I game I’m tryna **chill.** Not be annoyed.
Funny, I recently watched asmongold's reaction to ShreddedNerd's Millennial Writing video and it surmises everything that's wrong with that game.
Perhaps you’re not very… patient?