After all these years, Borderlands 3 is finally finished and out, or is it? Yes, is the answer to that second part, it is definitely out, but the question is whether or not the thing was finished. Fans have been left wondering that ever since they picked up the game 3 days back and found it riddled with enough bugs to make even the roughest Beta blush. I'm not just talking about the type of issues specific to a bad port either, apparently every single platform is suffering the type of teething problems that one most certainly does not expect from a game that has been this long in the making.
For those who have not followed the hype train, rumors of Borderlands 3's development stretched back as far as 2014, pretty much the second that content stopped releasing for Borderlands 2. Fans heard the franchises name being floated around trademark offices and got up on their hind legs like meerkats, hoping to get a glimpse of their next foray into Pandora. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your view point, instead fans ended up with 'Tales from the Borderlands', (One of the funniest pieces of Borderlands content) and 'Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel' (One of the lamest.)
Gearbox's darling franchise had picked up so much steam with it's second entry, that none of the core base could be satisfied with this "side content". (Despite the fact that one of them was a whole game, albeit a rough one.) I know of Borderlands die hards who still refuse to force themselves through the dull level design and ill-imagined mechanics of The Pre-Sequel. People were so taken by how much of a revolutionary improvement Borderlands 2 was, over Borderlands 1, that they would settle for nothing less than that level of improvement again. Back then, in a much more blissfully ignorant era of gamer/developer relations, such seemed inevitable. If you just put in the hard work and money that was earned from the last game, then surely the next would surpass it's predecessor in every facet! Of course, improvement rarely follows such a straight trajectory, and as the years went by, expectations dropped, and soon everyone would just be happy settling for more of the same.
So imagine how happy they were when the announcement trailer dropped, earlier this year, and everyone got to see a game that looked exactly like the one they remembered and loved from 2012. (I will point out that the visuals had been significantly improved.) Borderlands is not a hard game to envision, it's all about loot, guns and crass, sometimes funny, humor; the question would be whether or not they got it right in the creation process. Answering that question may take a few more months, as people are very much still in the 'honeymoon' period with the game and seem unwilling to be critical. (Much like they were with the 'Pre-Sequel', which is now justifiably considered the weakest entry in the franchise.) One thing that no-one can deny, however, is that, like I said, this game is rough as all-get-out.
The Gearbox forums are flooded with people complaining about lost frames on high-end PC's and those on consoles are reporting that performance mode (A mode that is advertised as offering a silky smooth 60 fps in exchange for weaker fidelity) is the only way to play the game, even though it only offers a, mostly stable, 30 frames experience. Those brave enough to venture into the core game without such a mode can expect sub 20 frames and worse on co-op if someone peeks at their ECHO device during heavy combat. (It's not like Gearbox could have know about that issue guys, I mean, who is foolish enough to look at their menu during combat anyway?)
Dissent doesn't just end there either. As Borderlands 3 is, infamously, an Epic exclusive title, players have found themselves without an offical platform forum within which to vent their grievances. (Wait, Epic haven't even built forums yet? Good god, why do people still defend their abject lethargy?) In light of this, fans have retreated to the one birthplace of a lot of Borderlands' most long lasting and endearing fandoms; the Steam forums for Borderlands 2. (Ooh, that's gotta hurt the old pride bone for Epic.) Take a shimmy over there and you can see pages worth of people trying to troubleshoot this mess-of-a-launch as a community, the same community that Gearbox tried to split up by moving to Epic in the first place. (Okay, I'll stop.)
A large point of contention with longtime fans, and just about anyone who takes pride in the development of digital content in general, is the fact that Borderlands 3's DirectX 12 support is still in Beta at release. Now, I understand that Gearbox and Microsoft might not have the best working relationship in the world, but I have no idea why that would have any effect on Gearbox's ability to work with one of the most popular API's in the gaming world. (As I have seen some suggest.) Perhaps a rough Beta mode for DirectX 12 Support was acceptable back in 2015, (When the API first launched, and likely when Borderlands 3's development began.) but in present year it is a little bit laughable for a multimillion dollar AAA company to be struggling with an industry standard. (Some users have reported being unable to get past initial loading screens after selecting DirectX 12 in their settings menu.)
But do the bugs end at performance? Heck no, they don't. But it is hard to get a direct idea of how widespread the are because of Gearbox's anti-consumer approach when it came to reviews. Gearbox, apparently aware of how unpolished their product would be, decided to be incredibly selective with who they granted a review copy of the game to and why. Firstly, they only allowed for US outlets to get their hands on a copy, citing 'security concerns'; and Secondly, they ensured that the review keys that were handed out were compromised to prevent accurate reviewing. By that I mean, instead of just handing out early steam keys (Like a responsible developer) Gearbox opted to hand out special Epic store accounts with Borderlands 3 pre-loaded onto them. However, these versions of Borderlands 3 were unfinished 'earlier versions' of the final game. (A time-honored excuse for software developers when their final product is trash.) As such, reviewers encountered all the bugs that the main audience have encountered with many much worse bugs thrown in. (Shout out to that one staffer who lost 6 hours of their progress and had to start from scratch!)
UPDATE: Turns out that players are losing progress too because of the poor cloud saving feature. That's a bad look Gearbox!
So, with all this evidence to hand, I ask you: is any of this an acceptable way to launch your game? If your name happens to be Randy Pitchford, your answer would probably be "Sure, I dunno." During all of this nonsense, Randy decided to that his best course of action would be to boast about how many people he managed to dupe into buying a pre-Beta. "Fun Fact: On PC, the data is that the launch day peak concurrent players of Borderlands 3 is about *twice-as-high* as the all time peak concurrent players of Borderlands 2. WOW! You guys are great!" he posted on twitter to mild condemnation but his general tone is very telling as to Gearbox's attitude. They don't seem to care about providing a stable and/or fun experience, just one that pushes a lot of copies and, Borderlands 3 pushed a lot of copies.
In conclusion, what can ultimately be done? Well, nothing from the consumer side. All of the glaring problems with the experience are either down to poor QA or poor UI design. The latter can be solved with a google search (hopefully) and the former is out of your hands unless you happen to own a copy of Borderlands 3's developer kit. Just like with 'Fallout: 76' the fans are the one's left in the dust when the games are rushed to market like this, and they have to wait for the developers to deem fixes worthy enough for their time. Hopefully unlike 'Fallout: 76', Borderlands 3 will only continue to get better from here on out and not irredeemably worse.
No comments:
Post a Comment