I am currently grinding through Borderlands 3’s Love, Guns and Tentacles DLC for the fifth time, my first time on console, in order to catch up with one of my PS4 friends. He runs one character, and doesn’t really feel the need to start another one given that when you do so, you then need to play through the entire story again to both get to endgame bosses and use any loot you might have already farmed for an alternate character. And given the length of Borderlands 3’s story, that’s something like 20-25 hours per character, and that’s excluding another run if you want to do True Vault Hunter Mode.
What I am realizing more and more is that Borderlands, which has always used Diablo as an inspiration, needs to be inspired by it further. Once you beat the game in Diablo, at least in the Reaper of Souls era, that let you start Adventure Mode on any alternate character you wanted, freeing them from the structure of campaign missions and allowing them to run to any zone, farm any boss and level that way.
This allows the leveling process to be less structured and allow you to grow your characters doing a wide variety of content rather than re-experiencing a story that is frankly, not great. And I think that’s obviously true for the Borderlands 3 base campaign story too.
I also think that in addition to a type of Adventure Mode, Borderlands 3 needs to do more to help with the speed leveling process for alternate characters. Diablo has a lot of things that help with that, a paragon system that is more beneficial than the Guardian Rank system, it has XP gems that you can use to boost gains easier than an artifact or two. And it has the ability to give alts “reduced level requirement” gear in order to more easily clear through lower difficulties and start working on higher ones immediately, seeing more XP gains more quickly. Almost none of this exists inside Borderlands 3 right now.
I really do believe that one of the best things about Borderlands is its diverse collection of classes, but the game has always done this, demanding a full 1-2 story playthroughs from start to finish to get your alternate characters in the endgame when things actually become fun to farm. And for some reason, they didn’t learn anything from how Diablo changed that philosophy, and we’re still stuck with the same model now. Every player that is only using one main character is missing out on 75% of what makes the game good, especially in BL3 when the classes are all diverse and fun and (at least before Mayhem 2.0 hit) relatively well-balanced.
I don’t know if this is actually in the cards for Borderlands or not, but I hope it’s something they consider for the future. The game needs it.
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