I just went through the entire game again, leveling my first Zane, and holy mother of God, half of the time I spent running it consisted of Lilith and Tannis and, worst, Ava gabbing whilst my character had to stand there, waiting for me to be able to do something other than surf the web on my phone as I waited for the NPCs to shut up and let me actually play.
I swear… it was maddening. I have no desire to go through that again, ever - even if I want a max Fl4k. People might not exclusively use a single VH if they had the option to run through the game without having to endure that sheer magnitude of nonsense.
Side benefit to split screen gaming is the ability to keep those dialogs gabbing when I’m in my backpack and the split screen profile isn’t.
But yeah, we need a speedrunner mode. It could be hilarious too. Compress all dialog to hilarious phrases.
Instead of 2 paragraphs of text when you hand the vault key to Lilith on the second map, it could be “cool.”. After she gets the crap kicked out of her she would say “damn it”. Tannis would say “do the vault”. Ava would only say “you got nothing” or “kick his dick off”.
One of my biggest gripes when it came to this game. Even Assassin’s Creed has graduated to dynamic dialogue. I wish all those waiting moments for them to be done talking A) could not be interrupted by inventory and skill menus and B) were in a more cutscene dynamic form, skippable, more immersive, etc.
On that point, just making it so that being in the inventory, map, etc wouldn’t pause them would be fine. That way I could peruse my weapons or skill trees, or explore the map while that’s going on. The dialogue isn’t so interesting that I need to listen to every line of it. Half the time it’s pointless rambling.
Or jokes that fall flat after you’ve seen it for the first time, like the windshield of sanctuary cracking and having to watch clap get sucked up to it.
Kills the pacing for sure.
Go the Far Cry 5 route and make it so you can shortcut any dialogue, including that not in cut scenes.
Hand you whatever item it is you need or place the marker on your map immediately, rather than making you wait until it’s finished.
Don’t pause the dialog when you’re in an Echo screen (map, inventory, etc).
Any of those three would work and remove a minor-but-prevalent annoyance from the game, making additional playthroughs less tedious.
Or, what I really want and totally unrelated, make level scaling work from the beginning and I won’t mind playing through multiple times. As it is, I beat the game, turn on Mayhem, and go back and finish all the maps and side quests I had to skip because they were too underleveled for me.
It’s so weird, isn’t it? GBX has always had trouble with titles that weren’t borderlands ratings wise, but you would assume after 7 years between games that they would pick up some quality improvements we’ve seen in titles released by other companies since. I feel like BL3 hit my fallout 4 spot in my brain; I was so hyped for fallout 4, got the pipboy edition, couldn’t wait for all the new voiced dialogue options I would have and the new map, new quests, etc.
But bethesda just dropped the ball IMO! Can’t even see equipped weapons without mods! What! I would think they have a list of features that they want to implement in their game, but not seemingly obvious ones I would expect to see! With the budget and success of bl2 I thought for sure BL3 would be a lot more amazing than it is. I mean, I still like it but man. The potential I imagined was just… So over shot, which is weird because I grounded my expectations in reality based on other games I’ve played. It irks me and I wish I had a time machine and connections to whoever drove the boat for BL3.
There are some pretty solid ideas on this thread. I haven’t seen this issue talked about much, but I 1000% support some kind of streamlining of dialogue in BL3.
BL3 sits in a weird place for me. I moved on from BL2 a while back and only recently got BL3. BL2 burnout came because, at endgame, there were only a very few viable options for play and I hated the slag mechanic with a passion. BL3 improves on nearly every aspect of 2 when it comes to gameplay. The actual running and gunning is flat-out amazing and addictive; sliding, crouching and the smooth gunplay is just awesome. Most of the boss fights are pretty good if not great (not Katagawa; awful fight). I have a max level Zane and Amara and nearly max level Fl4k. Those three VH’s may not be “balanced” but they are fun as hell to play; sorry Moze fans, tried it and hated it. Overall I like 3 a lot better than 2. Then there are the problems and they tend to grate on a person after a while:
Story. It’s bad, no matter how you spin it. The main story is awful. Too siren-centric, not enough inclusion of the B-Team, poor writing all around. I get what they tried to do, but it failed.
Annoints. Seriously, either make them all meaningful, reduce their impact on gameplay, or give us an annoint reroll machine.
Guardian Takedown. Some platforming is fine, Guardian takes it entirely too far and the rewards are awful.
Dialogue pauses like we’re discussing. It’s terrible. Just let me get back to shooting things.
Story again; in all these cut scenes and forced dialogue pauses, WHERE IS THE VH? All the NPCs talk as if they’re doing all the key parts of the game when it’s the VH, the hero, that’s doing the work. That should be acknowledged. It wouldn’t have been that difficult to include the VH in the story instead of making us a neutral witness to everything that happens.
Ava. Everyone likes to bash on Ava and I don’t have the levels of hate that seem popular, but a little more character development would have gone a long way to making her slightly more bearable.
Level scaling. The game needs to scale with level from beginning to end. It’s tedious to have to skip whole areas or parts of the game until Mayhem is unlocked, then go back and do it. It’s ridiculous to wait until Mayhem is unlocked to go back and get another Night Hawkin. If i want to farm rare skags every 10 levels, that should be my choice.
Much of the story is bad, yes, though I gotta say; second time around, I like both Eden and Meridian as enviorments.
And Tyreen is starting to growing on me. I feel a strange connection to her, almost like we´re family. Like I would die for her.
EDIT But yes I agree, the main story could use some cleaning up, and I don´t think it would be too much work? Just give the option to cut some dialogue stops, and switch out some “narrative escort” missions with a mission to just run the course and meet the NPC at the end.
I especially hate the scenes where the Calypso twins break into your life with comments and, even worse, videos (which I don’t watch and wish I didn’t have to hear). I love this game, but this part is really annoying to me especially after the first playthrough.
Imagine playing a game where people only like the mechanics and even then have thesis written on personal ideas to be implemented because the fundamentals are good but could be done so much better. A team of passion driven professionals is not your go-to for digital media no, the people needed to make good games are individuals that live at their mother’s house, live in dens, go to elementary school or work construction jobs…
omg thats perfect. The ‘sup killer’ part really resonated with me the most. I’ve commented several times around here how much it triggers me she always calls us killer.
I remember people asked for this ever since The-Presequel, that’s where the ‘stand and listen’ was starting to get out of hand.
It’s fine for first playthrough, but come on, is it so hard to code a button that lets you skip script dialogue step(s), depending on a simple flag of game’s main story completion?
I guess it is, since it took a few months to implement cutscene skipping.
I doubt that we will ever see any kind of “re-write”, but I don´t think you need to do that much TBH. After the first run, just make an option to skip and bypass the mission objectives that only serve to deliver exposition; Mark every “Talk to Lilith” and “Escort Typhon de Leon” type mission as instantly completed, and give players the option to interrupt quest givers and talking heads.
Honestly why can’t they just implement a skip that finishes the story and puts you to level 50 for those who completed the story so we don’t have to go thru it again.
