The first three Borderlands games (including the Pre-Sequel) looked so similar to one another that I’m pretty sure they were made in the same engine. Characters got design updates occasionally and the entire weapon inventory seems to have redesigned between 1 and 2, but anything that didn’t specifically get a redesign looks exactly the same. Borderlands 3, released five years after the Pre-Sequel, is the series’ first major graphical upgrade.
They may as well not have bothered.
Because of the weird min-maxing of my processor and graphics card, I can only play Borderlands 3 on the lowest settings, while the Pre-Sequel and earlier games run no problem. This does bias me against the visual upgrade, but look, Borderlands isn’t a photorealistic series. Not being that is one of the things that set it apart. The graphics don’t necessarily benefit from being better because there’s no real world standard that everyone knows about and can compare it to and which even our strongest graphics engines can’t yet mimic. Borderlands 1 already looked exactly like a Borderlands game, so the only room for improvement is in new character designs, weapon designs, monster designs, and so on, to keep things from getting too stale and repetitive.
Borderlands 3 also has some redesigns, although the problem here is that I mostly don’t like them. For example, here is the Borderlands 2 light runner:
And here’s the Borderlands 3 outrunner:
Borderlands 1 had a vehicle called outrunner but which looks basically identical to the BL2 light runner, so I’m going to refer to the BL1/2 design as the light runner and the BL3 design as the outrunner. There’s nothing about the outrunner design that seems like it would be bad for general audiences, but I personally dislike how it’s now much more lightly armored and has lots of shock absorbers and thin struts exposed. The light runner had a rugged look that helped make Pandora seem like a place where roads and garages were rare and bandit ambushes were common. The outrunner more looks like a dune buggy you’d take for a spin on vacation – an off-road vehicle, for sure, but not one built to keep going in spite of a light sprinkling of small arms fire.
I’ve talked about the three pillars of Star Wars before, and other than the fact that Star Wars hates wheels (everything is either treaded or hovers), the light runner fits right in with the space western scoundrel pillar (I call it “smuggler pillar” in that article because I only later realized that “scoundrel pillar” is a much better name for it), while the outrunner does not. Personally, I really like Star Wars and the biggest appeal of Borderlands for me has always been that it feels a lot like that scoundrel pillar of Star Wars but with guns that make the dakka dakka noises, which is basically the only change I have ever wanted to that aesthetic. Borderlands 3 leaving that behind to do something else is really disappointing to me, although I’m not sure how general audiences would take it.
Also it’s really dumb that in 2019 they’re still so shy about saying the word “fuck” in an M-rated video game full of blood and giblets and dismembered body parts used as scenery doodads, and their heavy use of “slap” as a replacement really draws attention to it.
Chamomile Has A Blog 
Wow. What a whiney article. Even my laptop plays Borderlands 3 with great graphics. Instead of writing whiney articles, go upgrade your computer. The graphics were actually quite outstanding in BL3.
LikeLike
Touch grass.
LikeLike
This is an annoying article to have in my Google feed. Stop whining about a game not looking great when you can’t even play it at good settings. I was playing a game on the GTX 1080 and it looked significantly better than the old games. And telling people to touch grass when you literally wrote an article to complain about a nearly 4-year-old game in 2023 is hilariously ironic. You can literally buy a $600 computer right now that can run the game on max settings at 1440p.
LikeLike
Dude, if seeing someone disagree with your opinion in a Google feed is enough to upset you, you absolutely need to touch grass.
LikeLike
You’re missing the point. I’m sitting in my office chair reading this while working and decided to respond because your criticism makes zero sense. If your computer can’t run that game on high settings, you shouldn’t be playing it especially at this point in time. And I touch grass every day, deflecting criticism by telling people to touch grass is also bad. You put a bad opinion on the internet, you’re going to get pushback. Try playing it on the PS5 or the Series X. Hell I mean I’ll even do a comparison for you. Just throwing wildly inaccurate and uninformed opinions out like this just really bugs me.
LikeLike
“You’re missing the point” is a Hell of a thing to say when you’re responding to a blog post about art design and won’t shut up about graphics hardware.
LikeLike
LMAO the art is more detailed, higher fidelity, the enemy and environment design is significantly better and even the scope is upgraded. You can’t tell because you chose to base your opinion off of the experience with the aforementioned bad hardware. If art design is your niche, and you’re basing your opinion off of bad hardware as you admitted, you should really give up on art. You’re terrible at this. Are you going to tell me you would appraise art at a museum in the dark? Or say that a sculpture lacks detail that you’re looking at from 50 yards away? Same difference. Stop being obtuse to deflect criticism, again.
And posting this on the internet opens you up to criticism. Deal with it, my sweet summer child. You just happened to catch me when I had free time and felt like dunking on someone.
LikeLike
“Deal with it,” he says, sobbing with rage at someone who doesn’t like that the new outrunner is underarmored. “Posting this on the internet opens you up to criticism!” he projects in the middle of a meltdown triggered by someone criticizing him.
LikeLike
Uhuh, you could choose to ignore me but you keep responding. But sure, I’m the upset one.
LikeLike
You stated explicitly – twice – that you were upset that I wrote an article that you didn’t agree with. And trying to measure upsetness by responses to comments is a weird way to go about it – for starters, you are also responding to all of my comments, but also, of course people tend to respond when you speak directly towards them. Plus, at one point we hit the reply limit and I had to respond to myself to keep the replies in order (until you fucked it up anyway, but never mind that). I get notified anytime anyone comments anywhere on my blog, because I am the moderator, but you aren’t. Which means either you’ve set up notifications to email you anytime anyone comments in any reply chain you’re in whether or not they were replying to you directly, or else you are manually checking this blog for new responses…
So that you can keep arguing about an article about art direction that you somehow misunderstood as being about graphics hardware, and now you’re trying to furiously backpedal into pretending that your comments were relevant, even though you clearly have nothing to say about art direction (and a questionable grasp of graphics hardware, for that matter – that’s not what “fidelity” means).
LikeLike