Borderlands 3/Destiny 2
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Borderlands 3 and Destiny 2 are, in fact, in direct competition. Yes, they’re different on a number of levels, and stylistically they’re basically on different planets. But they’re two of the biggest loot shooter RPGs out there, especially with Anthem on life support and The Division 2 ultimately feeling like a much different kind of game. A get the feeling that there’s a big fanbase overlap, even if some Borderlands fans have likely evolved their taste to the point where Gearbox’s writing isn’t quite so hilarious 7 years later. Both of these games can be massive time sinks, and at a certain point you’re competing over the same player’s time. So while they’ll both carve out their comfortable existences over the next couple months, they’re similar enough that they definitely warrant comparison.
While overall I’d still argue that Destiny 2 is the better game, and I’ll get into that later, there is one defining feature of Borderlands 3 that makes the RPG aspects of the game more satisfying. There’s no PvP, at least no large-scale PvP that’s meant to serve as a core part of the game. There are duels, but they’re positioned as an extra. It’s a funny thing because in most circumstances it would be hard to call the lack of a feature an advantage. But PvP causes a whole lot of trouble for Destiny 2 balance, because every gun and ability needs to balanced for what are ultimately two wildly different scenarios. Getting rid of PvP as a central game feature lets a game like Borderlands 3 stretch out a little bit more.
You see this right away when you look at some of the skills that our heroes are packing. I shudder to think about what it would be like to balance something like the Iron Bear in a standard team deathmatch environment, and basic features like FL4K’s pets of Zane’s drone would be basically unworkable. I have no idea how the team could avoid making a character either unstoppable or woefully underpowered, and even smaller perks like regenerating ammo could cause all sorts of unexpected trouble.
Same goes for guns: a bunch of manufacturer perks just wouldn’t work in a PvP context, and from what I’m hearing some of the more outlandish top-tier weapons would do the same. One of the joys of a game like this is creating overpowered builds that turn one aspect of a character into a absolute machine: that’s the sort of thing that just doesn’t work in PvP, because those overpowered characters would be crushing other players, not faceless AI. Overpowered abilities and weapons can still be a problem for a PvE game, but not anywhere near the problem they can be for a PvE game.
Overwatch arguably has some of those more overblown abilities and systems in a PvP context, but the only way Blizzard is able to do that is by almost entirely eliminating PvE and entirely eliminating loot, reigning in player agency to return to an experience that the team is capable of balancing. It’s not either mode in Destiny 2 that makes things so complicated, it’s the combination of the two that turns balancing that game into an interconnected Rube Goldberg machine where one bugged-out shotgun perk can define the game for weeks.
Borderlands 3 doesn’t have those limitations. It’s unquestionably a PvE game, and that means we can have wildly different character classes with big, splashy abilities and some outlandish guns to augment them. Which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you much you’re here for the obsessively-tuned sandbox of a game like Destiny 2 and how much you’re here for the sweet loot of a game like Borderlands 3. But I’d argue that the focus on PvE allows the team to do some very interesting things in Borderlands 3.
