It hasn’t been long since Borderlands 3 was released, yet there have already been several patches. These mainly addressed balancing – but why?
This is the problem: Multiple patches and updates in Borderlands 3 targeted the values of vault hunters and weapons. Especially the latest update caused frustration for many players – after all, it nerfed several favorite weapons of the players.
The vault hunters were also adjusted repeatedly. However, the game’s performance issues still persist in part. The community was not very pleased – now Creative Director Paul Sage explained why there were so many adjustments.
This is what Paul Sage from Gearbox says about the updates
This is why the adjustments were made: In a long interview with Forbes Paul Sage explained how many of the adjustments came about. At Gearbox, they are not big fans of nerfs themselves. However, the recently adjusted legendary weapons were simply too strong. Gearbox had to react: “These weapons were dramatically overpowered compared to all other legendary weapons. And we couldn’t just buff all the other weapons.”
Because then those weapons would have been too strong again. And that would significantly affect builds – even more than the previous updates. However, the nerfed weapons are by no means useless: “Even after we weakened them, many commented that they still felt very powerful.”
This is why so many balance patches come early: Paul Sage further emphasizes that it is important to make such adjustments early. “It will affect fewer players overall, and it helps to restore a baseline so that future content can be created better.” They want to ensure that players can still enjoy Borderlands 3 for many years – just like it was with Borderlands 2.
Buffing everything is certainly not the answer. You have to be cautious. However, they do not want to take away the fun from the players – on the contrary: “Sometimes we will find a build that crushes enemies faster than we expected. And that’s okay,” Sage said. However, the game always needs to provide a challenge: “We definitely want our players to find good builds, but if a encounter that should last 2 seconds lasts less than 0.01 seconds, we have a problem.”
At Gearbox, they are trying to bring more variance into the gameplay. Other weapons have also been improved – and players have more to experiment with.
If you want to try something new, why not try this Zane build:
