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Borderlands 3 Has an Endgame Problem - MMORPG.com
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Borderlands 3 Has an Endgame Problem - MMORPG.com
I’ve been playing nothing but Borderlands 3 since the game dropped last week and while I’m having more fun than I’ve ever had in the series due to improvements in gameplay, there are some significant problems with the endgame right now.
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They have just patched the game, about an hour ago, to reduce the amount of loot in Mayhem, removed some farming exploits (the main three that are well known at the moment) and balanced some things out (including the sticky grenades).
I'm sure it doesn't fix all the exploits but we know it'll be fixed.
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Looting in Warframe is nowhere near as exciting as looting in... literally anything else.
"Ooh, a rare crafting material. I just need another 12 of those to build the thing that I'll receive in another 12 hours - 3 days."
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The game punishes players for taking extended breaks or for joining late because of the Vault system. Either they haven't figured out how to properly compensate for the number of prime items they have, or they are being willingly inconvenient.
Riven acquisition is a pain, with the main source being a daily random map combination, for one random riven for a random thing with random stats that has to be revealed through a random, inconvenient challenge, while slotting the veiled Riven into one of your precious mod slots. It's not a great system, and the average player is more likely to just buy the damn thing.
Something like Borderlands doesn't require an essay on how to unlock the thing. It doesn't take days to craft something. It doesn't legacy vault its most valuable items or rely on daily rotations and obnoxious unveiling quests for its random roll mods. You kill the thing, you get the gun, you use the gun, and it feels great.
That's just the nature of live games. You never know when things are going to get patched! That said, I looked through the hot fix and it doesn't address most of the issues.
Nerfing drop rates and fixing some egregious items and farming scenarios (ex. loot caves) is a great start, but the hardest difficulty still isn't challenging at all.
I've literally never done Mayhem 2. I started doing Mayhem 1 and found it to be too easy and went right to 3 and...also found it to be too easy. TVHM is also a joke. With only 2 difficulty modes (Normal/TVHM) and six (sort of) Mayhem levels (Normal Mayhem 1-3 and TVHM Mayhem 1-3) to play with right now, players should feel like they are progressively moving through each as they improve their skills and build.
As for the drop rates, even with reduced rates it's still not worth it to do anything but boss rush the easiest/most rewarding boss, leaving endgame modes like Circle of Slaughter and Proving Grounds as pointless as they were before the patch.
These changes stem some of the bleeding, but they'll need to take a more comprehensive approach to improve the health of BL3's endgame.
I know, I know.. you could just say that they could increase the chance of higher quality items rolling and reduce the amount of items that drop but that creates another issue. Say, if 7 items dropped from a boss you could get 2 blues, 1 purple, 1 orange and 1 green and 2 whites. If they change it so that 3 items dropped from the same boss you could get 1 blue, 1 purple and 1 orange. You just lost a blue item in that scenario.
Point being, if they reduce the amount of item drops and increase the chance of finding higher quality items, the chance of finding more high quality items 'at the same time' goes waaay down. All those useless drops had a 'chance' of being good.
You'll know what I mean when you pop 3 legendaries and 4 epics out of a boss. It ain't likely to happen, but it could... and that's the point. If that boss only dropped 4 items, you'd never get a lootsplosion that good. And.. lootsplosions like that are just pure fun.
I'm glad the devs understand this, even if most players don't. All you have to do is lose the OCD mindset and just ignore whites and greens after about level 10. It really is that simple.
I like both games but both haves their issues. I would say that BO is better in the looter aspect since you can use what you got right away without any waiting, that's more exciting, especially if what you got does something special aside of the stat of the item.
You're complaining about a fundamental flaw with the aRPG sub-genre with the boss rushing stuff. Elitism players will always find the optimal way to obtain loot and spread it around the internet so everyone follows suit.
To me, boss rushing is boring as all hell in terms of gameplay. That's enough of a reason to do some proving grounds on it's own.
As for difficulty, I agree that Mayhem 3 is quite easy and needs to be tweaked. I don't think they were going for a tiered structure like in The Division or Anthem though. You skipping Mayhem 2 and thinking that's a problem is a strange way of looking at it to me. It's like starting a game on easy, then changing it to hard and complaining you weren't forced to play on medium. You're not intended to progress through the difficulty levels one by one, you're just supposed to pick the one you want in terms of challenge and that's it. You can get nice loot no matter what you choose.
It's not an MMO that's designed to make you grind to keep you playing.
Angry Joe for example went on about it forever,he was like that was the only thing that turned him off was the way Mayhem was done.
Hint ..the proper way to do it is with better AI and NOT a lazy approach like a reduction in % dps.
I can see the boardroom...ok guys we have to rush this game out tomorrow,let's just slap a % penalty on everything in Mayhem,how long will that take our coders............
Sir about 5 minutes sir,ok done,let's go to lunch.
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It's not a fundamental flaw. It's all about the implementation. I love boss rushing, but good game design means that all activities have a place. For example, I played Marvel Heroes for years and that game had boss terminals, basically formalized boss rushing. These terminals had a place in the content offering for targeted farming of specific pieces of gear, but they didn't replace other methods of gearing.
The biggest change to boss rushing in BL3 compared to the rest of the series is the fact save points plop you right outside of the boss. This combined with the abundant drops and ease of the game's difficulty meant explosions of 1-5+ Legendaries every few minutes. I know this for a fact, because I've been farming Captain Traunt for hours each night every night for the last few nights.
Boss rushing needs to be part of the picture, but if you're going to spend money, time and effort developing bespoke endgame modes such as Circle of Slaughter and Proving Grounds then they also need to have a place.
Maybe they pull from boss loot tables, maybe they have a token system with vendors where you can redeem certain items, maybe the time: reward ratio simply needs to be rebalanced to consider the ease of boss rushing. How you get there isn't as important as getting there, otherwise the endgame devolves into boss rushing and boss rushing only. This is not an inherent issue to ARPGs that can't be designed around. Proving Grounds are a riff on Rifts, which are an incredibly fun and successful mode available in Diablo III.
As for Mayhem, it's not that I don't think I should be able to skip a difficulty, it's that the game never presented enough of a challenge for me to even consider it. I started snoozing through Mayhem 1 and just to see what was waiting for me I decided to try Mayhem 3 only to find it was also incredibly easy. Mayhem levels ape Diablo III's Torment levels, and while you may feel like you can skip through a couple of those, eventually you do hit a wall where you need to come back with better gear/builds to handle it.
If Gearbox is only rolling out with three Mayhem levels then each one does need to provide a meaningful challenge and sense of progression. Otherwise, what's the point? Of course I'll do Mayhem 3 when it feels as easy as Mayhem 1! I get more loot! It becomes a no brainer. This isn't good game design if it's intentional and it's an example of poor balance that needs correcting if it's not.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I hope so! But I don't see a need for them to be distinct from Mayhem. They could easily just be part of the Mayhem system. Just start rolling in +levels for enemies/loot on higher Mayhem difficulties.
I just think you're judging the game like it's an MMO or MMO-Lite, or whatever, and it's not. I know you want a Borderlands MMO or live-service game because you've said it loads of times before but this isn't it and pretending that it is, is pointless.
I'm not saying that some of the changes you're suggesting wouldn't be good, at all. I'd like the see proving grounds be more rewarding because I find them a lot more fun. But, you are definitely treating the game in a way that was never intended.
It's not supposed to have that hardcore tiered progression that pushes you every step of the way. You are supposed to build to your play style (not find the 'optimal' build or you're dead), find that crazy gun that let's you splat everything in sight, kill loads of shit and have fun. That's just the Borderlands way.
I think this was true of past games, but by putting an endgame focus on BL3 it's clear that they do want some long tail development on this one even if they don't want to call it a live service explicitly. I think the fact Gearbox rushed to hot fix some of the issues I outlined in today's piece support that as well. Anyone who played the older games knows that issues like that could languish for like a year before they were addressed. And sure Rifts overtook everything else in D3, but that's not an inherent flaw, it's just Blizzard failing to make other activities attractive.
Marvel Heroes actually did manage to make most of its activities useful even if it had plenty of other issues and more shallow challenge progression. I had reasons to do Danger Room, the various patrol zones such as Midtown, boss terminals, raids and so on. None of these problems are inherent to the genre. They can all be designed around.
I never played Marvel Heroes properly so I can't really relate to it. I tried it in the very early beta or something and never went back. I wish I'd played it properly when it was available, looking back.
It's just that the loot chase is not one of those things that it does well, and I wish it was better in that regard.
I never suggested forcing. I actually hate forcing players to do things. The ideal, to me, is to have reasons to play multiple different activities. It keeps things fresh. There are plenty of ways to make other activities attractive without forcing players to do things. Like most people, I have ideas, but I'm not a game designer.
My main point was that none of this stuff is impossible to tackle and some games (like Marvel Heroes, problems and all) managed to figure a lot of this out.
Players will always gravitate towards the path of least resistance, so it's ultimately a matter of not making everything available in one place. I offered up a number of suggestions in the piece and in one of my replies, but I'm sure designers could come up with even better solutions if necessary.
Borderlands content has always been trivial after a very short period.
smh
You've reached glad and killed Mythic Aszhara? that'spretty impressive. In fact, you're probably the first person to do so this patch. Bravo.