Request for  Drivergamer127
I'm in no way a certified or accredited reviewer, just giving my thoughts on a 'swing and a miss' for Gearbox.


I first heard of Battleborn when they unveiled their PR campaign back in 2015 on the Playstation Store, and from the first time I saw the trailer I immediately knew one thing: If I was going to play this game, I wanted to be the bird guy because he looked cool. But there were two fundamental problems; one, the college had extremely bad internet so that it would be impossible to play the game, and two, I had no idea what the game was about. (One of the many big issues with the PR campaign, we'll get to that.)

SO, time goes on and, though I'm focused on school, Battleborn was one of those games I swore I'd buy when the price dropped. Finally in March 2018, (STILL have no idea what this game's about), the price of the full game dropped to below $30. Seeing as the developers explicitly stated there weren't gonna be any more updates for it, I decided, "Hey it's now or never" and bought it.


STORY MODE
First thing I did was delve into the game's story mode since I wanted to get to know the characters before going online and kicking arse' with them. Maining Bennedict right off the bat, I did the missions and beat the game. Now, let me just say I love the presentation. The characters are pretty funny (Not at all the serious tone I thought'd it'd be; found myself chuckling a lot) and the opening animation/song is awesome. While it's MUCH more fun to play the storymode with friends, it suffers from a lack of any real world-building and development for the characters. The only characters that learn anything are Deande and Melka, who learn to 'put aside their differences and work together'....kay.

I give it the excuse that, because there's a 25 character roster, each with its own unique playstyles and personalities, developing a storyarc for all 25 would've been Marvel's Avengers level of storywriting. Be that as it may, eventually through the campaign you'll find yourself asking "Why am I doing this? What's the story?" And your favorite character will undoubtedly end up the same place they started. Which brings me to the next gripe I had about the game.

CHARACTERS
Kudos to Gearbox for creating 25 unique characters for a MOBA like environment. They all play differently and there's something for every type of player (Thankfully Bennedict matched my playstyle of DPS above all else). The only problem with this is, they don't get fleshed out...at all. While each character has specific LORE challenges that unlock bits and pieces of their past (which you then have to read or listen to), there's no story or character interaction (aside from shouted dialogue in match) for any of them. You don't know what they want/need, you don't see their relationship with one another, you don't get acknowledged with special dialogue, you're barely in the cutscenes. So you can imagine how frustrating it is knowing that your favorite character (whomever it may be) is hardly in the story or, better yet, hardly HAS a story to tell.

So what you're left with what is essentially 25 gimmicks- 25 forgettable, not fleshed out characters, who show potential for greatness through their designs and personalities, but nothing more.

Ironically, that's okay.I used to play Unreal Tournament for the Sega Dreamcast religiously (This game is run on the Unreal Engine) and none of those characters had a story, so it's completely doable and still fun, which brings me to:

PVP
Let me tell you, in 2018 these modes are FUN and addictive. There's always something to do, someway to help your team, and the banter between characters is pretty funny. (Friggin' Toby...) With the XP system and character Rank perks, you'll always feel like you're actually GETTING something out of playing the matches. It can be a learning curve depending on what character you play but, once you hone your skills and strategize with them, it's satisfying to be able to do your character's 'job' online.

You can tell that this was the developers true focus and they clearly thought that this game was going to be the next big thing because the presentation is very enjoyable. A 'labor of love' as they called it. Sadly though, there's only 3 maps for each type of game mode and they're not exactly innovative. You're not gonna ever think, 'Wow this map is really cool/beautiful/awesome!" Which, okay, we're here to PVP, not gawk at virtual sights. Still, 100 games later with only 3 average looking maps, you're gonna get PVP fatigue pretty quick.

WHY BATTLEBORN FAILED
Battleborn is NOT a bad game. You can actually tell the developers really tried with it, but it was a plethora of both outside and inside reasons why its playerbase deteriorated from 2016-2018.
The most popular mantra is that a little known Blizzard game called "Overwatch" killed it since they released within 2 weeks of each other, but that's not the entire story. Battleborn STILL had a decent playerbase at launch. But it was pretty much all these things that made it suffer:

-A PR campaign that was both uninformative, didn't target the correct market, and started way too early.
-Bugs and tech problems at launch, (Which was fixable, but a deterrent for those wanting to try Overwatch then instead)
-A systematically flawed game architecture that forced PVP purists to PVE and PVE purists to suffer through gamebreaking bugs/tweaks to NPCs and characters (Shades of DCUO)
-Taking away the option to choose what PVP game you wanted to counter long que times (Goodbye PVP players), which they later added back.
-Not going Free to Play (This is debated in the community but I stand by this)
-BattlePorn (As a furry I laugh at this because I would've been all over this with Bennedict goodies XD. One of the bigwigs at the studio believed that they could draw in a bigger audience for the game if they used rule34 to do so via reddit. Not only did this do the OPPOSITE, but many saw it as an admittance of defeat and boarded the "Goodbye Battleborn" hype train)

There's a bunch of others but, because i got into the game so late, it's not my place to speak about matters I know nothing of.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
Don't play this for PC, it's already dead there but PS4 and Xbox are still kicking. With Steven Spielberg's "Ready Player One" coming out (a few Battleborn characters are featured there like Toby, Bennedict, Ambra, and El Dragon), it's safe to say it's now or never for if you want to try this game out and see 'What would have been'. It's FREE TO PLAY and a pretty enjoyable game should you want to drop the 20-30 bucks for the full version.

It's a shame Bennedict is another case of a good character wasted by major studio decisions so that we'll never see more content or story with him. He really did have potential to be great and popular in this fandom.

For you future Salesmen/Artists/Developers out there, learn from Gearbox's mistakes:
-Know what market/and demographic you want to target. (Was this a MOBA or FPS? Why did it target neither market specifically?)
-Create the product FOR that market- don't be overly ambitious and overextend yourself. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
-Good god, watch your release dates so you don't get molly whopped by a competitor.
-Inform, Inform, Inform. People buy from people they trust, not people they like. (At launch, people still didn't understand what Battleborn was. You gonna pay 60 bucks for a product you don't know?)
-Research and know what you're doing. (There's no reason this game's structure should have been counter-PVP when PVP is supposed to be its biggest draw. Why would you force a player to PVE to get items to make their character/playstyle better, but at the same time, NERF and tweak characters to balance PVP but make the PVE players suffer?)

As for me, these days I play it just like I did the original Unreal Tournament- for fun. It's clear E-Sports isn't happening for this game as they'd hoped for, so I just play to complete the challenges and learn what little there is to learn about each character (maybe adopt a few personalities for future projects as well). My time with Bennedict was enjoyable and I thought i'd do a little fan art tribute before moving on to a different game. Mark my words, you'll be seeing a his spiritual successor in a project coming 2019 ;)