Ok so Rich and I played more Borderlands 3 on his PS4 and oh my gosh the game is a technical mess.  The lag makes it almost unplayable, having the game hang every time we open the menu is absolutely nuts.  Trying to view the skill trees is an exercise in frustration, sometimes that page for the trees will load, but then you have to wait like five to ten seconds for the tree to populate.  There was one moment where we just sat there waiting and it felt like twenty seconds until it appeared.

On the plus side, the character models for our players (and Moze’s mech) appeared first complete with useless animations that I guess are now necessary.  BL3 feels like it’s injecting as much “stuff” on to the screen as possible to make everything feel cool, but it apparently just kills performance.  The textures take forever to load.  There was one new area we happened upon where the following exchange happened:

Alex – Wow this place will look great once the textures appear.

Rich – What do you mean, they’re here- (textures finally load) -OH THERE THEY ARE.

It’s still fun, but it’s hard to judge whether or not I like any of the new features since BL3 derps so hard on the fundamentals.  Intense gunfights have framerates so low they look like slideshows being downloaded through a 56k modem, and god forbid you try to open a menu or get into Moze’s mech during one.

The maps… oh my god the maps are horrible so far.  Why all the verticality?  There’s so much backtracking to get to climbable areas and the maps themselves seem to mistake “large” for “interesting.”  During vehicle segments I’ve been more useful just holding up the map than actually trying to shoot things.

Also, maybe we missed the new way to do this (if you can even do it at all), but we can’t find out how to teleport to the gunner seat in your teammate’s already deployed vehicle.  That was always an option in other games and was super useful… can’t seem to do that in BL3.  Hopefully we’re just dumb and missed something.