Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
1. Launched with too high a pricetag
The game was never worth $60 sadly, it launched around the same time OW did for only $40, this won't have helped the game
2. Gameplay Issues
From what i understand there were a lot of issues with the game itself intially, the player peak count dropped off very quckly so there must have been an issue
There are probably other issues that affected the game although there will no doubt be people who post "Its because of overwatch" when BB launched 21 days (3 weeks) before OW and the peak playercount was already in the gutter before the OW servers even went live, OW had a bigger impact on the number of players who didn't buy the game in the first place, those that did buy the game abandoned it rather quickly, not because of OW but because of what BB did or didn't do
The game was basically a free to play game with a $60 pricetag, had it launched as free to play then people might have played it and compared it more to smite than to OW, as smite is much more like BB than OW is, but poor choices lead to the games downfall, even had they launched a month earlier or even a month later i don't think it would have made any difference so blaming OW solely for the death of the game is silly
2) the design of everything is SO OH MY GOD! BADASS!!!
3) characters range from incomprehensible to self-parody.
4) there's absolutely no middle ground.
5) the game is very difficult to play because you can't really see what you're doing, what the map looks like, where you are, who you're fighting, or even use sound to guide you. Everything is laid on super thick, like BADASS!! so your gun takes up at least half the screen, a quarter is made up of random numbers, gauges, bars, and muzzle flashes. Every character says really loud things that could conceivably be entertaining if they didn't do it all the time, every single second, forever.
6) hobby-grade coop campaign; genre-blended, multi-mode competitive e-sports; meta-growth, choice + epic Battleborn Heroes!
7) they actively picked a fight with Blizzard. Thousands of years from now, great thinkers will debate the true motivation behind this horrible decision.
8) it had too little stuff for too big of an asking price.
9) they neglected to use their actual valuable IPs to boost the game. Where was Duke Nukem? While I feel FPS dude bro man is one of the better characters they made, why didn't they skip the foreplay and add Duke himself as a playable character for their hobby-grade mess?
10) gearbox sucks.
2) Unjustified price point. The amount of content you got on release for 60$ was subpar at best. Too few multiplayer maps, very short and not all that replayable campaign (aside from grinding). Season Pass announced beforehand probably put many buyers on alert that no major updates to the base game will be made free of charge.
3) Very raw and unpolished game design. I'll start with the cold truth - most of the Borderlands players that did try out Battleborn returned to Borderlands. Despite saying before release that they expect it to be their new "go-to game". Quite a few streamers basically fell back to running Borderlands 2 stream in a matter of weeks after release. Most of them in fact. The loot isn't all that exciting, the whole item system is way too simplified yet still grindy.
4) Gearbox tried to appeal to two audiences - singleplayer/co-op one and multiplayer (new) one. Singleplayer didn't contain nearly enough content, the DLC were released slowly, were short and costed additional money. Loot, as I described above, was arguably less exciting. Plethora of bugs that developers, seemingly fixed slower due to bigger fixation on making multiplayer work better.
Multiplayer crowd, on the other hand, was left with very few maps, game breaking bugs and exploits that ruined whole matches, slow update rate with new content, need to grind basic gear before feeling competitive, subpar matchmaking experience, especially against 5-premade stacks. Basically, in trying to cater to two crowds, Gearbox missed both by a mile.
5) Strange PR decisions after the release. Price cut with Humble sale was too late to capture the audience that chose to invest in other games and only irritated the fans that did stay with the game. Half-hearted F2P attempt later down the line, which clearly had no chance of working if several weekends of free access to Battleborn were taken into consideration. I know, fans shouted that this was the way on forums all day long. Maybe it was the way 1-2 months after the release. After that it was meaningless. People won't jump into the game just because it is free, the F2P market is oversaturated with propositions.
6) Randy Pitchford. At this point he was a major reason, it's that bad. Numerous broken promises beforehand didn't inspire any trust into him or his words about the game. His childish at best attempts to rectify the problem with the lack of PR and visibility only hurt the game even more. At this point I have to wonder how such inept and incapable person is still employed in his position. One can only imagine how different things could've been if he was swapped for an experienced professional before the release.
7) Lack of immediate reaction from Gearbox and 2K after the obvious flop. It seems they were hoping for the magic that did happen with Borderlands, which eventually sold well despite poor start. When good developers and publisher should do everything in their power to ensure that the game doesn't need to rely on chance. Instead of admitting the failure, making a statement, promise free content updates, providing solid roadmap to inspire trust in the future of the game, Gearbox and 2K for the most part spent their time covering eyes with hands and insisting that everything is going fantastic. They were working in the "normal mode", when they should've been working in "damage control" one from the day of release, when the sales numbers came in.
8) Clashing factores in game design. The game strives to be high skill cap experience. Yet lacks well made tutorial, even after the year, and vomits all over the screen with special effects Borderlands-style, obscuring the vision of the player and impacting his ability to make objective decisions. Borderlands was a co-op experience, it could get away with oversaturated special effects. You need to moderate your game design if you're trying to make competitive experience however.
2) Overwatch released around the same time, was also a hero shooter (no moba elements), had MASSIVE hype, and was cheaper.
3) You had to unlock characters in a PvP game that you already paid $60 for, and this money didn't include future heroes. This is generally a suitable model for a F2P title, but people didn't like this in a $60 game, especially when Overwatch costs less upfront and gave you current and future heroes for free.
4) The PvE mode was literally a 20-30 minute mission that you only really repeated to grind legendary equipment for PvP. It was in no way robust enough to justify the $60 pricetag for a lot of people, yet it was the primary reason why the game supposedly costs so much.
5) No tutorial. People came in playing the game like it was Team Deathmatch and ignored the infinitely more important MOBA-elements. People didn't understand how or why they were losing. You know how some people tend to ignore the payload in Overwatch? Doing that in Battleborn is WAY worse.
6) The new player experience was AWFUL. A new player had to unlock the character they wanted, mutations for said character, and legendaries for that character. People playing already had all of this stuff plus a general gameplay knowledge advantage, and new players got crushed in-game. A lot of people found it extremely frustrating. Leading to a smaller playerbase. Less players = more new players fighting veteran plays. Repeat forever.
7) Poor balancing. Early on, there were a lot of good players giving the game solid competitive feedback. The game was essentially a MOBA, and the players who knew and played to those strengths thrived. They had discussions on what was strong and why, how to potentially fix it, and what the game would need to succeed. The lionshare of this informations was seemingly ignored by the devs in favor of balancing for what they wanted and the lowest common denominator: people who played the game like TDM, and didn't even know what a turret was. Because of this, balance often failed to address root problems and people got tired of asking for fixes for months.
Honestly, the game died because changes never came fast enough, and it was managed with a quasi-hubristic pride: They thought their PvE was better than it was. They thought they could do all the balance the way they wanted to without any community feedback. They thought people would put up with their $60 entry, $20 season pass, AND microtransaction monetization model. They assumed a lot, and failed to listen or react when the bleeding started.
Many people pointed out most reasons, but in a nutshell I would pin it on:
-Terrible match making
-Poor optimization
-Price
-Steep learning curve (though I don't necessarily consider that a flaw, just a reason players would drop off)
-Fierce competition from games like Overwatch
-Stupid long amount of time it took to get a game started (wait for your team to get matched up, wait for an oposing team - hope no one quits, wait for map choice, wait for character choice, wait for the map to load, wait for round to start)
I would definitely say that the matchmaking was one of the bigest offenders, espacially with the dwindling player base. Rather than gather 10 players and try to distribute them as evenly as it could, it would first try to find players of similar level, then look for an opposing team. This lead to awesome matchups like a team of newbie sub level 10 accounts vs a premade team of level 100s (one of my first games). From there it was either a stomping, or someone leaving and back to the que we go. I played a lot of FPS games back in the day and had a decent enough understanding of MOBAs to hold my own and get over the innitial hump without getting frustrated enough to quit, so I stuck around for a while. I can't imagine many players did though (and who could blame them), as the current state of the game seems to indicate.
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/Gearbox-Battleborn-Multiplayer