Jolly Cooperation: Borderlands 3 (1)

Hello everyone and welcome back to Tiro Finale! Ever since the last chapter of Jolly Cooperation way back in October last year, I have actually gone on to complete a whole host of cooperative multiplayer games. These included great titles such as Divinity 2, both Vermintide 1 & 2, Conan: Exiles and EDF. Put mildly, the global lockdown had really given my buddies and I a lot more time to play together. And it was not just the number of hours we spent together, even the number of players increased too from an average of two to four.

We were nearly about done exhausting the list of games we had on our cooperative playlist until the Summer Steam Sales decided to roll around. And with it, a whole host of games for sale including one that was on the top of our collective lists, Borderlands 3. 

One particular party member of ours, is a very big fan of the Borderlands series having played through most of the mainline games multiple times. On the other hand, I have only had a limited amount of exposure to the Borderlands series having only played Borderlands 2 part way through with no real recollection of the story. 

For some reason or another, leading up to its launch, Borderlands 3 had me particularly intrigued because of one of its playable character, Moze, the gunner class. Moze would be the first character in the Borderlands 3 series to be able to deploy a pilot-able mech into the battlefield ala Titanfall style. Watching her character trailer was more than enough convincing required for me to want to play this character.

Nevertheless, we would have to wait a whole year before the game was finally released on Steam as it had a timed exclusive deal with the Epic Games Store. While I personally do not have any qualms with the Epic Games Store, the lack of inter-system integration like what UPlay and Origin have rather put me off as this meant having segmented game libraries. 

Once the game had finally been released on Steam, it was just a matter of waiting for the game to go on sale and purchase it together with the rest of my three party members. Simple enough right? Oh, and there was also the issue of running the game smoothly in multiplayer.

Booting the game up for the first time and running through several benchmarks, I was really happy with the performance of Borderlands 3. My AMD (Ryzen 5 + RX 5600XT) was more than up to the task outputting a solid 100 fps average on the default high settings at 1080p. Seeing as how this was going to be a frantic looter shooter, having a smooth high frame rate was certainly going to be a plus. I simply selected the default graphical settings that the game launched with and made some minor tweaks. Maybe in later chapters of this series, I will do a more in-depth look at optimizing the graphical settings further.

Earlier I mentioned that we had completed a good number of cooperative games, yet I had always neglected to take sufficient screenshots to make a proper Jolly Cooperation series. To be fair, I was not planning to take many screenshots in Borderlands 3 either but, a quick peek at the Photo Mode quickly changed that. Borderlands 3 by far and wide certainly does not have the best photo mode but, what Gearbox did implement is a very practical and intuitive photo mode.

So more than the incredibly satisfying gameplay and solid multiplayer functionality, Borderlands 3 also has an excellent photo mode going for it. Whilst my other party members were running around looking for hidden loot and side objectives, I was scouting out the next photo op location. Naturally, I even made it a rule that I would take a minimum of one photo in every session that I played. 

As expected, I ended up taking way more than just one photo a day as there was just so many unique photo opportunities in this game. The use of high resolution textures really shines here especially in the PC version of the game where players are able to crank up the texture resolution to the highest setting. The in-game camera itself does not freeze time and has dynamic textures. This means, you can zoom up close to a subject and its LOD will actually increase the closer you get.

My only gripe with the photo mode is the lack of super sampling which would allow players to take much higher resolution screenshots than what their video output is. Understandably there are some limitations to implementing a system like that seeing as to how the game is real time and there are multiple other players involved. Nevertheless, I still hope Gearbox would be able to find a way to implement it, if not in this title then, perhaps the next?

Otherwise, the photo mode tool is pretty robust and there are several pseudo-camera settings too such as depth of field and focusing distances. Players are able to make real time lighting adjustments and apply filters too, the former of which is very helpful in lighting up darker shots. 

As of this point, I am still trying to learn the best way to use the photo mode to its fullest potential. While the controls themselves are fairly simple and the options modest, getting everything well framed is proving to be the biggest challenge so far. And with three other players around and about, I cannot spend too much time in-game trying to get the best shot. My job in the game, after all, is to shoot bad guys and not photos.

That does not mean I will be stopping anytime soon though as you can certainly expect Borderlands 3 to be a regular staple of the now ongoing Jolly Cooperation series. If there is anything you would like to see or any questions you would like answered, do not hesitate to ask me in the comments section below. Until the next time, thank you so much for reading and have yourself a wonderful day ahead!