On the left, PVP matches. On the right, story co-op missions. Notice a theme?
Battleborn was really not designed for PVP. The bulk of the gameplay comes from the story missions (currently there are 8, with plans to release a couple more as part of the Season Pass dealie). In my personal opinion, the story missions are far more rewarding anyway, both in the way they’re laid out and the character dialogue that plays. Which makes sense, given the Battleborn team was developed primarily by Borderlands writers/devs, so they know what goes into a good co-op mission.
Personally, I think the marketing team for Battleborn were really inept at their job. They banked way too hard on forcibly making the game a “competitor” for O\/erwatch, added the tagline “by the studio that brought you Borderlands” as if that alone would be enough to empty the wallets of potential consumers, and focused so hard on pushing the PVP aspect that most people didn’t even know there WAS a story mode and assumed it was some kind of cheap “O\/erwatch clone” right out the gate (which, again, doesn’t make sense to me, since both games came out within 2 weeks of one another, how can you make a AAA-budget “clone” in such a short time when both games went into development around the same time anyway?).
Either that, or the marketing team WANTED this game to fail from a sales standpoint in every way possible.
You could also argue by the above image that I’m just really shitty at PVP games. And you might be right. But even a shitty player should be getting a team that can help carry them once in a while, right? You’d think eventually random chance would pair me up with a team that stacks in my ADVANTAGE than my disadvantage, right?
Anyway, point is, Battleborn really is a great game, but the PVP is awful (at least on PC, maybe it’s better on XB or PS4) and given the chance, I’d have replaced the whole thing with more story missions. Maybe it would be better if we had a bigger player base to help even the odds instead of getting a team of two Lv100s and three Lv5-15s vs a team of five Lv100s (including one of the actual Gearbox Devs themselves), but thanks to poor sales as a result of absolutely TERRIBLE marketing decisions, I guess what we get is what we get.
Make more like this one in the future, Gearbox! (Just make sure you play up your strengths, or learn better from your weaknesses!)
Here’s where I have to disagree.
Your post started with “Battleborn was really not designed for PVP.” and immediately, that’s just…it’s not true. Battleborn’s longevity does not (will not?) come from its story missions. That’s like saying that Destiny’s longevity comes from its story missions and not its raid or PvP (for the people who enjoy that stuff).
Yes, Battleborn’s story is enjoyable in its witty and fun dialogue and characters, but it is not the main selling point of the game. In my opinion, and in the opinions of most other people I’ve asked/play with, the story missions are dull after the first run. Hell, I was getting bored of them the first time I was doing them. I love Battleborn, I do, but I also honestly think that vanilla, Y1 Destiny had better story missions than it does. They’re too long, too tedious, and unless you’re going balls to the walls Advanced Hardcore or whatever, you’re not getting anything useful.
Also making Battleborn out like it was meant to be a “competitor” to Overwatch? No…just no. Yeah, the marketing for the game really fell short but saying that the marketing team was wrong to advertise PvP? It’s hard to hear, but yeah, I think it’s just you being unlucky and not good at the game. In my experience, solo-queuing hardly ends well. If you’re in a team with a bunch of other randos against like a five-man team, you’re gonna have a bad time. Even a co-ordinated three-man team can carry. No matter how good you are, unless you get really lucky and end up on a team of other grouped up players, it’s probably gonna suck.
You can’t blame the game or the team behind the game for you not liking its primary elements or being good at its primary elements. Even if you truly believe that Battleborn should have been PvE based, you are in the minority on this.
Fair point, this is all personal opinion and not factual fact. But I’m gonna have to agree to disagree with you, since it sounds like we enjoy different aspects of the game from the get-go.
Me and my usual posse seem to have the exact opposite opinion on the mission aspect, as playing each of the 8 missions with each of the 26(+) different characters gives us more than enough variety to keep it interesting every time. More importantly, at least for me anyway, is unlocking the character lore through the challenges. That’s what more or less what drives me to play every character, and that’s the reward I get out of re-re-replaying them.
It just feels to me like PVP is broken mainly because of the huge imbalance of player skill in what is undeniably a small community. Every match, you’re either playing with long-time pros or people who just picked the game up during the Steam Sale, there is very rarely any in-between. I rarely enter a PVP match in solo queue, it’s almost always with one to three other friends in a call, so we DO have some coordination, but again, look at the player base we’re up against - it’s either super pros or super noobs, so we either steamroll or GET steamrolled. The big defining factor here isn’t really skill, it’s player base.
And player base is directly determined by how well the game sold, which, let’s be honest, it has not sold well. And a huge part of that is due to the fact that the game’s marketing department knew it would be releasing the game within a week of what was perhaps gaming juggernaut Blizzard’s biggest and most hotly-anticipated new property in years. Because of the way PVP was prioritized in Battleborn’s marketing, how could people NOT compare it to O\/erwatch? Timing + marketed gameplay + vocal minorities just plain not liking Gearbox as a company = a sales disaster = small player base = broken PVP.
Now I could full well accept that I’m just not a very good player at the game, heaven knows I’m not amazing at video games, but as the mission screenshots indicate, it’s not like I don’t know how to handle the characters (I should HOPE I know what I’m doing after already racking up 230 hours on this game!). I just feel that - especially after where the Borderlands series has ended up - Gearbox’s primary strength is crafting well-balanced co-op missions and writing interesting stories with great and memorable characters, and I think emphasizing that angle in their marketing would have helped the game sell better (it certainly would have helped people distinguish it better against O\/erwatch, and maybe the two games could have been friends, who knows), which, through the aforementioned chain of events, would have led to a much more balanced and enjoyable PVP scene.
Really, the only thing I’m blaming here is the fact that there’s not a big enough player base for people to enjoy casual PVP. You either have to be hypercompetitive and GIT GUD, or ignore the entire PVP aspect altogether (I really do want to enjoy it, but as it stands, there’s just no balance to it, at least in my opinion).
That, or nerf Galilea’s goddamn stun. Good god, that stun.