[0:00]early uh, some genius strats here. Oh my God, I beat the boss. I'm so good at Borderlands, guys. You don't even know how good I am at these games. Anti DSP. Wow, none of those looks legendary to me. Did I just waste my time? Did the game just crash? Oh, there's no fu Hey, oh my God. Listen, I'm just going to be honest with you right up front. I have never liked Borderlands. I remember when Borderlands two came out back when I was in high school and I played it with a few of my buddies and we all got bored less than 10 hours in. And that is considered to be the pinnacle of this series, the game that got everything right. And yet me, my brother and two of my friends, all got bored at various points. Because at the end of the day, this series is just pure unadulterated slop and always has been. All you do in this series is shoot the same handful of enemies with the same handful of guns to pick up incrementally better versions of the guns you already have. And you do this for dozens of hours, hundreds if you're the type who does new game plus, true Vault Hunter mode, et cetera, et cetera. And the whole series selling point that there's 10 gorillion guns is a lie. In reality, there's maybe 20 guns and there's a handful of modifiers on those guns so that they can lie to you and say that there's a Kajillion guns. When one Jacobs assault rifle is exactly the same as another Jacob's assault rifle. Oh, this one is four more rounds in the magazine. This one has 2% more accuracy. I do not like loot games in general, because they are the ultimate representation of the skinner box, of dripping dopamine into your brain ever so slowly and thinly. I mean, let's be honest, that's just not enough for somebody like me, whose dopamine receptors are completely fried by over stimulation. It was like pulling teeth trying to play this game without playing a video on my second monitor. And honestly, if I did, the frame rate would have been even more unstable and shitty than it was, so it was probably for the best that I didn't. Oh, and we can't talk about Borderlands without talking about the humor. This has to be the most insufferable writing that has ever been featured in any video game series. I know people tell themselves that it used to be kind of funny, like Borderlands two at least. Handsome Jack was a somewhat amusing character. I can't say I ever laughed out loud at any of his jokes. It's still very juvenile, but I don't know, some of the stuff he said was kind of edgy and as you know, I love edgy humor. But Borderlands three and four, holy shit, man. The series has been completely and utterly sanitized. This isn't just millennial humor. This is like purposefully painful humor. I think the actual intent of the writing is to piss you off. There's a quest in this game where one player has to play Simon says while the other three watch him do it. This is real. We're playing Simon says in a rated M game. You can make any number of excuses for this kind of infantile gameplay in Donkey Kong Bananza, that's fine. This game is for adults and they're forcing us to play Simon says. If Borderlands three was known for being like the most left wing one with obnoxious girl bosses and a DLC focusing entirely on a gay wedding. Borderlands four is just the safest, most corporate friendly, left leaning crap that is annoying at worst to somebody like me, but mostly just boring. Now listen, we all have bad taste in video games to some degree, you know. Dragon Ball the Breakers is one of my favorite games and it is one of the worst multiplayer games ever made. So I'm not just going to stand here and shit all over everyone who likes this series. Well, maybe I will a little bit because let's be honest, Borderlands kinda deserves it. Yes, this is a long intro because, uh, let's be honest, this is just going to be a glorified shit post. Do you want to hear some complain keynote as some of my fans have come to calling it? Yeah, that's what this video is going to be. Because I don't give a fuck about fairly analyzing Borderlands. It doesn't deserve it. We all know this series is garbage. It's okay if it's your gaming guilty pleasure. But let's not pretend on any level that these games are good. They are not. They are a time waster. A time waster that you can have marginally more fun with friends, though. I would honestly even debate that point. I feel like any game ever made is more fun if you add a co-op feature. I would pick Resident Evil 5 any day over this. Hell, I had more fun playing Dead Space 3 with a friend than any single Borderlands game. That is not a joke. I am not exaggerating. And you have to understand, we now live in the era of friend slop. There's actually no need for a game like Borderlands anymore when it feels like every handful of weeks, there's a new flavor of the month game that comes out that is expressly made for you to just fuck around with your buddies and have fun. Now, before I get into any of the specific problems of Borderlands 4, I do want to address a couple things. First of all, is a little bit of an update on the whole YouTube view situation. So, Josh Strife Hayes figured out that the reason that YouTube views are so low across the site is because specifically desktop PC views have cratered. Now, feel free to call me a conspiracy theorist, but I don't think suddenly on August 10th, everyone's desktop PC exploded or people just decide to stop watching YouTube. The most popular theory right now as to why this is the case is YouTube just quietly decided to stop counting viewers that have any form of ad blocker on as views. Now, if you're a corpo shill, which I doubt is anybody watching this video for being real, you could say that YouTubers don't deserve the ad revenue from a video view where the user didn't view an ad.
[6:09]Okay, sure, let's just say that's fair. Why the hell would they not count it as a view entirely? Especially because it's obvious that the algorithm has not been adjusted to reflect this change. So now we have at least a month, if not a full year's worth of videos, which I'm not going to get into that, but for some reason, this is also connected to the restricted mode thing. People are not getting recommended like any videos being made in the past year with maybe some exceptions. Just check out your recommended sidebar on your computer and look, how many of those videos are from a year ago, two years ago, three years ago? And how many of you are getting recommended videos you've already seen, yet it doesn't show the red bar at the bottom, signifying that you've watched it. It's obvious that whatever Indians and you know, praise Vishnu, praise India and all that. Clearly they're the future of America, et cetera, et cetera. It's clear that whatever brave brown individuals working at YouTube broke something and they have no idea how the algorithm works. So, they didn't adjust anything else to reflect this new, more realistic view count. So now nobody's videos are getting shared in the algorithm anymore. Obviously, I'm not going to ask people to turn off ad block. I think that's absurd. Nobody wants to watch these dog shit ads on YouTube. I'll leave it completely up to you if you'd like to white list my channel specifically for ad block, but even if, you know, a thousand of you do that, that's not nearly enough to make a difference. Ultimately, this is on YouTube to fix the problem. Okay, this is the last time I will harass you about low view counts until there is a major update like YouTube reverse this stuff. It's clear that hyping videos that do absolutely nothing because my Metal Gear Solid 3 Delta remake was actually in YouTube's top 100 most hyped videos and yet it barely got any views from that, maybe 5 to 10,000 at the most. So thank you for introducing yet another useless feature, YouTube. All right, back to the Borderlands four review, if we can even call it that. I don't think Borderlands has anything inherent to it that makes it more fun with friends. It's just a game that you can play with friends. In fact, I only played Borderlands 4 with my friends for about 8 hours. And I ended up playing the rest of the game by myself about 20 more hours. I was having more fun playing by myself and I'll tell you why. It's because the more people you play with, the more badass enemies spawn and enemy health is scaled anyway with each player. So everything feels like a goddamn bullet sponge in this game. How the fuck do brain dead normy NPC motherfuckers find it fun to shoot a guy in the face 500 times before he dies? Genuinely, how is that compelling on any level? And the thing is, I'm sure there's some people like, oh, you guys just sucked or again, you just didn't even try to have fun. You didn't min max your build or whatever, even though those were the early levels, so you can't even really min max. Well, when I played the rest of the game by myself, I did min max for shotgun damage and there were multiple points in the game where I could one or two tap any non mini boss enemy type in the game by clicking on their head. And the game still wasn't fun. I'll tell you why, because it's completely brain dead. All I was doing was casually strolling around and just click, click, click, click, over and over again. This is just absolute brain rot. And the thing is, the shooting doesn't even feel that good and a big part of that is because of the horrific performance. This game relies so heavily on frame generation to get a workable frame rate even at 1440p, we're not even talking 4K. Most of my play time was done on medium low settings with DLSS on and still the fucking frame rate is all over the goddamn place. Oh, this is on a 3080, by the way. And it certainly wasn't being bottlenecked by my Ryzen 9 5900X CPU. Medium low on a game that looks like it came out over a decade ago. This is a cell shaded like comic booky cartoon art style. Why the hell does it have such insanely high system requirements? There's an insane amount of input lag and a lot of the guns in this game have slow projectile speeds to match. So it's hard to even fucking hit something directly in front of you because there's such a delay from the moment you click on the mouse and the bullet actually hits the target. I mean, I'm missing point blank shotgun shots to the face and I know there's going to be people who say skill issue, skill issue, whatever, but it's not like I was losing. I didn't even give a fuck that I missed half the time because this game's not fun. Now, of course, Randy Pitchford, or as I like to call him, Randy Pitchburg for no particular reason, was having a bitch fit on Twitter because people are constantly pointing out how horribly his game runs and he's making all sorts of excuses. And hey, cool it with the transphobic remarks, bro. Well, sorry, Randy, your movie bombed, your game sucks. I'm not even convinced that you're human, so sit down and shut up as synthetic God dismantles your newest baby. I I'm totally sure he's going to watch this video, guys. Definitely. This game has absolutely no substance at all and that is not new for this series. It is always been this way. This has nothing to do with political propaganda and everything to do with actual gameplay loop being fundamentally unsatisfying. And I know it's subjective. I know there's some fucking retards who are going to think this is the best shit ever to play with your buddies and you've always had fun and you sink in hundreds of hours trying to get the perfect God roll on whatever gun that drops. And look, I'm no stranger to this series, even though I don't like loot games. I put over 500 hours in Destiny 2 when the Forsaken expansion came out, but Destiny actually has good shooting mechanics. Borderlands does not. It has never felt good. It doesn't matter if there's technically over 50 enemy types when they all functionally do the same shit, which is basically nothing. Just stand around and let them shoot you in the head. Even the ones that rush at you and are harder to shoot, who cares? You just back up an air dash or hover over their heads. Or hell, you could just take the hit. It doesn't even matter if you go down in like three or four hits, as long as you can kill minor enemy, you just come right back up anyway. There's no consequences for bad gameplay. And you could say, oh, just play it on hard mode. But how would that make this game any more fun? If anything, it'd make it worse because then, if it ever becomes truly challenging, I just jump up onto a rooftop, crouch and just peek out and click, click, click, click, click. It's the same fucking gameplay. There's no level design, there's no encounter design, the enemy variety is virtually meaningless, except maybe flying enemies could hit me with my camping rooftop strategy. You're just doing the same thing over and over and over and over again. Every encounter feels exactly the same. This is like the video game equivalent of an MMO in the worst way possible. In the sense that I'm just spamming all my abilities as soon as the cool downs are up, right? There's no reason not to use your grenade or your heavy ordinance every time it comes off cool down, because the cool downs are so short anyway. The same goes for each character's special ability. I can't speak for all of them, but Vex's incarnate is just a flat buff to my character, so I should use it every available opportunity, especially when the cool down's only one minute. And I spec it out to last a really long time. This is brain dead. Utterly, utterly brain dead gameplay, which would be fine if it was like addictive and really tight and satisfying, but I just don't think it is. There's no reason to play Borderlands over something like Destiny or hell, even like Deep Rock Galactic. I'd maybe even stretch to say Earth Defense Force is more satisfying, except that this is a new release. And you know, the normy casuals who have to buy every fucking game as soon as they come out or they'll have FOMO. They got to get this shit, support Randy Pitchford Stein's fucking addiction to CP, allegedly, of course. No, actually they were all adults and it was for artistic purposes. No, this series sucks, man. If he really wanted like a normal analytical review from me, originally, I did record about 15 to 20 minutes really dissecting why Borderlands is unsatisfying from a video game perspective. But I realize, I'm basically just preaching to the choir and there's no reason this video needs to be 45 minutes long or even longer than that. Because ultimately, I think anyone who has any amount of taste already agrees with me that Borderlands sucks and kind of always has. I mean, sure, we could spend a lot of time dissecting why the combat arenas are virtually all the same and all that matters is the placement of explosives or how loot drops are fundamentally unsatisfying because epics in this game drop so commonly that there's no reason to ever take a look at a green, a blue, especially not a white. And legendaries are so insanely rare. It was driving me insane. Over the course of the first 15 hours of gameplay, I only got one legendary to drop. And it wasn't even a gun. It was a grenade. And over the course of 28 hours, I only got to touch eight legendaries. Four out of those eight were from golden keys. Oh, and for the little slimy turd on top of the shit cake, two of those eight legendaries was the same goddamn shotgun, one of which was a quest reward. So you're hearing that right, only three legendaries dropped from chests or enemies in 28 hours. And it gets even worse the more I think about it. This game has these huge boss fights and they're pretty good, actually. The Calos boss fight took me three tries because she actually killed me a couple times when she didn't have any minion spawned. So I actually had to pay attention and not just turn my brain off and mindlessly shoot her and spam grenades and all that stuff. So I liked that first fight, but you spend about five minutes shooting this massive bullet sponge that has these Dark Souls ass attacks. And then it drops worse loot than a randomly generated world boss in the sandbox. I'm not joking, consistently, I got more epics from randomly generated sandbox activities than the main story bosses in this game. I feel like I could complain about this game all day, truly. So instead, I'm going to try and condense my complaints into a series of bullet points really quickly for you. One, as I already stated, the shooting isn't fun. The enemies are either extreme bullet sponges or die in one or two shots if you're min maxed. Two, the enemy variety may seem pretty wide at first, but in reality, there's only about four or five total enemy functions amongst those 50 types. And you basically deal with them all the same. You figure out where the weak spot is, then you just click on it until it dies. Three, the level design and encounter design is meaningless because every arena is functionally the same. Just a big empty circle with some explosive barrels, some of which you can pick up and throw at enemies, but it does barely any damage. Four, the movement mechanics are pretty solid, but they're completely unnecessary. You don't have to slide, you don't have to double jump and hover, you don't have to use the lasso to get across the arena, even though you can cancel out of it with a double jump and save a shit ton of momentum, which is actually really fun. But functionally is never required or even incentivized over the course of the game. Five, despite the series' reputation of having 10 billion guns, functionally, there's maybe 30 tops. I have to give Borderlands four a little bit more credit in this department though, compared to previous entries in the series. As clearly, there has been an effort to further distinguish the guns from one another instead of just stats. Like there's a lot of underbarrel attachments and other alternate functions on guns now. And to even further distinguish the guns from one another, they now can have licensed parts from other manufacturers, so a Jacobs gun could have a part from Vlad off or Hyperion, et cetera, et cetera. So all of that is good, but it still does not solve the problem that 95% of guns are still the basic ass assault rifle, SMG, pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle, that you see in every single shooter ever made. There is very little effort into making truly unique guns. Even the legendaries that I got a chance to try didn't seem very unique. And I'm not going to sit here and give you a shit ton of examples of video games that have actually creative guns. But the most obvious examples would be Half-Life one and two, or if we're talking about games I grew up with, of course, Ratchet and Clank, even though technically none of those games are FPSs, they're action platformers. And obviously that genre has a lot more freedom to have creative weaponry given that you literally dodge bullets in those games. So your own projectiles can be much slower and have a very wide variety of functions. But still, I think they could do better than this. Even the energy weapons, a lot of what they do just isn't that interesting, like shooting a bunch of little globules that explode or a huge orb that flies slow. I don't know, it just doesn't feel good. Though, most of the shooting in this game doesn't feel good. Six, the character abilities just feel like wind buttons, but not as visually or gameplay wise, even as satisfying as ultimate in a hero shooter. Yes, you can use them much more frequently than ultimate in any of these other games, but the actual effect is not nearly as impressive. Now, obviously, there's a wide variety of abilities and I spent 99% of my play time just using Incarnate on Vex. So maybe one of the 12 abilities is really cool, but from what I've seen, at least from what my buddies played as well, none of them were really that satisfying. I don't know, at best, it does change your place to off a little bit. Like Rafa has one where you can slice people up with blades, but this is a shooter, you want to be shooting people, I would think. And my ability was just kind of a somewhat significant buff to my overall gameplay. Like I'm not going to downplay it and say it didn't make much of a difference because it auto reloaded my guns, it did a lot of damage. And it did various other little minor things that help my overall gameplay, but I still played the game the exact same way while my ultimate was active versus when it wasn't. So I can't really say it made the game that much more fun. Seven, this game has level scaling. Now, I know some people are going to argue this is a good thing for a looter shooter because let's say I'm level 25, I go to a zone where the enemies only level 15. I kill them super easily and the loot drops are only level 15, so I'm wasting my time. Okay, I think that's fine to a degree, right? Because then after you beat the game and you want to go back and do all the side quest, at least you have a real reason to do those side quests because it'll always drop loot at your level. I think that part of it is fine. However, what I do have a problem with is that not only is there level scaling, but there's also a minimum level of the enemies as well. So I tried to bum rush my way through the story past the 15-hour mark, right? Because I was pretty sick of this game, I wanted to finish it. Lo and behold, the final zone of the game, the enemy spawn at level 35 at minimum. I was only level 29 when I got here. So I actually had to leave and level grind, which took a long fucking time because despite enemies being a higher level than you, they actually don't really give you a noticeable higher amount of experience points. So this is just straight up padding. I can't even go around and do quests that I'm overleveled for and get a bunch of EXP reward from said quest because everything scales to my level. So no matter what I did, it was going to take me the same amount of fucking time to get to roughly level 32 when I decided I was good enough to finish the game. And the thing is, you could just say, oh, get good. Kill these enemies who are five levels higher than you or more. Uh, that's virtually impossible. If the enemies have a skull next to their level, that means you're going to get fucked. So this complaint is less about level scaling and more about the forced padding in this game that I was required to go out of my way and spend about 3 hours grinding just to finish the game. Now, despite my obvious distaste for this game, I decided to do my due diligence and actually play some of the post game. And a few of my problems were slightly alleviated.
[22:45]Namely, the loot problem is probably the biggest fix as the new ultimate Vault Hunter mode replaces new game plus. It seems like Gearbox tried to lazily copy off of Destiny here. Where instead of running strikes or raids, you redo story missions with multiple modifiers on them. And you fight super hard versions of the various bosses spread throughout the game. The thing is new game plus is obviously superior to this because it's only one story mission and one boss a week because they try to turn this slop into live service. And as for the ultimate Vault Hunter mode thing, essentially, you have to earn ultimate Vault Hunter levels and each level makes all of the enemies spread across the world more difficult. The problem is, for no conceivable reason, it also ups the level of everything in the world on top of that. So even though there's already level scaling with just one level of what I'll just say UVH, so I don't have to keep saying it over and over again, the enemies went from being two to three levels higher than me at most, and now being seven levels higher than me, which made them virtually unkillable. So even though more legendaries dropped over the course of four hours than the entire roughly 28 hours of the main campaign, the game was much more painful to play with the ultimate Vault Hunter mode activated because I wasn't about to grind to level 50 and minmax my build just so that I can get a few more shiny guns to drop out of enemies. It just wasn't worth the time. I mean, this end game is so lazy, it's unreal. Can you imagine if in strikes in Destiny, instead of being special missions designed just for that game mode, they were story missions that you had to do again while listening to every single fucking cut scene. Most of which are unskippable Half-Life two style cut scenes. I just have to stare at characters talk for like five straight minutes. This is the worst padding imaginable. There was no thought put into this whatsoever. For all of you co-op slop game enjoyers, are you seriously entertained by watching other characters talk while you and your buddies just have to jump around and spin in circles or shoot the shit out of whatever boring ass stories you have to share with each other about your daily wage slave lives. It doesn't help that the mission they chose for the very first week of the game released, Shadow of the Mountain, half of that fucking mission is talking. I'm not joking. You only get one story mission a week with a legendary weapon drop at the end, and then you got to wait for next week. This is garbage. Period. Absolute fucking garbage. There's no excuse. But yeah, that's it for gameplay. Let's talk a little bit about the the woke stuff. Is it woke? And yes, obviously, it's fucking Borderlands. Of course it is, but I guess maybe the longer question would be, is it less woke than the previous game? And believe it or not, the answer is yes, even though I never finished Borderlands three, I'm well aware of a lot of the content that's in the game. And a couple people in my audience have given me info on the previous one that is extremely cringy, like a gun that encourages you to get vaxed and a DLC that is purely dedicated to a gay wedding. Yeah, there's nothing that severe in this game from what I've seen. No, this is the more sterilized subtle type of wokeness. Think Starfield, right? And seriously, look at the generic NPCs, man. What race are these people supposed to be? It looks like everyone is part African on this planet. Another good example, just take a look at the Vault Hunters themselves. Even the one white guy amongst them, Amon, who's clearly supposed to be inspired by Vikings, has a huge flat nose that is not finotypically Nordic by any stretch of the imagination. Oh, and he's gay, too. Yes, the most physically masculine character in the game is a homosexual. Is that surprising to anybody? So clearly they just wanted to make a gay Kratos, who's an albino black man. I even heard rumors that originally he was black and they realized they didn't have any white characters in the game, so they just bleached him. Even the Goth girl is Asian.
[27:00]The dude wearing armor is a Hispanic, I think. And of course, we have the black female genius engineer. I swear to God, this shit is just spitting in your fucking face. The amount of times that I've seen recent media have a a genius black woman character. I mean, we've got Ironheart, the replacement for Iron Man. We got that one bitch from the Boys, who's like the smartest person on the planet. This shit is fucking parody tier, absolutely. Except it's the type of parody you can't point out or everyone will call you racist. So it's an Emperor's New Clothes situation for all the normy cowards. I'm no coward, so I'll clearly point out how retarded this is. I'm not going to put IQ statistics on the screen because I don't think you need to see them. You already know. So, yes, we have another of that character archetype. But I'd say generally, the wokeness is a step down from the previous one because it's less in your face. There's a lot less propaganda, right? This game has that aura of corporate sterilization. Where once upon a time, earlier in development before this huge push back against wokeness. This is probably 10 times more offensive and in your face because Randy Pitchford knows you're going to buy this shit anyway. And judging by the steam player counts, uh, he was right to some degree. But we're currently in a pendulum shift of sorts, not a major one by any stretch. Anybody saying wokeness is dead is completely and utterly delusional. But this is the type of stuff that the normy is now conditioned to accept. Yes, your alien planets will be incredibly diverse. Everyone will be ugly as shit and you're not allowed to point it out because it's just fantasy or sci-fi, it can be anything. It has to be the exact racial demographics of New York City or San Francisco or Los Angeles, or whatever. Yes, everyone must be a fucking city bug man and talk like a fucking champagne socialist, millennial soyboy redditor. That's not weird at all. I think it's completely pointless to give you a huge compilation of dialogue from this game because one, when I was playing with my buddies, we just talked over it all anyway. And two, you've played a Borderlands game. You already know how cringe the dialogue is. There is not a single goddamn funny joke in this game. Here, I'll give you one painful long example that just kind of exemplifies every joke in this game. Yeah, yeah, yeah, what is it? Another prisoner shipment. Lemme in. The password is. Honk shoo, mimimimi! Bingo. Come on in. You never can be too careful with Vault Hunters running around. These passwords have gotten weird, too. They used to be simple. Hail the Ripper Queen. Easy. But then Drillerhole started sleeping in an old timey night cap and demanding cutey catchphrases, some of which were super copyrighted. And the stuff we're doing in here. It ain't cutesy. This ain't no honk shoo evil facility, anyway! You ask me, an adorable password is a morale killer. How you supposed to rip a guy when you're thinking of someone in button-up pajamas blowin' cartoon bubbles in their sleep? It doesn't make sense! I had some great password ideas that Drillerhole shut down. Oh, shit! You're a Vault Hunter! Damn my chatty nature!
