Nydius
Member
I let FOMO get the better of me and bought BL4 a day after launch.
Now that I've finished literally everything short of getting all vault hunters to 50, here's some of my thoughts.
Campaign was fine. Better than 3, not as good as 2. The Timekeeper as a main villain was boring insofar as they didn't make any real effort to give him any backstory or motivation. His entire story is, essentially, "I am, I always have been, and I always will be, so bend to my will." Meh. The sub bosses you beat along the way are much more fleshed out as characters and villains. Even if you gather all of the collectibles that give some minor backstory (I can't remember their names, the pedestals with the glowing orbs), the Timekeeper's background is still extremely lacking. Both Callais and Lector's arcs are as good as Handsome Jack's from BL2, albeit in a smaller way. Beating them felt like accomplishing something. Beating the Timekeeper felt like ticking off a checkbox.
Now that he's not confined to quips and minor cutscene dialog as a player character, Zane has become one of my favorite recurring characters. I almost didn't want to finish the story arc in Carcadia Burn because he was downright entertaining the entire zone. Thank GOD they toned down Claptrap and basically shoved him into the background outside of a few early missions and a few side quests. The new main zone faction NPCs were all pretty good too, with Calder being my favorite.
I can only speak about two of the vault hunters: Amon (the Forgeknight) and Vex (the Siren). I REALLY wanted to break my streak of starting a Borderlands game playing the Siren so I went with Amon first. Got him to the low 30s and gave up. No matter how well I geared or what tree I went down, he would just get absolutely stomped by the zerg rush and bosses ripped him to shreds like toilet paper. I took to the interwebs to see if it was something I was doing wrong and, no, it appears that Amon is the weakest of the entire group, outside of one very broken, very OP, very gear dependent "one punch man" build. I started over entirely as Vex, beginning with her Reapers and Specters until the low 30s then swapped to Phase Phamiliar and both, without any research into build specs at all, was decimating things. I've stuck with Vex through end game. Vex's quippy nature does tend to get tiresome after a while though, I'm afraid. Amon's occasional dialog was funny, at least what I heard of it through 31-ish levels. I guess it doesn't help that I immediately recognized Vex's voice actress as the same person who voices Neyrelle in Diablo 4.
That brings me to "end game". Every Borderlands has launched with lackluster end game and Borderlands 4 is no exception. I find this maddening because they've been making this series now for 16 years and they have 3 mainline games and 2 spinoffs they can build from and yet we constantly regress to "the end game will be added later, we promise". There are no raid bosses (yet), nothing like the Maliwan Takedown, nothing like Wonderlands' bitesized Chaos portals, and their replacement for Borderlands 3's "mayhem mode" - the Ultimate Vault Hunter levels - leave a lot to be desired. End game, right now, consists of weekly Wildcard Missions where you have to replay an entire main story mission (dialog and all) with difficulty modifiers, weekly Moxxi boss replays, farming bosses, and farming Vile Bounties. That's pretty much it.
There is also no real end game "gear progression". In Borderlands 3, a weapon you earned in a higher Mayhem Mode had that Mayhem Level listed specifically on the weapon with increased overall stats. In Borderlands 4 though, the gear you earn in any difficulty mode is relatively the same with the only distinguishing difference being the number of aftermarket parts or the likelihood of firmware drops on greens, blues, and purples being higher on higher difficulty levels. You may get the same Maliwan Vertex shotgun on easy as you can on Ultimate Vault Hunter 5, the only difference is that the UVH5 version might have an extra part on it. Because they wanted Legendaries to feel more legendary and lowered the drop rate, they also made them quasi-bespoke: They have fixed stat variances, fixed parts, and a fixed pool of firmware that drops regardless of difficulty. This means that, as it stands, if you want a particular legendary, you may as well target farm a boss on easy mode rather than a UVH difficulty because the item you'll get is nearly identical in any difficulty. Making matters worse, theorycrafters with more time and patience than I, ran drop rate tests and discovered that, once you get into the UVH difficulties, the higher your difficulty, the lower your legendary drop rate. Likewise, once you're into the UVH levels, there's functionally no difference between UVH1 and UVH5 drops. Increasing UVH levels does not increase weapon power or even amount of parts or firmware on drops. The "increased loot quality" marker between Hard and UVH levels is static across all UVH levels.
So the end game is designed around gearing up well enough to get to UVH5, which can easily be accomplished by farming epics in UVH1 and target farming legendaries on easy. Then once you get to UVH5 there's... no reason to keep playing that character anymore.
This is already a novel so I will spare you any further discussion on performance. We all know how that goes. I will say that I ran into quite a few annoying bugs along the way, especially with Vex's Phase Phamiliar, Trouble. For example, sometimes when going into a boss encounter that begins with a teleporter or an elevator, Trouble will get stuck in his transportation "ball" form and never come out of it (see below), requiring a complete game reload. Vex's summoned Reapers and Spectres would also randomly get stuck in textures and Reapers would keep pushing flying enemies further upward until they were out of reach or outright despawn. More than a few occasions I would also get stuck into textures or fall through the world to my death. I also had a few boss encounters where, for some reason, they wouldn't come out of their invulnerable state and I'd have to close the game. One example is Primordial Guardian Radix where, after doing his underground attack, would come out and still be invulnerable as if he was still underground.
All in all, TL;DR and all that, I'd say it's worth playing the campaign. There's a lot of meat there, and maybe the replay value will come. But if someone is looking to buy it as a game they can play for a long time looting and shooting for some sense of progression? You're better off waiting until a complete edition is out. Because once you're able to get into UVH5 (which, for my Vex took a combined 80ish hours, campaign and gear grinding), there's no reason to play other than grinding the other characters up to UVH5. Maybe I'll try Harlowe next. Or Rafa because his Echo logs had me rolling.
And with that I take my leave.
Please enjoy this picture of my big blue cat.
Now that I've finished literally everything short of getting all vault hunters to 50, here's some of my thoughts.
Campaign was fine. Better than 3, not as good as 2. The Timekeeper as a main villain was boring insofar as they didn't make any real effort to give him any backstory or motivation. His entire story is, essentially, "I am, I always have been, and I always will be, so bend to my will." Meh. The sub bosses you beat along the way are much more fleshed out as characters and villains. Even if you gather all of the collectibles that give some minor backstory (I can't remember their names, the pedestals with the glowing orbs), the Timekeeper's background is still extremely lacking. Both Callais and Lector's arcs are as good as Handsome Jack's from BL2, albeit in a smaller way. Beating them felt like accomplishing something. Beating the Timekeeper felt like ticking off a checkbox.
Now that he's not confined to quips and minor cutscene dialog as a player character, Zane has become one of my favorite recurring characters. I almost didn't want to finish the story arc in Carcadia Burn because he was downright entertaining the entire zone. Thank GOD they toned down Claptrap and basically shoved him into the background outside of a few early missions and a few side quests. The new main zone faction NPCs were all pretty good too, with Calder being my favorite.
I can only speak about two of the vault hunters: Amon (the Forgeknight) and Vex (the Siren). I REALLY wanted to break my streak of starting a Borderlands game playing the Siren so I went with Amon first. Got him to the low 30s and gave up. No matter how well I geared or what tree I went down, he would just get absolutely stomped by the zerg rush and bosses ripped him to shreds like toilet paper. I took to the interwebs to see if it was something I was doing wrong and, no, it appears that Amon is the weakest of the entire group, outside of one very broken, very OP, very gear dependent "one punch man" build. I started over entirely as Vex, beginning with her Reapers and Specters until the low 30s then swapped to Phase Phamiliar and both, without any research into build specs at all, was decimating things. I've stuck with Vex through end game. Vex's quippy nature does tend to get tiresome after a while though, I'm afraid. Amon's occasional dialog was funny, at least what I heard of it through 31-ish levels. I guess it doesn't help that I immediately recognized Vex's voice actress as the same person who voices Neyrelle in Diablo 4.
That brings me to "end game". Every Borderlands has launched with lackluster end game and Borderlands 4 is no exception. I find this maddening because they've been making this series now for 16 years and they have 3 mainline games and 2 spinoffs they can build from and yet we constantly regress to "the end game will be added later, we promise". There are no raid bosses (yet), nothing like the Maliwan Takedown, nothing like Wonderlands' bitesized Chaos portals, and their replacement for Borderlands 3's "mayhem mode" - the Ultimate Vault Hunter levels - leave a lot to be desired. End game, right now, consists of weekly Wildcard Missions where you have to replay an entire main story mission (dialog and all) with difficulty modifiers, weekly Moxxi boss replays, farming bosses, and farming Vile Bounties. That's pretty much it.
There is also no real end game "gear progression". In Borderlands 3, a weapon you earned in a higher Mayhem Mode had that Mayhem Level listed specifically on the weapon with increased overall stats. In Borderlands 4 though, the gear you earn in any difficulty mode is relatively the same with the only distinguishing difference being the number of aftermarket parts or the likelihood of firmware drops on greens, blues, and purples being higher on higher difficulty levels. You may get the same Maliwan Vertex shotgun on easy as you can on Ultimate Vault Hunter 5, the only difference is that the UVH5 version might have an extra part on it. Because they wanted Legendaries to feel more legendary and lowered the drop rate, they also made them quasi-bespoke: They have fixed stat variances, fixed parts, and a fixed pool of firmware that drops regardless of difficulty. This means that, as it stands, if you want a particular legendary, you may as well target farm a boss on easy mode rather than a UVH difficulty because the item you'll get is nearly identical in any difficulty. Making matters worse, theorycrafters with more time and patience than I, ran drop rate tests and discovered that, once you get into the UVH difficulties, the higher your difficulty, the lower your legendary drop rate. Likewise, once you're into the UVH levels, there's functionally no difference between UVH1 and UVH5 drops. Increasing UVH levels does not increase weapon power or even amount of parts or firmware on drops. The "increased loot quality" marker between Hard and UVH levels is static across all UVH levels.
So the end game is designed around gearing up well enough to get to UVH5, which can easily be accomplished by farming epics in UVH1 and target farming legendaries on easy. Then once you get to UVH5 there's... no reason to keep playing that character anymore.
This is already a novel so I will spare you any further discussion on performance. We all know how that goes. I will say that I ran into quite a few annoying bugs along the way, especially with Vex's Phase Phamiliar, Trouble. For example, sometimes when going into a boss encounter that begins with a teleporter or an elevator, Trouble will get stuck in his transportation "ball" form and never come out of it (see below), requiring a complete game reload. Vex's summoned Reapers and Spectres would also randomly get stuck in textures and Reapers would keep pushing flying enemies further upward until they were out of reach or outright despawn. More than a few occasions I would also get stuck into textures or fall through the world to my death. I also had a few boss encounters where, for some reason, they wouldn't come out of their invulnerable state and I'd have to close the game. One example is Primordial Guardian Radix where, after doing his underground attack, would come out and still be invulnerable as if he was still underground.
All in all, TL;DR and all that, I'd say it's worth playing the campaign. There's a lot of meat there, and maybe the replay value will come. But if someone is looking to buy it as a game they can play for a long time looting and shooting for some sense of progression? You're better off waiting until a complete edition is out. Because once you're able to get into UVH5 (which, for my Vex took a combined 80ish hours, campaign and gear grinding), there's no reason to play other than grinding the other characters up to UVH5. Maybe I'll try Harlowe next. Or Rafa because his Echo logs had me rolling.
And with that I take my leave.
Please enjoy this picture of my big blue cat.
IntentionalPun
Ask me about my wife's perfect butthole
Not really. There's no skip button, and a huge chunk of missions don't show you the next waypoint until the person is done babbling. And a very large chunk of those has the waypoint be right in front of you.
So what do you mean you can skip it?
DonkeyPunchJr
World’s Biggest Weeb
Borderlands 4 - Borderlands 4 Update Notes - September 25, 2025 - Steam News
Borderlands 4 Update Notes - September 25, 2025
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Spukc
always chasing the next thrill
I could swear i was skipping shit in the campaign
Nydius
Member
You might be thinking about the pre-rendered cutscenes as they give you a skip button option. But in-game/in-mission, you just gotta wait for NPCs to finish their scripted dialog.
IntentionalPun
Ask me about my wife's perfect butthole
Yeah cutscenes you can skip but IIRC past BL games when a mission is grabbed you instantly get the next waypoint 90% of the time and then you can listen to dialog on your way there.
In Bl4 they don't tell you the waypoint and they also much of the time just have to sit and wait at the same place you started the mission from to be handed something anyways
In Bl4 they don't tell you the waypoint and they also much of the time just have to sit and wait at the same place you started the mission from to be handed something anyways
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Spukc
always chasing the next thrill
Aaah you are right!
Yeah when NPC's start talking i grab a beer or my phone to google builds
Nydius
Member
Random drops and vending machines, just like everything else. I feel your pain though, I went about 6 levels with nothing in the class mod slot because not a single siren class mod would drop. I'd get a bunch of mods for the other three but it took a long time before I got even a plain old common mod for Vex.
Doesn't feel any better, to be honest. The memory leak issue is still a problem and, if anything, it feels like it's gotten worse on Xbox Series X than it was pre-patch. But that could just be due to the amount of enemies I get now in the UVH levels. The notes say they supposedly fixed the issue where gear thumbnails didn't load but I'm still having the issue where they just show up blank even after the patch.
I played with the FOV slider on XSX and could notice a difference in frame rate. It also introduced some new frame stutters.
Lokaum D+
Member
Random drops.
Bitmap Frogs
Mr. Community
Random drops for the purples, and the legendaries come from specific places.
Nydius
Member
Just tried the "skip the campaign and make a new level 30 character" new game plus of sorts and this is, by far, the dumbest system I've seen in a while.
Specialization points are not account wide so any post-50 points you've earned stay on that individual character. The map is completely grayed out with no icons whatsoever; Look, I'm not asking for every icon to be carried over but at least give us the map with settlements, fast travel points, and silos having gray icons showing they must be unlocked so one can get their bearings. SDU's don't carry over, which is fairly standard for Borderlands games, but this basically makes the bank and lost loot machine fundamentally broken for fresh level 30's unless they dump all the SDU points they earn into them first. The bank should be account wide, at least.
And then you get in there with absolute trash common gear that barely does any chip damage to the basic ass Manglers and Rippers in the starting area because they're all +2/+3 (sometimes "!") levels above you.
What the hell is the point of this if you get no benefit beyond a jumpstart in levels and a completed campaign (that you can't run again even if you wanted to outside of mission replay which doesn't let you save your progress mid mission)? Especially if you have to grind specialization points post-50 on every character? Seems like you'd be better off starting at level 1 and playing through the campaign again where you'll get big chunks of XP for doing main story missions. It won't take very long to hit 30.
Specialization points are not account wide so any post-50 points you've earned stay on that individual character. The map is completely grayed out with no icons whatsoever; Look, I'm not asking for every icon to be carried over but at least give us the map with settlements, fast travel points, and silos having gray icons showing they must be unlocked so one can get their bearings. SDU's don't carry over, which is fairly standard for Borderlands games, but this basically makes the bank and lost loot machine fundamentally broken for fresh level 30's unless they dump all the SDU points they earn into them first. The bank should be account wide, at least.
And then you get in there with absolute trash common gear that barely does any chip damage to the basic ass Manglers and Rippers in the starting area because they're all +2/+3 (sometimes "!") levels above you.
What the hell is the point of this if you get no benefit beyond a jumpstart in levels and a completed campaign (that you can't run again even if you wanted to outside of mission replay which doesn't let you save your progress mid mission)? Especially if you have to grind specialization points post-50 on every character? Seems like you'd be better off starting at level 1 and playing through the campaign again where you'll get big chunks of XP for doing main story missions. It won't take very long to hit 30.
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Feel Like I'm On 42
Member
Im pretty satisfied with this patch on ps5 pro. Seems to have fixed the memory leak and the game looks more stable too.
I do 110 for this and borderlands 3. The game feels so much quicker and snappier. It's such a relief having the wider fov compared to launch. Felt like I was playing with a scuba mask on.
Moridianae
Member
Went with 100 and immediately felt better playing the game. It's should've been in the game from the very beginning though, if I'm honest.
On another note, I did notice the game ran quite a bit better on my base PS5 after rhat update.
I'm sure they'll do more to get it even better, but I admit it frustrates me.
I got it because my best friend of 20+ years was a huge fan and despite not liking the others much, I went ahead so we could play together. Love the game far more than any Borderlands I've played.
But damn it if I wasn't reminded why I don't buy games at launch anymore. Always better to wait weeks or even months for games to be patched up.
Its become a frustrating norm.
On another note, I did notice the game ran quite a bit better on my base PS5 after rhat update.
I'm sure they'll do more to get it even better, but I admit it frustrates me.
I got it because my best friend of 20+ years was a huge fan and despite not liking the others much, I went ahead so we could play together. Love the game far more than any Borderlands I've played.
But damn it if I wasn't reminded why I don't buy games at launch anymore. Always better to wait weeks or even months for games to be patched up.
Its become a frustrating norm.
Ocean Dweller
Member
Redeem Shift Codes at: https://shift.gearboxsoftware.com/rewards
Shift Code Reward Date
JH6BB-6RST3-5FB35-JT3BB-R3WCB Gold Key
JZRTJ-SR9BB-W6T35-BJBTT-36FZR Gold Key
BSFTB-TZ9BB-KRJBK-TTJB3-6S3KS Gold Key
Shift Code Reward Date
JH6BB-6RST3-5FB35-JT3BB-R3WCB Gold Key
JZRTJ-SR9BB-W6T35-BJBTT-36FZR Gold Key
BSFTB-TZ9BB-KRJBK-TTJB3-6S3KS Gold Key
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Feel Like I'm On 42
Member
I kinda take that back ....they fixed the memory leak but why the hell isn't this patched for ps5 pro Gearbox? The game suffers from a lot of artifacts that could've been cleaned up had they not gotten lazy with this for Pro
The worst offender is the godrays which look ugly with posterization artifacts