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Battleborn Open Beta thread: April 8 (PS4)/ April 13 (PC/XB1) - April 18

patchday

Member
(Now that I have almost 7 hrs played I can talk more)
So I unlocked Phoebe and Galiea. Amazing characters. These heroes are so well thought out. And so polished

Current thoughts on the overall game:

Pros:
- Fresh, original heroes
- Character designs
- Humor (Personally I like it; it adds flavor)
- Gameplay modes are very well thought out. All of the ones I played both Single player & MP
- Sincere attempt at decent Story Coop modes which is a first for a MOBA-lite/Hero shooter. They seem ok

Cons:
- RNG loot. LAst night I noticed a guy had "Green" Boots. I am still stuck white boots
- No Competitive mode (ranked mode like Overwatch and MOBAs have) complete with web api for stats (Even Paragon has this). So my guess is this is aimed at Casual audiences.
- Bosses are a bit bullet spongy but they are pretty decent


Still suspicious because lots of story content is locked. RNG still sux. Yes they try to balance it but my conclusion it still sucks to have ZERO control over the items you get.
 
(Now that I have almost 7 hrs played I can talk more)
So I unlocked Phoebe and Galiea. Amazing characters. These heroes are so well thought out. And so polished

Current thoughts on the overall game:

Pros:
- Fresh, original heroes
- Character designs
- Humor (Personally I like it; it adds flavor)
- Gameplay modes are very well thought out. All of the ones I played both Single player & MP
- Sincere attempt at decent Story Coop modes which is a first for a MOBA-lite/Hero shooter. They seem ok

Cons:
- RNG loot. LAst night I noticed a guy had "Green" Boots. I am still stuck white boots
- No Competitive mode (ranked mode like Overwatch and MOBAs have) complete with web api for stats (Even Paragon has this). So my guess is this is aimed at Casual audiences.
- Bosses are a bit bullet spongy but they are pretty decent


Still suspicious because lots of story content is locked. RNG still sux. Yes they try to balance it but my conclusion it still sucks to have ZERO control over the items you get.

It would be nice if there was at least a "crafting" system of sorts, where you could break down items to build things that were at least useful to you. Similar to what The Division does, or Hearthstone with dusting.
 
(Now that I have almost 7 hrs played I can talk more)
So I unlocked Phoebe and Galiea. Amazing characters. These heroes are so well thought out. And so polished

Current thoughts on the overall game:

Pros:
- Fresh, original heroes
- Character designs
- Humor (Personally I like it; it adds flavor)
- Gameplay modes are very well thought out. All of the ones I played both Single player & MP
- Sincere attempt at decent Story Coop modes which is a first for a MOBA-lite/Hero shooter. They seem ok

Cons:
- RNG loot. LAst night I noticed a guy had "Green" Boots. I am still stuck white boots
- No Competitive mode (ranked mode like Overwatch and MOBAs have) complete with web api for stats (Even Paragon has this). So my guess is this is aimed at Casual audiences.
- Bosses are a bit bullet spongy but they are pretty decent


Still suspicious because lots of story content is locked. RNG still sux. Yes they try to balance it but my conclusion it still sucks to have ZERO control over the items you get.

There is zero way this game does not come out with a ranked mode. It would be absolutely idiotic.
 
Yeah, this will have that. It's in the OP at the written rundown.

Skill-Based Matchmaking: Queue up in regular Competitive Multiplayer matches to be matched with and against similarly skilled players.
 

a harpy

Member
edit: ^^^ Awesome. I hadn't seen anything about it but I assumed it would be there. I think a lot of other people are assuming that, too.

There is zero way this game does not come out with a ranked mode. It would be absolutely idiotic.

All that will happen if they don't include a ranked mode at launch is an endless stream of complaining until they finally end up adding a ranked mode. It really would be foolish to not include it from the start.

Does anyone else feel like it's kind of stupid to require you to rank up in order to buy the higher tier gear packs? You can just play Story and get purple gear, but in order to have a good chance at it if you only play multiplayer, you have to first grind out 24-30 levels?
 

KanameYuuki

Member
We can finally talk about technical test and all of that right?

And for the ones who played it and played the beta, has anything changed at all? I did play the technical one and boy what a horrible game I found it to be, I don' know if I should even bother to dl the beta.
 

thumb

Banned
Im not interested in the competitive modes, but I'm enjoying the single player.

But the biggest issues for me have already been raised:

  • Limited situational awareness. There's too much happening all around my character. A FOV slider is desperately needed.
  • There's no reason this game should have performance issues, especially in single player. Lock down 30FPS. I don't care if you have to turn all explosion effects into tiny dust poofs.
  • Just let me play the characters I want to play. I see lots of interesting characters whose unlock requirements effectively mandate me having less fun.
 

patchday

Member
All that will happen if they don't include a ranked mode at launch is an endless stream of complaining until they finally end up adding a ranked mode. It really would be foolish to not include it from the start.

Does anyone else feel like it's kind of stupid to require you to rank up in order to buy the higher tier gear packs? You can just play Story and get purple gear, but in order to have a good chance at it if you only play multiplayer, you have to first grind out 24-30 levels?

Yep the random loot distribution is simply unacceptable for serious competition. Serious players are simply at the mercy of random loot generator

I just want my freakin' high level boots. 7 hrs put in. You can see builds on enemy player so I could clearly see he had Green boots.

Even Borderlands has Trading right? Why has it been omitted here. They seem to want us to grind for items to have a fair playfield. I find that unacceptable for good clean pvp

[edit] To directly answer your question I did find that sort of annoying but that one at least could be worked around after a lot of hrs put in. But yeah, new players might get it
 

Xevren

Member
High level gear is kinda moot due to the activation costs, I have legendary gear and I still use white since its stats are still in line with some of my higher gear or in some cases beating it. I prefer buying buildables early on just due to the xp gain from them anyway.
 

Steel

Banned
High level gear is kinda moot due to the activation costs, I have legendary gear and I still use white since its stats are still in line with some of my higher gear or in some cases beating it. I prefer buying buildables early on just due to the xp gain from them anyway.

Yeah, I have both blue and white boots and I use the white ones. Normally the only difference is an additional conditional that can be hard to activate, and the primary stats on my white gear is better anyway.
 

Matt_

World's #1 One Direction Fan: Everyone else in the room can see it, everyone else but you~~~
Just jumped into the beta as a random character and montana is a lot of fun
taking up half the screen with his fat arm however is not
 
Long thread so I'm not sure if anyone else also experienced this but it happened on my first play-through and I haven't tried again since.

Did a story mission, que was quick, got a full group of players, and it had us vote on a story/map. Everyone choose no preference and got a mission where eventually we were escorting a pretty funny giant spider tank through the level.

Got to a gate that wouldn't open. Seemed like the objective was for all of us to stand on some plates. Didn't seem to be any group voice chat and no one would party up. Took 1 idiot about 5 mins to realize he needed to stand on the plates with us, even though we were constantly pinging the map.

Eventually we get it and one player gets launched up to an area above us. I assume his job was to go hit a switch to open a gate, but he never did. He just fought around up there, walked around and never did anything. Since you need 3 standing on plates to launch the fourth we all were just stuck at the locked gate.

I didn't see anyway to get up there, I tried to party invite the guy to tell help him figure it out but no responce. I went on to make a sandwich, came back and same scnene. 3 of us stuck at gate, one guy running farther away on a part of the map we couldn't get too.
This went on for 15 mins.
I quit out, played some Bloodborne.
 
Long thread so I'm not sure if anyone else also experienced this but it happened on my first play-through and I haven't tried again since.

Did a story mission, que was quick, got a full group of players, and it had us vote on a story/map. Everyone choose no preference and got a mission where eventually we were escorting a pretty funny giant spider tank through the level.

Got to a gate that wouldn't open. Seemed like the objective was for all of us to stand on some plates. Didn't seem to be any group voice chat and no one would party up. Took 1 idiot about 5 mins to realize he needed to stand on the plates with us, even though we were constantly pinging the map.

Eventually we get it and one player gets launched up to an area above us. I assume his job was to go hit a switch to open a gate, but he never did. He just fought around up there, walked around and never did anything. Since you need 3 standing on plates to launch the fourth we all were just stuck at the locked gate.

I didn't see anyway to get up there, I tried to party invite the guy to tell help him figure it out but no responce. I went on to make a sandwich, came back and same scnene. 3 of us stuck at gate, one guy running farther away on a part of the map we couldn't get too.
This went on for 15 mins.
I quit out, played some Bloodborne.

I haven't experienced that exact issue but I have had people not step on plates. Even had one guy who would get close but not do it on purpose. I just chalk it up to the Beta and people fucking around in a game that they will more than likely not pay $60 for and not ever play again. I don't know why 2K went with the plate thing instead of a Diablo 3 type prompt that pops up in the middle of the screen to start the next activity and teleport to that location.

Anything involving players to coordinate precisely or block movement forward is open to all kinds of grief.
 

patchday

Member
High level gear is kinda moot due to the activation costs, I have legendary gear and I still use white since its stats are still in line with some of my higher gear or in some cases beating it. I prefer buying buildables early on just due to the xp gain from them anyway.

Yes but once the community hops in full force a meta might emerge. Perhaps there will be a dedicated builder and the "Carry" needs to accumulate his gold quickly to unlock the late game items.

I don't understand how the activation costs will make the pvp fair and balanced.

Plus surely more items will get added later
 

Fezan

Member
The match making in this game sucks. let's party all lvl 1-10 against 25-45 lvl guys. This happened to me in the last 6 games. Completely ruins any fun in the game when one team doesn't even know where to go and other team knows everything
 

Special C

Member
Is FoV something that can be patched or changed before lauch or is it pretty much set in stone? Seems like a deal breaker for a lot of folks.
 
I'm at the title screen. Just have to wait for the servers.

In the meantime I could use this art for my background on Xbox:
cxM1nfs.jpg
 
The entire evening I've been picking Ambra just to counter people picking her that don't know how to properly play her. It's hilarious when 10 minutes into the game they have zero kills and 6-7 deaths then they just leave. If nobody picked Ambra on the other team I stick to mainly supporting with Sunspots and punishing people who decide to dive.

Can't wait till she gets nerfed.
 

Xevren

Member
I <3 Benedict, was lucky and got some extra taunts from packs with him. They're all chicken dances from the Bluth family from Arrested Development lol.
 
Played the story mode last night, pretty awesome! They are like raids. Any idea on how many story missions are in the final game? Also, there is a bad ass looking Battleborn you can unlock by getting silver in both story missions I guess, but how do you get silver? Is it just score based? I assume you can unlock him in the beta by just getting silver on the two missions playable, I went against a guy using him and he was only level 16 or so I think. Talking about Ghalt.

I love Montana, but he's so hard to move around sometimes. I get stuck on seemingly nothing. And I hope they include some way to better differentiate your minions from enemy minions in the final game.
 
There is zero way this game does not come out with a ranked mode. It would be absolutely idiotic.

I could see them holding off on a ranked mode for a little while to iron out some of the balance issues. I would go as far as to say that when / if played at a higher level of play, the game is super unbalanced right now. With certain characters that outright invalidate others.

This doesn't show in extremes in this low level casual play, but you can see it from time to time, with characters like Gallilea and Ambra especially right now. There are other issues too though, like you shouldn't be able to do things like head-glitch with snipers.

Then again a ranked mode would expose these issues very clearly, very early on, but it would also be a hot mess, and largely unenjoyable beyond very particular character combinations.
 
I could see them holding off on a ranked mode for a little while to iron out some of the balance issues. I would go as far as to say that when / if played at a higher level of play, the game is super unbalanced right now. With certain characters that outright invalidate others.

This doesn't show in extremes in this low level casual play, but you can see it from time to time, with characters like Gallilea and Ambra especially right now. There are other issues too though, like you shouldn't be able to do things like head-glitch with snipers.

Then again a ranked mode would expose these issues very clearly, very early on, but it would also be a hot mess, and largely unenjoyable beyond very particular character combinations.

Like you said, ranked mode would expose the exploits/glitches a lot faster than casual play just because people wanting to rank up will use every advantage possible. Just the nature of competitive games. Everyone that knows anything about these types of games know that balance is a very long battle and the meta can turn a once useless character into the next powerhouse when combined with another once the synergy is discovered.

I think in the end it all comes down to how prepared they are to quickly make changes on clearly broken things.
 
Had my first chance to jump in last night and my wife and I really enjoyed what we played of it. Many of the issues I've read here I have the same problems with, FOV, general busy-ness on screen, etc, but I still had a ton of fun despite the issues. Liked playing as the ninja looking guy with four arms, can't recall the name, wife enjoyed the bow girl, also can't recall the name.

I was on the fence but this was enough to push me and I've gone ahead and preordered now. I still have major concerns about the community holding up long term but I'll enjoy it while there is one at the start.
 

dLMN8R

Member
Definitely curious to see how this runs on Xbox One compared to PS4. The game was fun on PS4 for me, but I prefer playing shooters on Xbox One and in general I get better networking connectivity on the Xbox, which supports 5GHz wi-fi, compared to my PS4 which can only connect to my 2.4GHz SSID.
 

Kuno

Member
Can't believe the amount of apathy for this game. I tried the beta on PS4 and while it didn't set my world on fire, I thought it was pretty fun.

I went on Twitch today to see how the first day of the PC beta was going and I had to scroll way, WAY down to see anyone playing it.

I feel like I'm not seeing a bunch of hate around for the game, it's just that people don't seem to care one way or the other. It's weird.
 
Can't believe the amount of apathy for this game. I tried the beta on PS4 and while it didn't set my world on fire, I thought it was pretty fun.

I went on Twitch today to see how the first day of the PC beta was going and I had to scroll way, WAY down to see anyone playing it.

I feel like I'm not seeing a bunch of hate around for the game, it's just that people don't seem to care one way or the other. It's weird.

Gearbox, specifically Randy, hasn't been doing a great job at properly marketing this game. It's day one for the opening beta so I would wait until the weekend to see if it's caught on on PC. I'm seeing a lot of people on PS4 playing it.
 

Trukk

Neo Member
It's a pretty good game, though not without it's flaws as just about everyone else pointed out.
Personally, my major issue is mainly not knowing where my teammates are in PvP, especially When I'm playing support.

A neat little thing I don't think was mentioned was that some characters have unique dialogue for single player, if they're the "star" (last person introduced in the Starring as intro). Only 2 I've seen are Whiskey Foxtrot on the rift level, and El Dragon on ISIC's level.
 

patchday

Member
Can't believe the amount of apathy for this game. I tried the beta on PS4 and while it didn't set my world on fire, I thought it was pretty fun.

I went on Twitch today to see how the first day of the PC beta was going and I had to scroll way, WAY down to see anyone playing it.

I feel like I'm not seeing a bunch of hate around for the game, it's just that people don't seem to care one way or the other. It's weird.

Its up to 4k viewers now which is not too bad. Think the open beta came out at a crazy time with Dark Souls III demanding many people's attention
 

Flunkie

Banned
I love this game and I'm not afraid to hide it. I thought it would be the biggest flop but I'm loving every minute of it. Play with friends, it's so fun.
 

Keasar

Member
PC version definitely improved my impression on the game. Much smother framerate, bigger FOV and better controls.
 

Jito

Banned
PC version definitely improved my impression on the game. Much smother framerate, bigger FOV and better controls.

I was just going to say, from watching the streams you can tell the game was designed for PC from the ground up. I'm not one to care about framerate in a game but it looks so much nicer at 60 FPS. Real shame they didn't get 60 FPS on consoles, really hampers the style of the game.
 
So, since I hit Rank 40. The characters that stuck to me are:

Thorn, Reyna, El Dragón, Galilea, Ambra, Deande, Kleese, Rath and Ghalt.
 
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