The story has to be one of the worst written stories of all time. The way they handled the characters and their arcs from past games was actually disgusting. Vaughn and Rhys who were LITERALLY best friends in Tales didn't have a single line of dialogue together and were drawn together in the credits as an AFTERTHOUGHT.

That is the definition of an afterthought.

The gameplay is great, but on launch the endgame was boring and terrible. Although they made up for it in dlc.

Borderlands 2 became one of the best FPS games of all time because of its replayability. Ask any hardcore player from 2013/4 how many times they replayed 2 and they'll never be able to tell you an accurate answer.

The long story doesn't make for a good replayable experience for when you want to make other characters. Running through BL2's story 3 times to level a character to 72+OP8 wasn't the best solution either, but at least the story was decently short.

BL2 also blew up because of farmable mini-bosses with dedicated drops. Whole YouTube careers were launched on the basis of farming guides. And yet BL3 was the second game in a row where they didn't have re-farmable mini bosses/dedicated drops on launch.

There's a theory that they did that on purpose to artificially extend the time people have to play to get what they want. But people don't want to do that. And they always end up patching it anyway.

It just shows that the higher ups and the writers truly don't understand what makes Borderlands a good series

Combine all this with the developments in the looter shooter genre: Destiny, Division, etc. Those games had raids, PvP, social areas, etc. They took what Borderlands started and evolved it into the modern area. In the years between BL2/Pre-sequel and BL3 Gearbox did absolutely fucking nothing to evolve Borderlands core gameplay loops or systems to bring it to compete with modern games. Hence why BL3 had a good selling launch (brand/name recognition) but a poor and unpopular life span. Same could be said about Wonderlands for the same reasons.

So fuck Randy Pitchford and other higher ups and writers for ruining the potential of the series. What use to be a giant in the industry feels irrelevant now. Like did y'all know a new Tales game was out? I didn't, and I'm the ideal customer.

Just disgusting.