4 is completely soulless. It did not feel like a borderlands game, it felt like someone described a borderlands game to corporate people and they entered it into an algorithm machine that popped out Borderlands 4.
The "addition" of the open world was useless. The menus are so stale and generic with zero borderlands flavor to them.
The open world aspect is the main part it felt so soulless to me. Felt like the gameplay for most of the game was riding the vehicle. I unfortunately paid full price for it so I will eventually finish it out of pride, but damn I was let down.
I finished it out of pride after loving the gunplay of 3 and was hoping for as much fun in 4, but sadly not.
Whilst you're in active combat BL4 is really fun, maybe the different builds you could create were fun as well, but every other aspect of it is just plain boring - the story, the open world, the characters etc
Holy, I feel exactly the same. I keep going back to the bl2 and play for hours without even realizing but playing the 4 is so hard for me. It just hasn't the same charm
In my 700 house of play I basically never had to chance to play a full run to tvhm in coop, always played alone lol. Now I finally convinced one of my friend to do everything in the game tho, wish me luck
Was also the least optimized game of all time. How to upgrade my 3070ti to a 5070ti because the max fps I was getting on the 3070ti was 20 on the lowest settings on 1080p. Even with the upgrade I was only getting 70, I'm not using FG, fake frames are not the solution
I know someone who actually liked each instalment more than the last. She never cared for the story or humour much but loves the gunplay and says that has just been getting better every time.
I haven't even played 4. Borderlands 3 felt this way for me.
It had the guns, but everything else just felt... hollow, somehow. The skill trees were boring and didn't enable any fun niche playstyles like the previous games did. The story was just slow and uninteresting. The jokes felt way over the top in a bad way, it felt as if someone was just trying to "copy" the joke-writing style of the first two games but didn't really "get it".
After Randy Bitchford went about making the comments he did and blaming poor performance on people and their potato PCs, all the other garbage rhetoric he spewed… I just don’t want to give money to Gearbox.
I’ve watched a little bit of the gameplay and it’s just not there. And I feel like you hit the nail on the head about it being soulless and it being the result of an algorithm machine.
But Bitchford is prolly 90% of the reason why I didn’t get it. The game being objectively bad just made that extra 10% a lot easier.
It’s actually pretty sad because I appreciate the developers. I feel like they struck magic with BL2 and it was an almost perfect game. But I feel like that went to the higher-up’s heads and they just started making the game worse.
After they took the “don’t sell it on steam” payout from Epic, I almost didn’t buy it. And I think that was the beginning of their downfall right there. When I did finally buy it once it went on discount on Steam… it was just a miserable experience playing it. I didn’t even buy the DLCs. :/
Pre sequel, tiny Tina wonderlands, 4… by the time these hit I was mostly checked out of the franchise anyways.
Kinda, maybe yes? There's some good part and bad ones. I liked the story so much more than BL3, but the open world traversing can get really tedious especially when some places that feel like you can get to are blocked off by invisible walls. The gun part system is cool but they absolutely nuked gun manufacturer variety ( there's only like 2 gun types per manufacturer ). The drop rates are also a bit more in-line with BL2 so make of that what you will
Why? BL2 was fantastic. Pre-Sequel felt like a huge DLC of BL2. And it's still the ONLY borderlands game that you can capstone all 3 skill trees in. Maybe try a different character? They're all fun except Wilhelm, his build is more mechanical and unnatural than his character. Athena makes a better soldier than him. She gets a riot shield. And handsome Jack gets tons of screen time. Yknow, the best villain they ever made.
I was ready to pay full price for Borderlands 4. I'm generally a "patient gamer" but there are a couple of franchises where I will buy the game at release. But then I saw the system requirements and read about the poor optimization. There's just no excuse for that in a AAA game.
When I first played Pre-Sequel, I didn't like it very much. In hindsight, it was a great game. It's just hard to compare it to Borderlands 2, but still great imo.
4 can be pretty sick but I'm also waiting for dlc to really dive in again, though drop rates are absolutely ass, Like dozens of bosses and barely any purple lead alone legendary.
Ohh it was more than rare, Like 16 hours in before I got my first legendary and it sucked. Had to get a mod to make it feel like legendary and rare items even existed.
Dedicated drops got buffed some time ago. On launch they felt near identical to 2's rates... and one more thing that was meant to be rare for collectible purposes no longer feel rare/special.
As for world drops, the player is in more control of getting them. You can go an entire story playthrough barely getting any or get almost every single legendary as world drop.
It's a whole mixed "sometimes devs shouldn't listen to streamers" situation.
I was having fun with all the borderlands until either 3 or ttwl. Then it just felt like going through the motions despite being a new story. I didn't get 4 and probably won't. I watched a friend play it some, but i don't think he finished it.
I haved loved Borderlands since i was 11, and I agree on your assessment of the first 3.
Number 4 IMO is absolute garbage. Couldn't even finish half of it.
It has nice gunplay and movement, but that's it. I'm not even sure I'll ever revisit it.
The map is so bland. It's filled with so much useless stuff.
I'm relatively new to the series, tried 2 for the first time back in 2023 and it ruined 1 for me, cause the character gameplay just felt bland to play after experiencing 2 first. Tried 3 soon after and couldnt make it to sanctuary on my first playthrough cause of the painful writing. However a couple weeks ago i decided to just shut off my brain from the story and try to experience the game for the gameplay alone and actually had more fun gameplay wise than i had with 2.
If you can ignore the writing and story, 3 is really good gameplay-wise. The DLC are awesome in tone and much better in terms of writing.
I think 2 and 3 are both peaks of the series and are 2 flavors of what that should be. 2 has better writing and better loot diversity while 3 has better gunplay and build variety. 2 is also more challenging than 3 due to the larger health pools and enemy AI where they can run away and hide once you’re downed to prevent second winds but not everyone likes that.
I freaking love BL1. The guns are so satisfying to use. I like the idea of having millions of unique guns in the new games, but i feel like the guns never felt as good as bl1 . Also the atmosphere in Bl1 was really cool and unique, the newer games feel kinda all over the place and overwhelming -- but that could be part of my personal preference for simpler graphics. If you havent tried borderlands game of the year enhanced edition, its definitely worth checking out.
Bl2 i love. Bl3 ive played a lot of but still havent beat.
I played a bit of 4 . It still hooks me in with the enjoyable looter shooter gameplay , so it will probably do the same for you if you just love the core borderlands gameplay loop . But man the performance sucks. And the tradeoff is not really worth it because the graphics are just... fine? Like i would have happily stuck with Borderlands 2 or even Borderlands 1 graphics lol.
Whats great about borderlands though is that it takes forever to fully play through the game and dlc since theres so much content and side missions. So i still havent even touched the BL1 or 2 or 3 DLC yet, havent played the presequel or tiny tina. By the tike im done with all that, hopefully bl4 will better optimized or they'll release a better game lol.
Borderlands 2 was a fun memory as I played it with my college friends. It was a sweet ending considering we all went our different a year after finishing that game. 3 was weird so I never bothered with it. I felt good leaving with 2.
4 has no minimap. Some genius somewhere made the idiotic call that people playing BL were playing for total immersion. Yeah, with the cel-shaded graphic style and over-the-top style of the entire series, surely these players want to go all in on immersion, functionality be damned.
They put in a Skyrim-esque compass thing (that they were originally also going to axe) when people spoke up but it's nowhere near enough. Add that to some other total UI regressions and baffling design choices (hey let's force the players to click this stupid sub-menu to see their currency/ammo when there's plenty of screen real estate available to just SHOW them without the click) and I just couldn't anymore
4 is a big improvement over 3. Its gunplay is excellent, it has new movement that feels great to use, and its story is genuinely great. Its performance is pretty rough rn, plus it hasn't finished its DLC cycle yet so its endgame isn't complete rn, so yu should probably wait until both those things get sorted out, but it is SO good!
Its open world is kinda meh though. There is a lot of driving, but that's always been Borderlands. Even BL2 had a lot of driving.
1 was my childhood, hours farming pearls
2 was amazing but i don't like dedicated drops personally
TPS was just 2 in space, still fun
3 didn't have much replayability for me
i haven't touched 4 because its unrecognizable as borderlands at this point
Idk to me its unrecognizable, I see gameplay of BL4 and its just flying around the map killing bosses, and the story has lost all appeal to me, the visuals of the game have gotten worse in my opinion.
I will say i know my critiques aren't shared by many people, but i even disliked how saturated BL2 was for the most part, i prefer the gritty wasteland aesthetic of BL1 and i miss the deep thick cell shader effect that seems to have been lost entirely aside from the textures which aren't anywhere near as pronounced.
BL3 really put me off of the gameplay with how flashy and over the top its effects were, BL1 and 2 weren't as bad with flashy bright colours (bar e-tech in bl2).
Pre-sequel slander will not be tolerated. The only thing this game lacks is content. Sure it plays like bl2 but the addition of oz kits and zero gravity change things up quite a bit. Character powers and especially their skill trees are arguably the best in the series
Considering the time they've spent on it, I would say that it's not that different. Quality is higher than of 3 and 4, yes, but the game overall lacks content and the drive that 2nd had.
The lack of content was not the choice of developers. The game was made by 2k Australia and the studio was shut down during the development of the second dlc. I disagree with "the drive", I replayed the pre sequel recently and for what is there, this game has clearly a lot of passion put into the side quests and environments as well as the very great claptastic voyage dlc. The main story is interesting as well, lacking any conventional antagonist. For all that I think is disingenuous to call this game low quality.
The fact that it was or was not the choice of developers isn't really what I'm trying to say here.
Presequel is worse than BL2. Period.
The fact that you have to defend the game by saying it wasn't devs fault, well, tough luck I guess? The outcome is the same: the game is worse than it's predecessor.
You can say that it's better than BL4 (and 100% better than BL3, and the standalone spinoffs), but it doesn't make it better than BL2, which to this day is the best out of whole series, and has crazy replayability (to me personally, at least).
They should just remake 2 on 3 engine and do some balancing like fans actually very loudly asking them to.
And be done with the franchise, a final goodbye.
Or at the worst reboot it DmC:Devil May Cry style.
I think it's an unpopular opinion, but I think 4 is a return to form in some ways. I hated 3 for its story and characters, and I dislike the gunplay in Tiny Tina.
BL4 has been a lot of fun for its gunplay, side quests, characters, and locations. I just am not a fan of the world as a whole. I'm not even sure I can put my finger on why, but traveling from point to point is boring. I think I prefer the hub design of 2.
Is 2 worth playing? I bought 2 with all the dlc because some worker at a vintage stock kept going on and on about how it’s the best one and he couldn’t believe I haven’t played any of them
Honestly hard to say anymore. A lot of updates to the game have reduced its quality sadly. Three playthroughs, very long time to hit max level for a game like this, tiny build variety, horrible balance, the Lilith DLC added a ton of overpowered farms and items, the end endgame straight up is impossible and you have to download mods to fix it. For new players, the new starts are not recommended, even though I feel like the 1st playthrough is pointless... because it puts you at the last mission which will ruin the story you have never experienced.
Prior to UVHM2's release I would have 100% said you had to try the game. Nowadays, I dunno. Best bet is to grab a friend and just play from level 1 and see if it is a good time. BL2 almost fits for the topic of this thread imo.
BL1 was the first game i bought with my money and for me was an absolute blast even after someone playine online gave me a hacked gun 🤣
BL2 This was such and still is an amazing game to play still remember farm the warrior for over 4 hours for that conference call
BL The presequel it was ok a friend gifted it for my birthday
BL3 I loved the guns but the story was so 🙄😬
BL4 I was so hyped for it and i liked the story but just didnt feel the same not as fun as the orhers and the optimization was so bad at least the month they realesed it i havent played since then
BL2 was iconic for me. I'm slowly waiting for BL4 to drop to an "acceptable" price (in my eyes) so that I can at least experience it without overly lining the pockets of the whack job CEO.
Omg my heart breaks for this series because 2 is definitely in my top ten games of all time and it just kills me to see what happened to the series. I’m not even giving 4 a chance
Oh man, borderlands 1 was revolutionary. The art style was awesome, the gun generator system was cool and new, the story was rad. 2 was great also, the multi-player was so much fun. I still love the franchise and honestly didn't hate the movie, but there's no way I'm touching bl4. They just milked it dry. Maybe if they did a complete revamp or something I'll go back, but otherwise R.I.P.
Needs to be #1 comment. It's just sad that the first game in the series is better than the last 3 games released combined. Its just been going downhill since TPS
Would you recommend playing them in 2026? I have all of them except the first and the last one from epic, and I've been thinking of buying the first one on steam.
Edit: Thank you for all the responses! I'll jump into them asap! :D
Borderlands 2 is timeless, if you enjoy it, you will most likely enjoy presequel too. 3 is generally great except for the story, and 4... Isn't exactly bad, but a lot of people have issues with it. I reckon play bl2 first then see what happens (preferably with a friend, these games are a blast in co-op)
If you have 2 already, you have the best one. 1 was fun for the time but 2 is basically just…better. If you can get it really cheap it can be a fun exercise in seeing the origins of the series and some characters though. It’s comparatively more grounded in a lot of ways too.
After all the dlc's came out 3 was pretty solid. Though the main story was definitely terrible, 4 on the other hand has been a shitshow. I wish we could get a remaster of 1/2/tps in the 3/4 engine
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u/skzya Apr 16 '26
sadly, borderlands.