First: I haven’t finished the game yet. I just haven’t bothered. It just hasn’t been that much fun, that I would have felt the desire to put more hours into it.
I have no idea how close I am to any kind of ending for the story, because the story hasn’t really moved at all in about 10 levels (my character is currently at level 23). I guess there’s something happening, but there doesn’t seem to be any kind of progression. Just me moving from place to place.
But hey, details….
Note: I’m assuming you have played other games in the franchise.
I hate the character creation. The characters from the previous games have been one of the stronger aspects of the game. Especially in BL3. Now, they have had to lose that in order to make a quite boring character creation system. Also, since you can mix the various classes fairly easily, they’ve just pretty much gone back to BL1 style skill trees, where you get various bonuses, but they have lost the glorious skill trees of BL3.
The overmap is horrible. Instead of just moving from map to map, you have to move through the “overmap”, which feels like unnecessary business work. It’s slow, it doesn’t look very good and the camera is bugged. Also, you can’t see a minimap in this context, so you have to keep checking your map to see where you need to go. Also, in order to make you go into to overmap, you can’t fast travel between maps (well, you can, but with huge limitations).
The actual maps are too large and complicated. There’s a lot of running around to get to places. Also, here’s a weird thing: They added a lot of stuff to find to the maps. There seems to be a couple of dozen hidden objects in some of these maps. And I like to explore. I like to go to each nook and cranny to see if there’s something to find there. At the same time, they decided to make opponents respawn quite fast. So, they want you to explore while at the same time they want to keep you fighting. Come on. Which one is it? Exploration isn’t very fun if you can’t just keep exploring without having to kill those same opponents over and over again.
Speaking of opponents, what’s the point of having second winds or “death saves” if the enemies keep teleporting, hiding underground or sometimes even take you down from behind cover where they shouldn’t even be able to see you?
I’m going to punish myself a little more with this and I might find myself even enjoying it, but part of me just wants to go back to the earlier games already.
Ad addendum: I did finish the game, but it did not make me feel any better about the game. Quite the opposite, in fact.
One of the maps was just extremely bad. The area in itself is hard to navigate, but it’s worse, because the map is mostly useless in this regard. Do they actually play these games?
The final fight was just frustrating. I had put a lot of points into melee, but the final fight includes an enemy, which you can’t get close enough to hit with your melee weapon. Yeah, that was cool. Also, I only had elemental weapons and that thing would either resist or be immune to everything I tried to hit it with. That’s not exactly good game design.
Also, most of the legendary items I found throughout my playthrough were items that were for classes I wasn’t, so they were useless for me. That’s fun.
Also, the end game design feels very stupid. Why is the myth rank just so stupid? The UI is clumsy at best.
The weirdest thing about the game is probaly that the journale is bugged. They had four working versions of it available, so how were they able to mess it up? It’s not a complicated functionality. Or at least it shouldn’t be. Still, quite often it would just be hidden until I finished a quest. While this wouldn’t be bad in some situations, the way levels work in this game makes it much worse. Most of the maps are going to be on your level, but story maps have a minimum level, which forces you to level up before continuing. However, if you can’t see your side quests, leveling up is pretty boring and slow.