Putting Battle Royale into my Borderlands

After the completion of the first Season Pass for Borderlands 3, the developers went to work trying to determine what could be put into the second Season Pass for the game. All the planned expansions – Moxxi's Heist, Guns, Love, and Tentacles, Bounty of Blood, and The Fantastic Fustercluck – had been released, and that meant the creators had to dig deep for their next content drops. Players were still playing, and content was still needed. This led to the creation of the first of a few smaller content drops, the first of which was the Designer’s Cut.

Unlike with the expansions in the first Season Pass, the Designer’s Cut was not a full, new story mode. Instead it added to separate chunks of content that, in no way, worked together. It’s actually really weird when you think about it because what the Designer’s Cut added in was (a) a new skill tree for each of the vault hunters to add in more powers, abilities, and customization and, also, (b) a new gameplay mode where none of your powers, abilities, or customization were allowed for use in any way, shape, or form. It’s like two smaller content packs that actively work against each other, stitched together because the designers didn’t know what else to do.

Arguably each part of the pack is meaty on its own. The new skill trees do add a lot of customization. I was a Phasegrasp main on Amara, for example, and I really liked her ability (which wasn’t that different from Maya back in Borderlands 2) to grab ahold of enemies and keep them locked down for a short period of time. But the new purple skill tree added extra ways for me to damage enemies and add to the damage I was dealing to them, meaning that I not only got better use of the skills I was taking, but I also completely ignored one of the original skill trees (the blue tree) in favor of the purple tree entirely.

Honestly, I would probably have to spend hundreds of hours deep diving all the characters and skill trees to determine which path on each was the best, but simply having a fourth skill tree is no small thing. It completely changes the way you play the characters. It’s the kind of upgrade where I could see it encouraging players that had already worked their way through the game to play through it again just to see if they could recustomize their favorite character and enjoy playing a new experience with them. That, or maybe they could find a new character to be their favorite due to all new abilities.

The downside of the fourth skill tree is that if you’d already played through Borderlands 3 and were bored of the experience, I don’t see how it could convince you to come back. This is the kind of feature where you have to play through the game again to experience all the purple skill tree has to offer for the characters. That would mean another playthrough for the full experience, and not every player was going to want to come back and try that again. It is a fundamental reinvention of the characters, which I think is a great thing… but it came at the end of Borderlands 3’s lifecycle, at a point where most players likely wouldn’t have cared at all if they weren’t still elbow deep in the Borderlands 3 experience.

All things considered, I’d call this a feature that’s great in concept but that should have come out earlier in the expansion process for players to really enjoy it. As it was, I liked the purple skill tree because I already had it when I finally got a full playthrough of Borderlands 3 in, but I know it wouldn’t have convinced me to stick around and play the game again after the fact. Hell, Gearbox could put a fifth skill tree in and I don’t think I’d go back to test it now. I’m pretty done with the game at this point.

The other new feature for the Designer’s Cut is “Arms Race”, a Battle Royale still arena experience to give players “limitless gameplay to work through”. Your characters are plunked down in a waiting area while Axton and Salvador (from Borderlands 2) explain the experience to you. Once they’re done talking, you are teleported into the arena where the game begins. You have no weapons, no abilities, and nothing to your name. You have to go out and find weapons in chests (and on enemies, once you can kill them) to equip yourself. Then the enemies will start spawning in, slowly, and you have to fight them to survive.

The trick is that the whole of the arena is surrounded by a “murdercane”, a swirling storm that will damage you if you stand inside it. As the play progresses, a timer will countdown and this will show you when the murdercane is moving. It’ll shrink and shrink, until finally it pushes you to the final chamber of the map, the boss room, where you have to fight Heavyweight Harker, a boss that rides around on a mechanical dog. He’ll shoot at you, the dog will attack you, and various minions will spawn into this tiny arena to attack you as well. You gotta wear down Harker until he (and his dog) are dead, and then the whole mission is over.

Your reward: orange weapons you found in the battle arena that you couldn’t use at the time. While other weapon levels will spawn, from white to green, blue to purple, the orange weapons you’ll find are the only ones you can’t use in the arena. Instead you can put these guns into the extractor and send them from the arena to your bank. These guns can be improved versions of orange weapons found outside the arena, making them very useful to gain if you want more firepower for the other parts of Borderlands 3. Just remember that if you go back into “Arms Race” again, you don’t get to take anything (not even the oranges you earned inside the mission) with you the next time through.

That’s really it. One arena, some new treasure, and a single boss fight at the end. It’s kind of underwhelming. I get what the developers were going for, in concept. They wanted a replayable experience that could hook back in players and keep them running, over and over again, just for the sake of shooting action. But what the mode lacks is any kind of variety. It’s the same map, over and over, with the same boss fight, over and over, and you’re basically stuck on an endless loop. I don’t know if this was the whole plan, or if “Arms Race” was supposed to get more maps over time if it proved popular. As it is it feels like a half-finished mode that needs more content to actually get interesting.

And, again, none of this really feels cohesive. The skill trees don’t work in the battle arena, and nothing you gain from the battle arena can go back to the battle arena with you. It’s a bunch of ideas slapped together, but none of it really works as a whole. It needs something more, some reason for existing beyond, “well, we think this will give you another hour of entertainment.” For the skill trees that might be true, but not for the battle arena. I played one session there, got an interesting orange gun for my effort, and then called it a day. I was good.

The Designer’s Cut isn’t bad, but it doesn’t feel complete at all. I wanted a little more. More variety, more reason to stick around in Borderlands 3, than this expansion gave me. And for fifteen bucks (which is what it cost when it was originally released), the Designer’s Cut feels completely underbaked. It’s not the worst thing that was unleashed on the players for Borderlands 3 – maybe if I ever revisited I might hit this battle arena sooner, and I certainly will use the purple skill trees even more – but it came at the wrong time to really make Borderlands 3 interesting again.