Jolly Cooperation - Borderlands 3 (3)

 

Hello everyone and welcome back to Tiro Finale for another chapter of Jolly Cooperation, the series where I break down the finer details of your most popular cooperative games. The featured title for the past three chapters has been Borderlands 3, a game that I have now sunk a good hundred hours into. In our previous chapters, we went through our basic introduction to the game, optimizing it for the PC and, most recently, talked about what makes the third installment my favorite thus far.

All of that being said, I did forebode some bad news in the previous chapter where I spoke about covering the biggest issues and glaring downsides that I have come across in my play-through thus far. Just to give a quick heads up, here are the five biggest issues I have experienced thus far ordered in descending order of inconveniences caused. These are:

1. Game Stability
   
2. Network Performance
3. Performance Optimization
4. Cooperative Features
   
5. In-Game Menus
   

Beginning with the greatest bane of our gaming sessions is Borderlands 3's stability. Like the rest of the other entries in the series, Borderlands runs on Epic's Unreal Engine. Borderlands 3, in particular, runs on Unreal Engine 4, a game engine which has been proven to be both very versatile and scalable. The game engine has been shown to able to handle everything from photo-realistic graphical rendering to more stylized presentations such as those seen in Fortnite, Kingdom Hearts 3 and, this here, Borderlands 3.

While it may not be a favorite of mine, I can fully attest to the stability that is Epic's Unreal Engine 4. Unfortunately, during many of our 4 player cooperative sessions, the game would invariably crash on our host's system. Thinking it was an isolated issue, we had even try to switch the hosts of the game between the four of us. Yet, the game would invariably freeze up and crash to desktop with no clear indication of what went wrong.

In a four hour play session, we would expect to see no less than two crashes that have lead to some pretty disappointing loss of momentum in gameplay at times. At other times, other members of the team would crash at pivotal moments of the game such as boss fights and cut scenes causing them to miss out on crucial story details and game play.

While I have been fairly lucky, only crashing less than 10 times throughout my entire play through. The same certainly cannot be said about my party mates who are plagued with crashing issues whenever we play together cooperatively. The most teeth grinding part of it all is that these crashes seem to occur largely when playing in multiplayer, not in single player.

A large majority of my crashes stemmed from playing the game in DX12 and much of my problems look to have resolved ever since I reverted to DX11. Among my party members, I was looking to be the most stable host. Unfortunately due to my immense distance from the rest of my party members, I was the most unreliable choice as a host to what would then be latency issues.

Which carefully helps us transition to my next criticism of the game, which is Network Performance. Despite having a very stable fibre optic connection between the four of us, latency seems to be an issue that still plagues Borderlands 3. For a game which hinges largely upon cooperative multiplayer, getting their net code right is something that would make or break the game.

Unfortunately, the net code for Borderlands 3 is best described as passable. The time taken to join games are acceptable but, not as fast as many other cooperative games that are apart of our stable. When disconnected, there is no option for a quick re-connection, something that we commonly see in many multiplayer games these days.

Then, there is the matter of latency which is certainly something I dearly hope would have been better in the game. With a lot of fast paced and twitchy gameplay, low latency can really make the difference between a good time and a horrid one. What's worst, there are no in-game overlays which show you the in-game ping which is another major disappointment for a multiplayer game. As such, I am unable to objectively identify the ping between my various party members who take turns rotating as hosts. The only way I am able to quantify the ping is from sheer feel alone.

Similar to  not being able to be a host due to being a great distance away from the rest of my three party members, I have come to accept that my ping would certainly have been a little on the high side. Nevertheless, Borderlands 3 seemed to suffer from higher ping compared to the other mainstay multiplayer games that I play such as Dota, Warframe and, most recently, Conan Exiles and Deep Rock Galactic.

Just like network performance, I have also gone in detail about game performance issues too where the PC graphical requirements do not quite seem to justify the high system requirements the game demands. To be fair, I am very satisfied with the overall graphical presentation of the game. While it may not be the most graphically impressive, I still do love its look and charm. Nevertheless for what is presented, I strongly believe that the game could run better on PC especially when you compare it with similar shooter offerings in the market. Unfortunately, I do not expect any further performance optimizations to be made available for the remainder of the post-game development cycle.

Wrapping up the fourth and fifth points are just a few niggles and pet peeves that I have with the game that I certainly believe can be patched in if Gearbox wanted to. Cooperative features for example could certainly be expanded with things such as better party member identification and a global map pinging system which would allow all party members to see waypoints set on a map. Lastly, Borderlands 3's UI and menus are far too dated for a game of this age and genre. The lack of indexed filters, search options and general waste of space in the UI is rather disappointing. In higher levels, this makes filtering through loot extremely time consuming.

Now with those five point listed, it may seem as if there is a lot that I dislike about the game. But that could not be further from the truth as, this is without a doubt, a game that I have a lot more fun that I initially expected. With a hundred hours under the belt, I have no hesitation in putting another hundred hours into it. It may seem a little unrealistic to expect such changes to be made for this game post-release though, I am certainly holding out for hope in future installments.

Fret not though, as there is still a lot more to be explored for Borderlands 3 in future chapter of Jolly Cooperation. In the next chapter, I will be talking about the post-game experience of Borderlands 3. Until the next time, thank you so much for reading and have yourself a wonderful day ahead!