I really, really want to enjoy farming Borderlands 3’s new Maliwan Takedown, but the game seems to be doing everything possible to throw up obstacles to that, and the more I play, the more I realize that Borderlands is really just not designed for “tuned for four players” co-op play in activities like this. At least not the way co-op works currently in the game.
If you are in a group with three of your closest friends then sure, it’s likely you’ll have a better time with something like Maliwan Takedown than most, but even with that, and definitely outside of it, I think there are a number of issues that Borderlands 3 has to overcome to make something like this work.
1. Matchmaking just does not work like it’s supposed to. I refused to believe that there is just not enough interest in Maliwan Takedown or Borderlands 3 right now where the game takes ages to matchmake for a full match, and straight up gives up most of the time, putting players in 2 or 3 man matches for an activity they specifically say should be run by four people. Matchmaking is by far the biggest barrier to enjoyable runs in something like Maliwan simply because it does not work as intended. But nor is there an app that allows for easy group-finding either like some other games have as an alternative.
2. Gearbox needs to rethink the respawn system in Maliwan Takedown. Leaving players dead the first time they die from Fight For Your Life is a very bad call that results in players being forced to spectate for 10-20 minutes at least before they can respawn, or more often than not, if someone dies they simply just leave. Waiting for a “wipe” means everyone probably just quits. Not to mention the fact that if the person who dies and quits is the party leader, it almost always disbands the entire game and boots everyone out. All of this is bad. The answer here is simply increasing respawn timers to 30 seconds or something to make it more punishing, but not like, 20 minutes of sitting around doing nothing which is practically begging players to leave.
3. Related to the above, Gearbox has always needed serious fixes for the downed player system and Fight for Your Life mode. First of all, it’s nearly impossible to tell when your teammates are down unless you’re staring right at them, and by the time you figure it out and try to get to them, they’re already dead. Second, you have to be like directly on top of someone, looking at their butt to revive them, when instead this should be a pretty generous radius of allowing your teammates to revive you while continuing to fight in your immediate vicinity. The lack of this results in a ton of preventable deaths which normally doesn’t matter until you get to an activity like Maliwan where death effectively ends the encounter.
4. This is a more general problem not directly related to Maliwan Takedown, but it’s very present there considering you’ll usually be running with four players. While Borderlands particle and weapons effects are tolerable when solo or playing co-op, when you suddenly have four people around throwing out Ghost Call grenades or splitting, bounce nades or firing Torgue guns or using skills, it creates an absolute jumble of noise that can not only affect game performance but also just literally your vision, as too much can be happening onscreen at any given time to even really see what’s going on.
5. I’m willing to declare Mayhem 4 a mess at this point, which is a difficulty that seems balanced for a full four players with the absolute max DPS builds in the game and no one else. The result of that means trying to do anything short of specific boss farming in Mayhem 4 as a solo player is a nightmare, but in Maliwan, it means that you will have a lot of people matching into Mayhem 4 since it’s the new difficulty (behind which many new legendaries are locked) when they are in no way ready for it because they’re not using one of like four builds in the whole game that can manage 1000% health increases with any effectiveness. It is wild to me that Mayhem 3 is 150-200% increases and Mayhem 4 jumps straight to 1000%. I know Gearbox is working on a revamp of the entire Mayhem system but this is not a good stopgap.
6. Crashes. Oh god, the crashes. The other main reason besides matchmaking woes that I cannot finish a single Maliwan run is that when I do finally have a game going, I get a crash part of the way through. This seems like an increases as of this recent patch, and it’s beyond frustrating given how much it takes to get a game going and get through these enemy-laden sections. And there’s no checkpoint system in Maliwan so a single crash, no matter where it is, makes you start all the way over. And that’s about the point where I just quit out of exhaustion.
If Maliwan Takedown worked as intended, and it was easy to find a team and have a legitimate shot at completing runs each time, I think it would be great. But again, Borderlands 3 is not ready to handle 4 man activities like this despite experimenting with them in the past with Invincible boss raids and such. This is a new animal, and there’s a lot of work to be done to make Borderlands fit with content like this.
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