More Mini Dungeons, If That’s Your Thing

I have a love-hate relationship with Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. At the core it’s a solid story with decent gameplay that you can rip through in a few short hours. If all you want is a distilled BorderlandsConceptually, Borderlands is Mad Max but set on an alien planet, with magic. The game play might be action-shooter-RPG fare, with a bit of Diablo thrown in, but the aesthetic is pure, Australian post-apocalyptic exploitation. experience that gets you through an adventure and shows you the best parts of a well written story, then the main quest of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is all you need. If you can get it for cheap, and put in the minimum hours to see the main quest, I don’t think the main adventure is necessarily bad. It’s just very short.

The reason why it’s very short, though, is because most of the meat of the game isn’t the main quest. It’s all the side quests, collectibles, and optional content that you can do. This isn’t necessarily new for the series as previous games, all the way back to the original Borderlands, had optional side content for you to do. The differences there, though, were two fold. First, the games were balanced with some expectation that you would do the side content along with the main content. The side adventures weren’t long (at least not in the first game and sequel Borderlands 2), and you could frequently tuck them in along with the main content you were doing, giving everything a balanced feel.

That is not the case in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, where frequently the side adventures can take up more time in a play session than any main quest adventure you were planning to work on. The game is incredibly unbalanced in that regard. And it’s made worse by the fact that the game scales with you, so if you do the optional content all you’re doing is punishing yourself by letting the game get ahead of you, your build, and your weapons, making it feel like you’re treading water simply because you wanted to see all the side content.

Not that much of the side content is good, and this gets to the second main flaw of the game: outside of the main adventure, the writing is awful. The main quest has a very tight, well-paced story featuring solid voice talent and it all feels very strong. The side content, though, has terrible writing, bad pacing, and voice talent that isn’t anywhere near as invested in the story as the lead characters. It discourages you from playing the side content because it is, to be blunt, very boring. Not only do you ruin your build playing the side content but you also have to suffer through some of the worst writing the series has ever managed. Playing Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is a lesson in frustration.

One would hope, then, that the DLC content planned by Gearbox would be better. That it could somehow fix the flaws of the side content, or at the very least provide more main content that could engage for a few extra hours. Instead, though, it feels like Gearbox put in the least amount of effort possible with the DLC, all packed together in a Season Pass, stripping away any story and focusing on the least interesting part of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands: the grind.

For the Season Pass, a new area of the game was introduced: Dreamveil Overlook. This area is the home to Vesper, a fortune teller who knows many stories and who has many secrets. She controls the area and its many mysteries, and upon entering the realm you gain the first quest: spinning the Wheel of Fate, which drops weapons for your party. Wheel spins cost 25 lost souls, and you can earn more lost souls by going into Vesper’s Mirrors of Mystery and completing the adventures within… if you can.

Each pack of the season pass unlocked one new mirror in Vesper’s realm: Coiled Captors, Glutton's Gamble, Molten Mirrors, and Shattering Spectreglass. Each one is, functionally, a dungeon crawl built around a different theme. Coiled Captors, for example, is an aquatic themed series of rooms with the serpent priestesses as the main enemy type within. But while each has their own theme, the function of each mirror is basically the same: enter the mirror, run a series of rooms, and then try to defeat the boss at the end. So so and you get a boodle of lost souls and access to the next level of difficulty (up to four) in the mirror.

It’s a bit of an upside-downside kind of adventure here. On the one hand, the dungeons aren’t too long, giving you twenty minutes or so of adventure (give or take, based on whatever random objectives each level/room provides) before you’re spat back out to do it again. On the other hand, though, these are nothing but dungeon crawls. There’s no story, no real adventure, just running and gunning over and over in the most low-stakes series of levels you can think of. If you complete these mirrors or not, nothing really changes in the world. All you get is more of a specific currency, the lost souls, to spend for more gear, all to make your build better.

And this is where I struggle with the whole concept. Bear in mind this all came out as the DLC Season Pass for the game after Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands was already released. Presumably if you’re that engaged in the main game you would have already completed the main adventure and, one would also assume, most of the side content as well. Thus all you are doing is running these dungeons simply for the sake of running the dungeons. It’s grind for the sake of grinding.

I wouldn’t hate that so much if there were some larger story added on with these dungeons, but there isn’t. There’s no incentive to actually run the DLC dungeons beyond getting gear because Gearbox didn’t write any further plot for the game. If there were a bonus story added on maybe I could see the necessity to run the dungeons. If clearing one unlocked the next mirror in order, and clearing all four unlocked a plot point in a larger story, then it would actually make the dungeons have meaning… which they currently don’t.

Now, I can see an argument that if you have these dungeons unlocked you can use them on a new playthrough as a way to get boosted gear in between main story missions. And that would make sense if, as I noted above, the game wasn’t already balanced to scale with you. Getting boosted gear, and levels, is all well and good but it never puts you ahead. What it does is lock you in a cycle where you go to the mirrors, do a run for gear, go run a main mission, and then trudge back to the mirrors to get upgraded gear again before the next mission. It drags out the experience when, really, only the main adventure is worth doing anyway and you can play through nearly all of it without any need to grind. Why bother going to the mirrors in that case.

In reality the DLC dungeons feel like half-baked, underwhelming content that was slapped together because Gearbox didn’t want to build full expansion adventures. Why put in effort making new expansions with stories to hear and worlds to explore when you can grab a cheap voice actress, have her read a bunch of random lines, and then stitch a series of random rooms together, before calling it a day. It’s mercenary, especially when Gearbox charged full expansion pricing ($9.99 per expansion, or $29.99 for the full pass) for these crappy, tiny dungeons. It was honestly kind of insulting.

The one good bit to come out of the whole season pass was the Blightcaller, the one new class in the game introduced with the final DLC dungeon. This class was an elementalist, providing boost to elemental damage (especially poison damage), while also gaining kill skills that would provide buffs to the hero. It’s both a solid main class as well as one that combines well with other classes. For example, I paired the Blightcaller class up with my starting Brrzerker class (a cold-based melee build) which allowed me to further boost elemental damage types and increase the damage I was doing with my main skills. I honestly really liked the two-class system Tina Tiny’s Wonderlands introduced, and a class like the Blightcaller really shows the flexibility and depth of the system. I just wish it was built on a better game.

In the end, then, the best part of the Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands Season Pass wasn’t even the adventures that were provided… mostly because the adventures were shallow and underwhelming. The Blightcaller is great, a fun addition to the game, but nothing else about these DLC packs was worth the price of investment. They’re more side content that underwhelmed in a game that was already packed full of that kind of material.