Borderlands 3 DLC

Borderlands 3 had four DLC campaigns, plus the director’s cut and developer’s cut that had some extra side quests or something? Those last two sounded lame and they’re sold separately so I didn’t bother.

When I was discussing the DLC for Borderlands, Borderlands 2, and the Pre-Sequel, I noted that Borderlands 1 and 2’s DLCs (the Pre-Sequel barely had any) followed the same arc of quality: They started with DLC so heavy on jokes that it was clearly unimportant to the ongoing story to the point of being questionably canon, then slowly grew into being real stories which advanced the character arcs of major characters from the games. This reached its apogee in the last Borderlands 2 DLC, Commander Lilith, which was released five years after the others as a lead-in to Borderlands 3, and which seemed really focused on catching up people who played the shooters but not the adventure games on all the really critical plot developments of the adventure games – chiefly, that Scooter had died and Ellie was replacing him as the vehicle vendor.

Borderlands 3 did not follow this trajectory. The first and second DLC are important beats in the stories of Moxxi, Sir Hammerlock, and Wainwright Jakobs, while the third DLC then goes even further beyond to tell an almost Poe-faced western story. The side quests in the Bounty of Blood DLC are mostly written with the same tone as the rest of the game, but the main story is pretty much completely straight. That might work out if it was about a bunch of characters we’d already been introduced to having a dramatic beat, but it’s all new characters who don’t interact with the side quests at all, which means none of them get any jokes, which means they’re following the beats of a fairly rote and straightforward western story and I don’t care about any of them. Kind of feels like someone had an idea for an entirely different video game but all they could convince Gearbox to fund was a Borderlands 3 DLC.

Also, this is a much smaller issue but it bugged me, the whole story takes place on the planet of Gehenna, which is basically exactly the same as Pandora: A lawless fringe world dominated by deserts but with some other terrain mixed in. The inhabitants have a dash of Japanese culture mixed in with their US western, mostly in the architecture, and the backstory heavily features the Jakobs Corporation rather than Dahl, Atlas, or Hyperion, the three which heavily invested in Pandora, but it wouldn’t have changed anything to replace Jakobs’ involvement with Atlas or Hyperion, nor would it have changed much to have this section of the planet have been a Jakobs outpost back in the day. Hyperion and Atlas both made an effort to be the exclusive power on Pandora, but neither of them were ultimately successful and since Dahl’s reign was before the first game, it’s not clear they even tried. Also, Atlas’ reign over Pandora seems to have been mostly nominal, with nearly the entire population refusing to recognize their authority and Atlas presence being confined to their own forward attack bases rather than controlling any pre-existing population centers. Bottom line, you wouldn’t even have to use a different corporation instead of Jakobs for the backstory if you set Bounty of Blood on Pandora, there’s plenty of times and places where Jakobs might’ve run a research facility without the current dominant power noticing or caring.

Then in the Krieg DLC they snap back from this to the same tone as the first two DLCs and the base game, and also they basically do the Pre-Sequel’s Claptrap DLC again but better. The Claptrap DLC was okay, marred mainly by its terrible final boss, and the Krieg DLC does a good job improving on it, although its final boss is more “at least it’s not Shadow Trap” as opposed to actually being good. Overall, though, it’s a perfectly good excuse to shoot some more guys, and also a pretty good way to explore the character of Krieg. Borderlands has a weird thing where the player characters are a few combat barks away from being complete ciphers in the game where they’re playable but get to have real character arcs and fully fleshed out personalities once some sequels roll around, so the Krieg DLC of Borderlands 3 is when Krieg, playable in Borderlands 2, gets to explore any of the concepts brought up in his announcement trailer.

It’s kind of clumsily handled, but I don’t know how you could do it better given the gameplay premise of Borderlands. Krieg gets reduced to being a side character in his own story, but Borderlands has never had major speaking roles for playable characters (they didn’t have any dialogue besides combat barks in Borderlands 1 or 2) nor would it be a good idea to require playing as Krieg for the Krieg DLC (which would also require porting him into Borderlands 3, but that wouldn’t be a terrible idea). Krieg’s whole premise in his (very well-received) announcement trailer is that somewhere inside of him is a conscious mind desperately trying to scrap back together some semblance of a normal life and human connection, but every time he opens his mouth to speak, vaguely related gibberish laden with metaphors of carnage and rot comes out instead, and he has difficulty holding himself back from acts of random violence. In the DLC, this gets translated into “sane Krieg,” the internal monologue from the trailer, and “psycho Krieg,” the gibbering external dialogue.

The announcement trailer had sane Krieg talking to psycho Krieg, trying to tell him to say and do things, and psycho Krieg would only sometimes and only barely cooperate, but psycho Krieg never talked back. So the implication is that sane Krieg is the conscious mind trying desperately to ram commands through instincts so overpowering that the conscious mind exerts only limited control over his own body. But in order to make that work in a DLC, they had to make sane Krieg and psycho Krieg separate characters who can talk to each other where the playable characters can hear it (brainscanning technology is involved, so these two still share a body), at which point the fight to be understood is immediately over. Still a fun DLC to play through (until the last boss, which was dull but easy, so at least I got through it in one go), but the only way to make this DLC work was to play it from Krieg’s perspective, and Borderlands’ mechanics just don’t support a specific character being the only playable character – even if Krieg were playable in Borderlands 3, I’m playing as Moze for a reason and I don’t want to trade my giant mech suit for whatever Krieg does.

Also it bugs me that the experiment that ruined Krieg’s psyche was committed by Hyperion using their robot army. The robot army was Handsome Jack’s thing, we see it get created in the Pre-Sequel, which is after Borderlands 1, which already has psychos! The Borderlands bandits are explicitly a consequence of Dahl importing a bunch of violent criminals for use as prison labor and then turning them loose when they abandoned the planet, so why wouldn’t this unethical experiment to create a common bandit enemy type have been their doing? This is a nitpick, they already had assets for Hyperion units but not for Dahl ones (the Dahl guys in the Pre-Sequel are in the old engine) and that is probably the reason why they used Hyperion, plus, Krieg is playable in Borderlands 2 which features Hyperion as a major antagonist, so giving Krieg a grievance with the Hyperion corporation adds to replays of the game he’s featured in, whereas Dahl has never really been an antagonist (the closest are the Lost Legion in the Pre-Sequel, who are ex-Dahl and who never appear in a game where Krieg is playable). It’s easy to figure out a reason for this, we know almost nothing about Dahl’s reign over Pandora so it’s totally possible that Hyperion had research facilities set up on the planet before they became the dominant power.

Backing up to the Moxxi DLC, this one puts the lie from the Pre-Sequel DLC that you get to play as Handsome Jack in the grave. In Borderlands 2, Handsome Jack had body doubles, and in the Pre-Sequel, you’re on Jack’s side, so one of the DLC characters for TPS was one of Jack’s body doubles. But that’s not how they advertised it. They said you get to play as Jack. I guess they didn’t want to rewrite the game to accommodate Jack’s presence in the party (it’s a plot point that he’s separated from the party early on and would’ve been moderately difficult to rewrite the entry into Concordia around that – but only moderately), but then the entire character is built around being Handsome Jack, with skill trees that revolve around having money and Hyperion connections and stuff. Why would Timothy, the doppelganger, have any greater access to that than any of his other employees, which is the entire party?

The Moxxi DLC for Borderlands 3 makes Timothy his own character, hiding out in Handsome Jack’s space Las Vegas resort, which was abandoned after his death leaving all of the tourists and employees stranded. Moxxi wants it for herself, so you go in to get access to Handsome Jack’s master control panel on her behalf, and along the way meet Timothy, the last Jack body double, who everyone wants to kill because everyone hates Jack and he looks like Jack and hey, that’s good enough. It’s not a terrible DLC, I like the aesthetic of the decadent resort struck by the post-apocalypse, and Timothy is pretty good as his own character. It’s not this DLC’s fault that the Doppelganger DLC for TPS was a lie.

Guns, Love, and Tentacles might be the best Borderlands I’ve ever played. Worth noting here that I haven’t played the Tales adventure games, which I’ve heard do much more interesting things with the setting and characters compared to the main games, so if I’d played those it might plausibly wreck the curve for how good Tentacles is, since most of what punches Tentacles up is that it’s a good story. It’s definitely not a particularly epic story. Sir Hammerlock and Wainwright Jakobs are getting married, because Borderlands decided that 2019 was the best year to pivot their series about fighting evil space corporations to a neoliberal story of defeating an evil corporate nepobaby who runs a weapons manufacturing company to instead install the good corporate nepobaby in charge of the weapons manufacturing company. It feels kind of weird to criticize Borderlands for being out of step with the popular zeitgeist anyway, since their usual problem is being performatively zealous in their support of it, but “arms manufacturers are good actually” doesn’t seem like an intentional statement so much as something they blundered into because they needed some way to knock the Jakobs corporation out of the fight against the Calypso twins and “install good guy nepobaby” is an uncomplicated way to do that.

Anyway, the power struggle for the Jakobs corporation is all in the base game, by the time we get to the Tentacles DLC the only way you can tell Wainwright is a corporate nepobaby is that his last name is Jakobs and that is the name of one of the arms manufacturers on the guns you’re looting. So instead this is the story of how Anarky Gaige, one of the DLC characters from Borderlands 2, is now a heavily armed wedding planner who needs your help with some heavily armed wedding arrangements, and then things get even more complicated because the venue is full of Lovecraftian-looking horrors including a cult that tries to possess one of the grooms.

Emphasis is firmly on Lovecraftian-looking, as the aesthetic is well-represented and all the highlights of Lovecraft’s fiction are referenced in various enemies and side quests, but the themes aren’t really Lovecraftian. It’s not that Lovecraft’s themes of madness in the face of human insignificance or racial purity being an impossible dream in a world of inescapable corruption are rejected, they just aren’t raised at all. The Lovecraft references go beyond Innsmouth and Rl’yeh to include B-tier locations like the Mountain of Madness, but there’s not really any engagement with the deeper themes even when things start getting less comedic and more intense in the climax. This was definitely a good idea (Borderlands doesn’t have the right tone for these themes at all, whether it’s reaffirming or rejecting them), but I can’t tell if it was done because it’s a good idea or because the writers missed the themes of Lovecraft’s work entirely. Wouldn’t be the first time, but also, the themes of Lovecraft are the subject of Discourse so it feels weird that Gearbox wouldn’t have heard about that.

Either way, the quality of the Borderlands 3 DLCs is kind of all over the place, but mostly good. They’re only sold in bundled sets now (and there’s a season two bundle that I’m not getting because it looks bad, so I won’t be commenting on that), which means if you want Tentacles and the Handsome Jackpot you are stuck with Bounty of Blood and Krieg. The latter two aren’t abominable, so if you really want to shoot more doods after doing the rest, they’ll do, but in terms of “is the season 1 pack worth it,” I can only recommend the first two DLC as a thing you should buy with money, at which point you may as well play the others if you aren’t tired of Borderlands by the time you get there.