I am a longtime fan of the BL series and hope you and your families are doing well and excited to work on this new game.
What follows is just some thoughts I have had recently on things to avoid in BL3…and on things to add.
Your call of course on whether my ideas have merit, but I’d be disappointed in myself if I at least didn’t try to share.
So I’m throwing my hat in the ring…here goes: (EDITED on 17 March with additional thoughts I had forgotten)
First and foremost is to please keep one thing in mind while you are planning this game…ENDGAME!.. I think one of the big surprises to BL2 was the desire for continued endgame content. Not just additional DLC content, but content that was playable OVER and OVER again without getting too repetitious. I mean the game seems to be still going strong after 4 years! 10K to 20K nightly on Steam alone…triple that total with consoles and Mac. That’s a heck of a lot of desire for ENDGAME!
So with that in mind:
Do NOT make an arena like Finks, or Robot Slaughter which is only played ONCE each playthru. Instead make the Arenas repeatable and at the very least, add a BadAss round which IS replayable similar to the Magic Slaughter.
Do consider an additional Arena type like the Hollodome and the adjustable difficulty Cortex arena in TPS but DO NOT sell it as a stand alone DLC unless the price is VERY reasonable…say $5.00
NEVER make a Raid…or a Boss…or a mini boss non farmable or not replayable…BAD idea…please…just don’t ever do that again like you did in TPS.
Continue to make a large assortment of RAID bosses and all other types of Bosses and design the fights so they are easily returnable to…not huge hikes through the entire map to get to. I personally would add even MORE Raids and bosses throughout the game as waypoints…which can be returned to later to play again
Take another look at the Digistruct Peak concept to see if you can come up with something challenging and replayable that doesn’t just resort to a stiff damage reduction penalty and MORE enemies. This will be a challenge…but take another look at scaling and how things will scale to those highest levels.
NEVER release ANY new content whether they be Headhunter Packs or Mini DLC’s or…ANYTHING…without some new loot released within it. NEVER lose sight of the fact that this series is a loot based series. Your mantra should be: “New Loot…GOOD! No New Loot…BAD!”
Do keep things humorous
Do continue to make characters that are interesting with HIGHLY complex skill sets and abilities which give endless possibilities in “builds”
Please…pretty please with sugar on top…TEST every skill in a skill tree properly to see that it actually WORKS as designed. Use the fan community if you need more beta testers and limit their test to a particular skill. Let’s not have any more “Laser Sight” fiasco’s.
If you are going to continue to use Damage Over Time mechanic…INSURE it will scale properly all the way to END GAME. It’s a GREAT and fun idea…but if doesn’t work well enough past about level 45…it just ticks people off. Not good.
NEVER make a Boss hard to spawn/respawn again…just don’t do it…EVER! Vermi and OOO…I’m looking at you kids!
NEVER make people spend 100 Eridium for a Boss fight…EVER…Dexi, I’m looking at you son!..that’s 1/5th of their entire possible bank! Discourages endgame…not helps it. Somebody…somewhere (bless his/her heart) thought that was a good idea. It’s not.
Loot dropping at different levels then the current level being played is just terrible! I mean who ever dreamed up that concept, please go play the game a while and tell me you had fun with the results of your idea. Thought so…you DIDN’T! It’s just a BAD concept and needs to be eliminated in Borderlands 3.
Do NOT make the new characters all “Battleborny like” with totally weird abilities…make those abilities fun but make sense…as much as they can in the Borderlands universe.
Continue to make super high quality DLC’s like Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep and Claptraps Fantastic Voyage. The quality, length, style, loot and really EVERYTHING about them was just SUPERB!
Slag?? The Bee??? Hmmmm your call. I will respectfully bow out of that one LOL
Phew! That’s it for now…just thought I’d share.
You have a mission…should you choose to accept it…and you do!
Darn it…amend my above post with these additions. Just plum forgot them…
NEVER make a Boss hard to spawn/respawn again…just don’t do it…EVER! Vermi and OOO…I’m looking at you kids!
NEVER make people spend 100 Eridium for a Boss fight…EVER…Dexi, I’m looking at you son!..that’s 1/5th of their entire possible bank! Discourages endgame…not helps it. Somebody…somewhere (bless his/her heart) thought that was a good idea. It’s not.
I don’t know- when you’re sitting on max cash, eridium, seraph crystals and/or Torgue tokens, having an incentive to spend them has to be expensive because, after all, you’re already at max and seem to have no trouble grinding for more. That’s kind of a problem for my OP8 characters- I can buy gear I’ve never used before and try it out but even then, how many copies of a Pocket Rocket do I need to buy? At least with Dexi, Tiny Tina’s slot machines and Buttstallion, you have a reason to use your accumulated eridium- and to go out to get more…
I like most of that, and I’m gonna add: make sure the loot drops at an appropriate level, not one or two levels below. That is definitely one of my biggest complaints about BL.
An easy solution (at least in my eyes) would be to make the loot drop at the host’s level.
i like the endless badass round idea. some sort of survival mode. with leaderboards. id like a survival area that changes every week, and top rounds earn some sort of rewards. would be a great thing to add to endgame. even years after the game is released, some players would come back weekly just for it. im thinking about something similar to destiny weekly nightfall. every week there would be diferent traps, types of enemies alternating, etc. with conditions and such, example; damage multiplied by 1.25x while in air. rewards could just be golc chest keys or the new eridium-like currency. and rewards could be handed out to % rank. as in rewards for top 1%, top 3%, top 5%, top 10% of players. would be great if the weekly modifiers would affect wich character is the best pick for the week. for example a week where electric dmage is enhanced, and we had a electric character kind of like gaige or athena. keep things intersting
from what we know, borderlands 3 will be masive and on mutliple planets. there could be multiple arenas. one of them a survival type arena. they could bring back the hamerlock zombie dlc concept from bl1
also for borderlands 3, please learn to make raid bosses. a raid boss isnt just a normal boss with more health. a raid boss needs 4 players, not because its harder otherwise, but because the mechanics of the fight need 4 player. example during X phase, two playes need to stand on a pressure plate while two shoot the ads, etc. not a single “raid boss” in borderlands 2 is an actual raid boss
I’d like to add and keep a very very controversial topic: “trading”. You know what I mean. I think this is one of the coolest things in a game that, me personally have never experienced in another game and would like to see it in bl3. I usually play straight fps. There may be other games that have trading, I just haven’t played em.
Secondly: humor yes. The dialogue is one of the main reasons I love playing this game
I like the idea of Vermi and OOO. It’s fun having evolving enemy types with a chance for them to become a random raidboss. It’s just the propabilities of seeing them that I hate. I’ve seen Vermi once and that was when I deliberately tried to make him appear for a couple of days.
I also like the higher cost of Dexi. With the maximum being 500 having to pay 100 to get to fight something is alright. The usual costs of 8 or 20 are so low that I don’t even care. The problem with Dexi is that he is not worth the price. The fight sucks and the Chopper is just a memegun. If the fight was good, there was a pool of good loot and a guaranteed drop on kill it would be interesting. I honestly wish all raid cost more (like 50 E) but had guaranteed drops on kill. I also never really understood why you don’t have to pay again each time you fight the raids if you do them multiple times in a row. There’s a price for opening the gates and after that you can just waltz in and out at your leisure with the boss respawning for free.
It’s funny how I stumbled upon this thread because some of the stuff you advocate for is going to be the theme of a thread I wanted to do, and it’s to do with scaling
I love all your ideas in here, and sincerely hope the devs are reading your thread and implement them for BL3…because 1 of the things that greatly concern me, and why I have stopped coming to these forums, and in general, just lost my passion for BL2 is because of just how difficult it becomes in the higher levels with the damage scaling, and enemies healing themselves before I can do any damage to them, or that I just suck at this game
Anyway I digress…apologies!
Did you cover loot drops?..I hope the loot drops for BL3 are a lot higher than they currently are (despite the recent improvements)…they have always seemed to me anyway, to be a bit stingy…either that or I just don’t have the patience to farm over and over and over again for no pay off in the way of better quality loot
