The thing is, even without the wokeness and SBI it was still going to fail. Every single element of this game is designed to be offputting, from top to bottom. Each element is a failure (except apparently movement is vaguely fun).
The story even if written well is still too stupid to be appealing. The planned 13 seasons because of "multiverse" is both stupid but also not a strong enough hook to last.
Looter shooters are a dead genre and having your only hook on that be "quirky writing!" is even more retarded because that's what founded the genre with Borderlands and that very series ran that idea into the ground. Big Number damage sponge has never been a fun idea, yet that's how they dealt with every single boss fight in the game.
Its fun to dunk on the SBI moments because they are aggressively in your face examples, but it was a failure from the moment the idea was greenlit long before they reached the point of adding those in.
Is the looter shooter genre dead? Or is the most prominent genre entry (borderlands) just insufferably woke? I would play the hell out of BL3 if not for the leftist narrative, characters, and dialogue.
If Warframe, a F2P game from over a decade ago, is the only game people are playing in the genre then yes its pretty dead.
For all Borderlands' faults it avoided all the pitfalls that kill the rest of the genre. Which is constant live service FOMO design (so you need to keep playing forever) and the power creep from that that makes it all pointless to play anyway because next month better will drop. Which is why it was able to keep trucking despite its pandering until the EGS exclusivity killed any momentum B3 might have had.
BG3 killed the momentum of BG3. Maybe they knew they had to take the EGS money, or maybe it was a coincidence, but a LOT of players turned on the franchise because it went extra woke in number 3.
That would have killed a portion of it, but you are vastly overestimating the amount of people who are tuned into such things. Its why games like BG3 (solid typo to give me a good example) are able to be massive successes despite being absurdly woke too, even if people here will swear its not (because they like it so it gets a pass).
But putting an extra wall in between them getting it (and even knowing it released because Steam isn't going to advertise a game not on it) will absolutely kill any possible momentum. Especially after a long stretch of time, wherein most people stop paying attention to your series, where you dropped a legitimately awful prequel in the middle.
Now the wokeness of Borderlands 3, on top of it being a stale dead genre released far too late to recapture its prior popularity, has certainly killed any momentum it could have going further. With the Tiny Tina series flopping and the mockery of the live action series proceeding to bury it from there.
I wouldn't say it's dead as Warframe is doing fine. And it's 11th year, so I think you hit the nail on the head that the narratives that just turned people off.
A lot of these live service games die off because they have no clue that the setting itself is important. Despite some of the minor pandering Rockstar does, GTA V has lasted more than a decade because the core game is still set around the setting of being a criminal. The most pandering expansions, the Casino Heist and probably Drug Wars still had the whole your robbing a casino and dealing drugs for big money.
I think it's just a talent drain at these franchises and they become woke to compensate off ESG, now that's drying up, they're fucked.
The talent drain is a direct result of diversity hiring mandates, imo, so I think it’s still the fault of woke in the end. If I were a talented and skilled straight white male dev, I can’t imagine working for a AAA studio where I’m expected to carry the load while simultaneously being public enemy number one. All that for crap pay and no job security? No wonder indie and AA are dominating.
but it was a failure from the moment the idea was greenlit long before they reached the point of adding those in.
People keep making this mistake. Those elements aren't added, the project is designed around them. It's why this project was doomed from the start.
You can always tell based on whoever the narrative director is and what their core beliefs are -- that's the trajectory the project will take from inception. If they're woke, then it doesn't matter how good your engineers are, your product will always suck 100% of the time. Just like, the Saints Row Reboot was still built off the exact same tech (and technically, better) as the previous Saints Row games, yet it sucked horribly. This is because it was built from the ground up with wokeness in mind, a stale story, and "safe" gameplay.
Its part of a deluge of Suicide Squad products WB ordered work on well over a decade ago. It had been scrapped and restarted many times before this version.
This version was built with GirlBoss Harley as its core yes, but the project was doomed long before then because it was an artificial push by WB to create their own Guardians of the Galaxy. Well before any Intentionality besides that was brought into the picture. Because it, like all the DCEU, was intended to rush and copy the MCU first, and all other elements flowed downstream from that.
Applying "one size for all my enemies" thinking is foolishly reductionistic. Rocksteady had been working on a Batman Beyond game before getting ordered to scrap it for this, iirc.
That, prior to any and all wokeness, was when the project failed.
but the project was doomed long before then because it was an artificial push by WB to create their own Guardians of the Galaxy. Well before any Intentionality besides that was brought into the picture. Because it, like all the DCEU, was intended to rush and copy the MCU first, and all other elements flowed downstream from that.
Yes, as you said yourself, the intentionality was to rush a Guardians of the Galaxy ripoff, which determined that -- as you stated, it was never going to be a high-quality product. There were never any good intentions from the product from the start, hence why it determined that the quality would be low.
It reminds me of Sony Pictures rebooting RoboCop; the intention was never to make a superior movie to the original, it was to cash in on a popular IP. So the intention was never about quality. This was revealed by the director, who was actually perfect to do a RoboCop film, Jose Padilha, who directed the absolutely superb Elite Squad films.
Anyone who has seen those films would have gauged that if anyone was perfect to write and direct a RoboCop reboot, Padilha would have been it. You even get flashes of that brilliance in the reboot like the opening sequence in the middle-east, which was similar to how he staged the amazing raid sequence on the gangs in Elite Squad 2. But if you read the behind-the-scenes production notes/interviews/etc., you quickly realise that Padilha was creatively handcuffed by Sony because their intention wasn't for him to make a politically charged crime-thriller that unfolded layers of corporate and intertangled government corruption (which was always Padilha's creative strong suit). The intention was to make a PG-13 laden cash grab.
Applying "one size for all my enemies" thinking is foolishly reductionistic
That's the wrong way around. You have to overlook the symptoms to understand the root cause.
Application of messaging (whichever way it goes) is downstream of executive intentions. And we all know which way the executives lean.
The thing is, even without the wokeness and SBI it was still going to fail. Every single element of this game is designed to be offputting, from top to bottom. Each element is a failure (except apparently movement is vaguely fun).
The story even if written well is still too stupid to be appealing. The planned 13 seasons because of "multiverse" is both stupid but also not a strong enough hook to last.
Looter shooters are a dead genre and having your only hook on that be "quirky writing!" is even more retarded because that's what founded the genre with Borderlands and that very series ran that idea into the ground. Big Number damage sponge has never been a fun idea, yet that's how they dealt with every single boss fight in the game.
Its fun to dunk on the SBI moments because they are aggressively in your face examples, but it was a failure from the moment the idea was greenlit long before they reached the point of adding those in.
Is the looter shooter genre dead? Or is the most prominent genre entry (borderlands) just insufferably woke? I would play the hell out of BL3 if not for the leftist narrative, characters, and dialogue.
If Warframe, a F2P game from over a decade ago, is the only game people are playing in the genre then yes its pretty dead.
For all Borderlands' faults it avoided all the pitfalls that kill the rest of the genre. Which is constant live service FOMO design (so you need to keep playing forever) and the power creep from that that makes it all pointless to play anyway because next month better will drop. Which is why it was able to keep trucking despite its pandering until the EGS exclusivity killed any momentum B3 might have had.
BG3 killed the momentum of BG3. Maybe they knew they had to take the EGS money, or maybe it was a coincidence, but a LOT of players turned on the franchise because it went extra woke in number 3.
That would have killed a portion of it, but you are vastly overestimating the amount of people who are tuned into such things. Its why games like BG3 (solid typo to give me a good example) are able to be massive successes despite being absurdly woke too, even if people here will swear its not (because they like it so it gets a pass).
But putting an extra wall in between them getting it (and even knowing it released because Steam isn't going to advertise a game not on it) will absolutely kill any possible momentum. Especially after a long stretch of time, wherein most people stop paying attention to your series, where you dropped a legitimately awful prequel in the middle.
Now the wokeness of Borderlands 3, on top of it being a stale dead genre released far too late to recapture its prior popularity, has certainly killed any momentum it could have going further. With the Tiny Tina series flopping and the mockery of the live action series proceeding to bury it from there.
I wouldn't say it's dead as Warframe is doing fine. And it's 11th year, so I think you hit the nail on the head that the narratives that just turned people off.
A lot of these live service games die off because they have no clue that the setting itself is important. Despite some of the minor pandering Rockstar does, GTA V has lasted more than a decade because the core game is still set around the setting of being a criminal. The most pandering expansions, the Casino Heist and probably Drug Wars still had the whole your robbing a casino and dealing drugs for big money.
I think it's just a talent drain at these franchises and they become woke to compensate off ESG, now that's drying up, they're fucked.
The talent drain is a direct result of diversity hiring mandates, imo, so I think it’s still the fault of woke in the end. If I were a talented and skilled straight white male dev, I can’t imagine working for a AAA studio where I’m expected to carry the load while simultaneously being public enemy number one. All that for crap pay and no job security? No wonder indie and AA are dominating.
People keep making this mistake. Those elements aren't added, the project is designed around them. It's why this project was doomed from the start.
You can always tell based on whoever the narrative director is and what their core beliefs are -- that's the trajectory the project will take from inception. If they're woke, then it doesn't matter how good your engineers are, your product will always suck 100% of the time. Just like, the Saints Row Reboot was still built off the exact same tech (and technically, better) as the previous Saints Row games, yet it sucked horribly. This is because it was built from the ground up with wokeness in mind, a stale story, and "safe" gameplay.
TL;DR: Intentionality determines quality.
Its part of a deluge of Suicide Squad products WB ordered work on well over a decade ago. It had been scrapped and restarted many times before this version.
This version was built with GirlBoss Harley as its core yes, but the project was doomed long before then because it was an artificial push by WB to create their own Guardians of the Galaxy. Well before any Intentionality besides that was brought into the picture. Because it, like all the DCEU, was intended to rush and copy the MCU first, and all other elements flowed downstream from that.
Applying "one size for all my enemies" thinking is foolishly reductionistic. Rocksteady had been working on a Batman Beyond game before getting ordered to scrap it for this, iirc.
That, prior to any and all wokeness, was when the project failed.
Yes, as you said yourself, the intentionality was to rush a Guardians of the Galaxy ripoff, which determined that -- as you stated, it was never going to be a high-quality product. There were never any good intentions from the product from the start, hence why it determined that the quality would be low.
It reminds me of Sony Pictures rebooting RoboCop; the intention was never to make a superior movie to the original, it was to cash in on a popular IP. So the intention was never about quality. This was revealed by the director, who was actually perfect to do a RoboCop film, Jose Padilha, who directed the absolutely superb Elite Squad films.
Anyone who has seen those films would have gauged that if anyone was perfect to write and direct a RoboCop reboot, Padilha would have been it. You even get flashes of that brilliance in the reboot like the opening sequence in the middle-east, which was similar to how he staged the amazing raid sequence on the gangs in Elite Squad 2. But if you read the behind-the-scenes production notes/interviews/etc., you quickly realise that Padilha was creatively handcuffed by Sony because their intention wasn't for him to make a politically charged crime-thriller that unfolded layers of corporate and intertangled government corruption (which was always Padilha's creative strong suit). The intention was to make a PG-13 laden cash grab.
That's the wrong way around. You have to overlook the symptoms to understand the root cause.
Application of messaging (whichever way it goes) is downstream of executive intentions. And we all know which way the executives lean.