If you’ve read my Borderlands 4 review, then you know I had a blast with the game. I still think it is a true return to form for the series, and it finally hits a great balance between action, humor, and serious storytelling. It’s not Oscar-worthy writing or anything, but it knew when to play things straight and not undercut the vibe with a joke or quip. The gunplay was never an issue with the series, and the greater variety in firearms and enhanced mobility make it a seriously addictive shooter.
The boss fights in particular were a highlight for me before release, and that remained true throughout. But Borderlands 4 lives in a strange middle ground where it has all the trappings of a live-service game, but without the MMO-lite social aspects. For a mostly anti-social gamer, that sounded like the perfect compromise — I could enjoy all the thrill of leveling up, fighting bosses, and getting better loot without having to talk to strangers. Awesome! Except that after I finished the campaign for review, I went back to play some endgame content and found that it was woefully unappealing.
Grinding loot just to grind more loot
Before I can talk about why Borderlands 4‘s endgame is a disappointment, I should explain what that content is. Granted, Gearbox already has a roadmap for tons of new content, including additions to the endgame, so hopefully that will be enough to entice me back. But for now, this is what we’re working with.
The main feature of the endgame, as of now, is the Ultimate Vault Hunter (UVH) mode. This mode becomes available as soon as you beat the campaign and is more or less a set of new difficulty levels. There are five ranks you can rise through, with each one buffing the enemies by greater amounts. Based on Maxroll.gg, these are percentage increases to enemy health and damage output that scale with each rank. Likewise, cash, Eridium, XP, and Loot quality are buffed as compensation for the player.
That’s fine, I suppose, but I’m never a fan of raw stat buffs as a tool for difficulty. That doesn’t change how I play, except maybe make me more passive. What I find makes difficulty modifiers more compelling are new enemies, new arrangements of enemies, enemies using new moves or requiring different tactics, and things of that nature. I fully respect that those things are infinitely harder than juicing the numbers on the backend, so I don’t hold it against Gearbox for including it. It just isn’t something that appeals to me.
A component of UVH mode is a new set of challenges, which were already part of the main game but functioned much better as things that I passively completed while doing the main content. Things like killing 200 enemies with a specific weapon are fine secondary tasks, but become tedious slogs when they’re the main focus.
And those new challenges are the only way to unlock Wildcard Missions, which come the closest to giving me something compelling to do in the endgame. These are retreads of main missions, with other modifiers slapped on to the enemies. The fundamental problem here is that I’m already doing that. Once I hit endgame, there’s nothing else to do except rerun main missions in UVH mode to distract myself from the monotony of completing missions. When I finally get to a Wildcard Mission, it just feels like business as usual.
Moxxi’s Big Encore is a welcome feature, and what I did most before finally dropping Borderlands 4 for good. But you can already see the pattern here; everything in Borderlands 4‘s endgame is a rehash of what I already did in the main campaign.
It is unreasonable to expect an entire second game waiting for me after beating Borderlands 4. I know that. The main appeal is to keep building up my character to ludicrous levels of power. That might be enough for some, and if you’re grinding with friends it could even be a perfect game, but I need a reason to grind. Even one superboss or raid mission to set my sights on would do the trick. That’s coming, but I’ve already moved on from Borderlands 4 and don’t know if I’ll be drawn back by the time that content drops.
None of this detracts from how I felt about Borderlands 4 during my review of the main game. I stand by everything I said there, but that’s where my experience with the game will have to end. The endgame just has nothing to grab me and feels like grinding for the sake of grinding.
