Battleborn: An Asshole’s Opinion On What Works and What Doesn’t

Alright pals! I’ve been commissioned for another video review after the frankly overwhelming response to episode 1 : The Monotoning. You may notice we’ve had a bit of an upgrade with the mic so it can actually register human emotion now. Without further ado, let’s jump straight into Battleborn.

Like the high off cough syrup, I’m more fond of Battleborn than I really should be. I wouldn’t say it’s riddled with issues but it does have a number of problems that I do believe inhibit it from being the success that it has the potential to become. Just to give a you a quick overview, in case you haven’t read the article my colleague Steven has written up – which you should – Battleborn is another entry into the MOBA shooter market with a bit of a twist – it puts a strong emphasis on including the PVE elements of your standard MOBA as well as the PVP. This means lanes, towers, neutral camps, upgradeable defenses and, above all else, minion waves are all part of the games various win conditions. This immediately differentiates it from the likes of Overwatch in its TF2 style player versus player set up. It creates a fundamentally different experience. I suggest you put the question of whether Battleborn can compete with Overwatch to one side because honestly it doesn’t have to – it’s almost a different genre despite being a hero shooter – and Battleborn will make a lot more sense to you once you dispense with those comparisons.

One of the things that is both a blessing and a curse about Battleborn is there is a LOT to talk about but I really only have the sufficient air time and patience for so much. With that in mind we’re gonna keep it simple and talk about what I reckon works about the game and what holds it back like a sickly child. I’m playing the PS4 version of the game so I’ll leave it up to you and your exacting standards whether the game holds up in terms of graphical fidelity and framerates as my head isn’t far enough up my own arse to give a decent opinion about such things.

Firstly, let’s talk positives. If you are making a MOBA, one of the foundations upon which your success is built is the quality of the hero line up.The longevity of a MOBA is undefined, most of the time it doesn’t have a story mode or single-player experience (Battleborn actually does, however it’s designed as a co-op story experience) so there’s no pre-determined guarantee of how much ‘game’ you are going to actually get out of your £50. Playing multiplayer matches (often with a limited number of maps) over and over again are how you make the return on that investment and that’s actually a pretty hard sell when you think about it. For MOBA’s at least, the incentive to do so is try out various combinations of heroes, switching up your playstyle and countering the opposing teams comp in the process. The heroes aren’t part of the draw, they ARE the draw. Essentially, Battleborn lives or dies by its roster.

Fortunately, Battleborn OD’s on personality and one of the most positive examples of it’s jerky convulsions is the hero line up. I mean the guys in the art department were smoking some good shit when coming up with these guys. You’ve got some standard soldier and archer characters to get your eye in then you’ve also got cursed space knights, lightsaber vampires, an insane AI occupying a steam punk suit of armour, there’s a teenage, scooby-doo styled detective that is also possessed by a demonic parasite, a teeny tiny little penguin that commands a sort of Jager styled mech suit and a giant marauding ice elemental called Kelvin. Plus there’s a sort of bird….man. Excellent. This a properly interesting and varied selection of characters. Very few of them are even human and its refreshing to see Gearbox push the boat out in terms of their character design, which they’d sort of need to do considering the world building and tone they have used to contextualise the game. I like things that are different. It shows a bit of fucking creative conviction. If the tone is consistent and the personality of your game is well conveyed, folk will get on board. It doesn’t always need to be set in the grim dark future on the planet Grimdark following the taciturn adventures of Mr Fucking Happy over here.

If you’re a joyless boffin, and I know I am, you’re gonna get a big kick out of how Battleborn’s progression system works. So rewards and unlockables are a big part of how to keep a multiplayer only game alive as it’s part of the incentive to continue to play. As mentioned in the Overwatch video, which I’m still sorry about, if a reward or upgrade system is poorly implemented it’ll be too superfluous to motivate players to put the time in or, worse, it will give experienced players too great an edge over newbies when they first play. This can be dispiriting to new players,obviously, and likely will cause them to cry ‘fuck it’ to entire game. So they should because a successful multiplayer game needs to concern itself with both veteran players and new players in equal measure.

Battleborn’s reward system is through in-game currency and loot. More meaningfully perhaps, it rewards players after every match with both Command experience and character experience. It sounds confusing and thats because it is. Basically command experience provides account wide unlocks like new characters, where as character experience provides new skins, upgrades and lore rewards for that specific character. Can i also take a moment to say that none of this is content gated or purchasable using real money? You just earn the rewards by playing the game? There’s an idea eh? What a good idea. Perhaps more folk should give it a try. I am talking to you. And you.

You also occasionally earn loot rewards – which provide items that offer positive bonuses to certain attributes like accuracy, shield regen, health or movement speed. You can create a loadout of three items and attach them to a character for use in battle. What it think is ingenious however is that the items have to be activated; you do not start a match with the items benefits. You need to spend match currency (shards) to activate items in your loadout, and the more powerful the item the more shards it costs to activate it. You can also use shards to upgrade your minions, create turrets, fortifications and health stations.

This creates a tradeoff where you need to decide whether its more important to activate that epic piece of kit you have or invest it in your teams defences, making access to the benefits of your loot a strategic choice rather than a foregone conclusion. It also means newbies with no loadout have a means of contributing to their team with their otherwise useless shards by simply investing them into the team’s fortifications which actually engenders in new player how important it is to, y’know, work with the fucking team. Everyone picking the same high damage character and pouring their shards into improving their own loadout isn’t going to work, decisions are assessed on how much they benefit the comp rather than your own score which is depressingly difficult for a lot of players to wrap their head around initially, but smart design eventually punishes you for doing otherwise. There’s no ‘I’ in battleborn and even their progression system reinforces that ideology.

But this leads me to the problem that Battleborn has. The progression system is a perfect microcosm of the sickness that has stricken the entire game. The design of the system is good for new players, except that is completely indecipherable at first glance. I mean command ranks, character ranks, loots – common rare epic, loadouts, mutations, lore rewards, skins, taunts. There is just…too…much…shit. I mean look at this, what am I looking at? I’ve played a fair bit of DOTA and Heroes of the Storm, so I have a rough understanding of how a MOBA works and even I struggled with all this. There’s so little to guide a new player on what they are meant to be doing. I hope you understand the concepts of laning, minion waves and neutral camps because otherwise you get to eat shit. No tutorials for you. The story does nothing to educate you about what you are supposed to be doing during the multiplayer matches, if anything it reinforces concepts and strategies that you shouldn’t do in competitive play. And the game is just so loud. Yes it’s full of colour and exciting to look at but the art styles and model design of characters and minions is so frantic and confused that amidst the hordes of enemies and particle effects, half the time you’re staggering about half blind trying to figure out which is the priority target. You can signal a specific point to your team but the little marker is laughably impotent in amongst the explosions of colour and hordes of writhing bodies. I normally play large, disruptive tank characters and I felt completely exposed when playing as they are the only characters that it is easy to differentiate at a glance from the minions. My best games were playing with Oscar Mike ( a small, standard soldier character) and i genuinely believe its because the enemy couldn’t tell me apart from the minions.

On top of all this, it’s a Gearbox game, which means it comes with a certain style of writing. Now I’m not going to start complaining about how the game isn’t charming or isn’t funny because humour is subjective and blah blah diplomatic position. What I am going to complain about is that the game talks too much. Too fucking much. The announcer talks, the win conditions talk, the neutral minions talk and GOD do the heroes talk. You’re mincing about a firefight, trying to peer through the clouds of explosions and lasers to figure out whats shooting you so much all the while your own character is squealing in pain, the other heroes are shouting pithy remarks at one another and the announcer is getting drowned out by the same 5 or 6 lines MINREC spouts every match. I understand the need for player feedback, world building and injecting humour and personality into the experience but the game is so eager to provide these things that it ends up drowning itself out with the sheer volume of it and I actually feel it is detrimental to the player experiencing the game from what it is. When I was a kid I went to a birthday party with a clown, before clowns as a race died out. What I remember was the party was the tits but the clown just fucked everybody off. He never stepped back, as a true professional does, and assessed whether is antics improved the general levity and ambience of the party. He just honked his nose over and over again and continually made the kids stop what they were doing to watch him make balloon animals. Now fair enough that guy needs to earn his dinner but sometimes you just need fuck off and let them eat their cake.

Battleborn misses out on being a great game to a larger audience because its far too eager to impress. It’s included so much humour into the game that there’s no silence or sobreity to effectively contrast it with. It’s spent so much time cramming the game with upgrades, customisation options and additional content for veterean players that its forgotten to teach the new ones the basic objectives and concepts of its genre. It’s a shame because Battleborn is a great game, but I don’t think its an excellent one yet. The game has a lot to offer, but the way it has all been implemented means it currently risks getting in the way of itself. I hope the beta is illuminating for gearbox, they are a good company and I want to see them succeed. Everything’s just a bit hyperactive; Reign it in a bit, get it off the sugary drinks and give it some regular exercise. It’ll be getting straight A’s before you know it.