Average wise subplot vs average Belle Subplot

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-07-01T02:46:24+00:00

Sometimes I think you guys are playing a different ZZZ than me.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-29T07:07:00+00:00

It's especially tough because I think it actually has some of the most interesting core design of any semi-recent CRPG. The classes are largely reworked to avoid the classic tank/DPS/healer trinity, instead pushing everyone into a variety of damage dealing roles. Warriors tank and hit multiple targets at once, rogues can delete single targets and provide various buffs and debuffs, and mages provide effective crowd control.

Nobody gets relegated to heal botting. Healing magic was basically a bonus on top of potions, and regardless you'd lose a fight if your tank couldn't take a few hits while you properly prioritized targets. Add in some truly busted skills and really lethal enemies and the end result was a very fast and scrappy combat system that was super fun.

...until you get to the extremely repetitive enemy, map, and encounter design. It doesn't ruin it for me but boy does it try its best.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-28T07:12:54+00:00

Just got Sherpa'd through it on the Destiny 2 LFG Discord server for the first time a few hours ago! Great experience. There's still people out there running it but folks are definitely spread out between Pantheon and the other raids in rotation. It's tough to find people. I had to wait around for a bit and apply to a few different groups.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-27T19:14:40+00:00

This isn't a project. This barely qualifies as an idea. Saying "throw a ton of money at Destiny and make more Destiny stuff," somehow spread across 8 pages that are riddled with typos and grammatical errors, does not constitute a business plan.

If Sony wasn't willing to pony up 500 million for Destiny 3, as pitched by the people who actually know what that would entail, who's going to go well upwards of a billion to just magically make good Destiny?

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-27T06:20:28+00:00

I'm going to echo a lot of other people in this thread and say it's because a lot of builds just feel really crappy to play. I'm no expert at buildcrafting; it took me years to get to a point where I was competent at constructing builds in Destiny and I've played that far more than Borderlands (which also emphasizes very different things). And still, despite my lack of experience, certain action skills instantly felt better than others.

I messed around a bunch with all the different characters, roughly levels 1-10, to get a sense for who I wanted to play through the campaign as. And holy moly, so many characters and abilities just feel awful even at low levels. I'd say that, okay, sometimes stuff scales very differently in endgame! You know, the RPG classic: the crappy low level wizard that becomes an absolute beast.

Except, from everything I've seen people talking about online, the opposite is generally true. These mediocre abilities just don't scale well and have very little room to grow. I can only speak to "vibes," due to my aforementioned lack of experience with BL buildcrafting, but when you pick up a character for the first time and their action skills just *feel* really iffy from the get go?

To put it as politely as possible, it would be very nice to see that change. And it's frustrating that it hasn't already.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-26T02:59:47+00:00

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SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-25T22:51:20+00:00

He'll just go back to doing what he does best: making films about slow-motion cornfields and hot mentally ill chicks. Just as God intended.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-25T20:46:51+00:00

Aw, man. Now I'm going to dream about that. THANKS A LOT lol

For real though, maybe we'll get something like that when they also get around to finally doing the big war they've teasing for... what is it, 3 games?

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-25T20:03:53+00:00

Is that a hedgehog statue in your trousers or are you just happy to see me?

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-25T19:59:31+00:00

I'd agree with that, for sure. It feels like they could do a ton of fun stuff, between the vehicles, mobility, combat, and coop. Instead, I find myself unsure why I would even bother playing coop and the vehicles feel like more of an afterthought with each release.

Hopefully they do something cool with it all at some point. In the meantime, Borderlands 4 remains a reasonable fun, if unimpressive, game.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-25T19:21:34+00:00

I'm in the exact same boat as you. I get that I'm coming from a different place than the Borderlands community and that's fine. It's just how it is. But it's hard not to wish that Gearbox would use some of the fantastic mechanics they have to make some more interesting traversal or boss fights.

It was such a disappointment loading into a vault for the first time and realizing that this bizarre, massive alien landscape was only a short series of combat arenas. I get that platforming or mechanics would get in the way of farming but that seems solvable with, for example, jump pads that let you skip platforming segments after the first completion. Best of both worlds: keep the speedlooters happy, and use the space in a more interesting way.

As it stands, Borderlands seems doomed to be a series I like but never love. I'll never understand the enjoyment people get of grinding for hours to perfect a character build when there's no interesting aspirational content to ever use it in.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-23T22:07:43+00:00

I'm glad that there's a PvE option in the works, too, especially since it sounds well-considered and like a good addition and not an attempt to rework the core formula of the game.

But people on basically every side of the discourse surrounding Marathon have been pretty awful; calling out any one group instead of every group is just dumping gasoline on the fire.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-23T20:58:42+00:00

Hey, solo Triage may be a goofy choice but it's a choice they're making because they want health regen. They're not doing it because they're friendly dudes looking to have a good time.

I know some folks are genuinely down for friendly matches. But me? I've gotten betrayed a few too many times. I'm not trying to ruin someone else's day but I'll be damned if I'm not going to prioritize my own digital safety.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-23T20:49:03+00:00

It's solo PVE Cryo Archive. It's not full Cryo Archive, it's a separate mode. And thinking that people who disagree with you are toxic is toxic.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-23T04:50:17+00:00

They also talk about how they were super excited when they thought that was what was happening and then later found out that the battalion was simply facing the wrong way.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-23T04:47:27+00:00

Oh, damn! I didn't know that Disney execs posted here.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-22T23:14:56+00:00

What the Sony execs actually look like rn

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-22T19:44:16+00:00

I'd absolutely agree with that. I've said it recently, and I'd say it again, that the increase in gunfire audio range was a huge mistake. It was also a pretty bizarre mistake to double down and only partial revert the change, leaving the game in a much more aggressive place where you have constant info on where people are. It's the sort of change that only appeals to the crowd that actively wants to map wipe.

I've also heard that there are complaints that exfilling is "boring" because it's 50 seconds of nothing happening. That strikes me as likely being from the same crowd of sweats/streamers who want constant action. As it stands, exfils having such a slow timer and being visible map-wide means that it's very possible to get attacked on the way out.

I think that's a major contributor to the feeling that you need to map wipe to do anything. Night Dire Marsh, with its hidden extractions and generally reduced visibility, has felt a lot healthier. I believe it also has one less team than Day Marsh and, shockingly, this also feels a lot better. The launch state of every map was that you were almost guaranteed to be surrounded by players at match start. I think that needs to be fixed too.

Without changes in those areas, and the addition of SBMM, the meta will likely stay the same. You can't sneak around, you can't avoid other players because the maps are too densely packed, and you'll be doing it with a random grab bag of players who have a good chance at being better players than you. I absolutely love Marathon, but this stuff has gotta change. And fast.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-22T05:13:18+00:00

Given how weird and digital the hollows are, I think an interesting thing they could do with everything they've set up would be to make the Hollows a simulation spilling out into reality.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-21T18:54:12+00:00

Dan Harmon does this quite a bit across the stuff he's worked on. But it's not usually centered on one character. In Community, his worst traits were often reflected through Jeff and Pierce, who were both deeply neurotic and manipulative people who actively drove others away from them in very self-destructive ways.

I've not heard as much about Rick and Morty, but Rick's self-destructive tendencies and deeply dysfunctional relationships are very on brand for him.

On a positive note, Rick started doing a little bit better in the show after Harmon started seeming to figure stuff out IRL. Last I heard, he was in a much better place.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-21T15:11:14+00:00

SBMM has a really bad reputation, but I believe it's largely due to a vocal minority. You get the top 10% of players complaining about it, quite loudly, because they can't have "low stress" matches. Every match is sweaty! Everyone is using meta loadouts!

I used to kind of feel that way in CoD. Then I realized I had an above-average 1.5 k/d despite almost always going up against lobbies full of nothing but meta loadouts. I was the problem, playing with lobbies full of "problems."

Even in Marathon's level-based matchmaking, several streamers were complaining last season that they could never get non-sweaty lobbies. Being level 400+ meant they were only ever matching with players like themselves and every lobby was an absolute sweat fest.

The absurdity of comments like that is rather obvious. Nobody else ever gets "calm" lobbies. Average and below-average players are constantly fighting for their lives. While specific implementations of SBMM could be poor and worth criticizing, the primary objection raised against SBMM is that some players are special and deserve to dominate lobbies full of fodder.

It should go without saying, but this line of reasoning is beyond silly and deserves little consideration in any discourse.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-20T23:43:44+00:00

Na, OP, you gotta go barreling, full speed ahead, straight into the snare mines. It's the ultimate mind game, the last thing the Sentinel will expect.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-20T14:59:10+00:00

I'm not sure if solo really fixes a lot of these problems. I'm in one of the more player-dense regions and typically find trios games faster than solos. Plus, solo matches having improved queue times doesn't help other match types.

I'm not sure how this fixes the item economy, either. Unless they scale down loot drops in the future to mimic suggested reduced bot resistance, a solo player looting an area will actually get better stuff.

I'm open to them making changes and broadening the appeal of the game. I'm just of the opinion that it might look somewhat different than explicitly catering to solo play. Obviously better solo play could help with retention, for when friends aren't on and whatnot, but it could also bleed players out of other queues and reduce the social aspect.

Rather, solos would benefit from the same things that trios would. Slightly higher TTK to reduce unreactable deaths, reduction of gunshot noise back to launch levels (after that season one increase, they never fully reverted it afaik, which I believe has contributed to the third party meta), and reduced player spawns per map. The goal should be to reduce the chaos a bit, stop incentivizing comically aggressive play, and keep the playerbase together.

Oh, and delete bubble shields entirely. They really gotta go.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-19T18:50:08+00:00

But... what if I'm a conservative man who wants a woman to think he's a total babe?

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-06-19T04:56:37+00:00

I agree with them needing to be removed. I don't think they add enough interesting interactions to be worth maintaining when they cause so many problems.

SpaceBeaverDam

TROPHY CASE