Conclusion

Borderlands 3 is a great new addition to the series that will make you feel right at home. The gunplay, shooting, and tons of loot have only seen small changes, which is a great as those are the core values of Borderlands. While most of the quests are really basic in nature, "go to X and kill Y", the writing behind them is very solid and doesn't feel tacked on to only justify these quests. The main story is decent, not that impressive, and predictable. I'm not even sure if that matters much. Borderlands is about items, shooting, killing and the mayhem—the more boom, the better.

Some people might say the game's humor is a bit childish, which I wouldn't deny, I still felt well entertained. Can I have more of the unbelievable Claptrap please? Borderlands 3 has a varied character selection, each with a deep skill tree that definitely lets you model your character to match your playstyle. It also seems that none of the characters is underpowered, definitely not if you think a bit about builds and how to benefit from synergies between weapons, equipment, and skill choices. If you are a completionist, there's plenty for you to do, and you'll come across all sorts of Easter eggs and pop-cultural references sprinkled throughout the game, which might add extra replay value.

Controls are good even if some of the keyboard mapping doesn't feel 100% thought out (e.g., vehicle driving). Movement is responsive as your character will rarely get stuck around objects, and aiming is fluid and precise. I did notice some bugs with hit registration, especially when shooting enemies that are close to curved walls. Where Gearbox failed big time though is the UI, which seems like it was engineered for 12 year old console players, not serious gamers. Working with the inventory is a pain, and the map isn't any better. What puzzles me is how nobody in QA noticed that tracking quests and their objectives is almost impossible. The list of quests is on a different screen from the map with quest objective locations, so you have to constantly switch back and forth between resetting screens to get an idea of which side quests you could complete next because they are in the same area.

Some critics will say that Borderlands 3 is "more of the same", which is absolutely right, and I love it. Gameplay is addictive—i ended up playing much more than I wanted while creating this article, which is part of the reason why we're posting a bit late. On the other hand, some sections of the game feel overly drawn out, an impression that is intensified by some slow NPC dialogs and the inability to skip cutscenes. Vehicle mechanics so far haven't impressed me at all since they really do feel tacked on.

Graphics in Borderlands 3 are stunning and true to the cell-shaded comic book style the series pioneered. Borderlands 3 does not want to be photo-realistic, it's an artistic choice, which makes things much easier for graphics developers, too. If you take a closer took at some of our screenshots, you'll see excellent lighting in many scenes. Nearly all of that lighting is pre-baked, a method which renders light effects on to textures during development so that they no longer have to be generated in real time during gameplay, which of course helps with performance, but limits flexibility. Geometric detail on world objects and characters is very good, but floors in the outside world look extremely flat and bland. Having low-res textures on them definitely doesn't help, either. What's surprising is that many indoor areas look much better; maybe these were created by another team with different budget allocations.

Borderlands 3 is based on Unreal Engine 4 and supports DirectX 11 and DirectX 12, a choice I have to praise Gearbox for. Developing for two APIs that are so different definitely complicates things and increases development time. Still, DirectX 12 is the future, and insights gained now will only benefit future titles. While DirectX 11 works very well, the DX12 implementation seems a bit unstable. It starts with extremely long shader loading times during startup when DirectX 12 is enabled. After the intro animations (which are unskippable, btw), you'll see Claptrap dance across the screen for several minutes (!) with no indication of what's happening and whether the game crashed or not. I dug a bit deeper and it seems the game re-compiles all its shaders during that time even though DirectX 12 has a shader cache feature that should mitigate exactly that problem. On DirectX 11, the game loads through that same phase within a few seconds. That's why I'm playing in DX11, because I'm not willing to wait for that long.

Our performance testing shows that when the DirectX 11 API is used, NVIDIA cards definitely have an advantage over AMD cards. Especially older AMD cards based on the "Polaris" architecture, such as the RX 570/580/590, lose a lot of performance when not running in DirectX 12. The newer Vega and Navi cards seem less affected as the differences between DX11 and DX12 for the latter aren't that big. Unfortunately, it looks like either AMD or Gearbox didn't properly test DX12 on Polaris cards as these simply crash at higher resolutions due to running out of memory. NVIDIA's 3 GB GTX 1060 chugs along just fine and only fails at 4K even though it has even less memory than the Radeons. So it's definitely something that can be fixed. Why the 8 GB Polaris cards crash with an "out of memory" error, yet the Navi and Vega cards aren't affected remains a mystery.

DirectX 12, on the other hand, treats AMD cards better. NVIDIA, however, is having difficulties, but the performance loss for then is relatively small, just a few percent. For NVIDIA users, I would definitely recommend DirectX 11 as it gives better performance and lets you skip the insanely long loading times at the start. Still, NVIDIA's DX12 performance deficit (or AMD's DX12 advantage) isn't big enough to fundamentally change market positions.

For 60 FPS gaming in 1080p, at the highest "Badass" graphics preset, you'll need an RX Vega, GTX 1080, or RTX 2060. 1440p reaches 60 frames with the RTX 2080, GTX 1080 Ti, or RX 5700 XT. If you want 4K60, then only the mighty RTX 2080 Ti gets close at 44 FPS. Overall, these requirements feel high considering the visuals on offer, but you have to consider that we picked the highest available preset. Slightly reducing details for higher FPS is very much possible thanks to a large range of settings options. Tinkering with "volumetric fog" especially can help drive up FPS with minimal visual impact. In terms of settings I'm happy—everything is there. You can turn off motion blur, adjust the field of view, and remap the keyboard controls.

Overall, Borderlands 3 is a highly entertaining shooter that's worth the cost if you liked Borderlands 2 and are willing to overlook that it's an Epic Store exclusive.