So, for some reason, I’ve been getting recommendations for videos on YouTube regarding what people want to see in BL4 at launch. This is a bit weird, because there has not been an announcement of BL4 yet. Many, myself included, assume or think that it might come out around the same time as the movie later this year, but we don’t really know.

The thing is, these videos are very much interested in things like end-game content, proper balancing of weapons, minimizing bugs and crashes and so forth. Sure, these are decent requests, but to me this kind of approach sort of misses some aspects of the game, so let’s talk about them.

Lor Needs to Return

Lor is a transman. We meet him pre-transition in BL3 and post-transition in whatever the Tales game was called. Not that I ever played the Tales game, but I read on him appearing in the game. I think this character’s transition was handled somewhat poorly, as there is tragedy in there that wasn’t addressed, but also because there have been characters who have socially transitioned, so why didn’t Lor?

Also, importantly, Zer0’s interested in him can’t have changed. Zer0 is a robot or alien (we don’t really know), who was immediately smitten with Lor when first meeting him pre-transition. (Or should that be ‘her’, I’m not really sure, but I always feel it’s safer to use the current pronouns.) So, Zer0 should still maintain his feelings.

Character-Specific Voicelines from the NPCs

They did this in the Pre-Sequel, but not in 3. This seems weird. Amara would profess her joy in meeting a fellow Siren to Lilith, but Lilith seems dismissive of her, because Lilith doesn’t have a voiceline specifically addressing this. She answers with the exact same lines she does with every character. That’s just bad. Lilith seems like an asshole and this is one more way she is completely incompetent, when, as a leader, she can’t even recognize this very basic need for recognition from someone working for her.

Give Me Mad Moxxi Back

She is now mostly known as just Moxxi (I think the exception is Timothy calling her Mad Moxxi, when you first call her from his hideout in DLC1 of BL3), but when first introduced, she was Mad Moxxi. This side of her does pop up, but I would love to see her going back to whatever she did to initially get that moniker. Maybe she’s even the villain in a DLC or something. Or maybe Lilith is gone and Ava is missing (hopefully), so she is now ruling the whatever the central location is with an iron fist. I don’t really know. I just know that if I had the chance, she is the one character I would like to write for.

Less Returning PCs

Do we really need the B-Team back? I didn’t find them funny in BL3, so maybe they should just be gone for a while. I mean, there’s now 20 different playable characters (five of which are dead), which would be nice to see, but at the same time, I don’t want them to tie their hands by feeling that we need to have an opportunity to meet all of them again. Maybe some of them should just be gone for now. Or maybe we just meet Salvador in a bar somewhere as an easter egg and that’s it.

Don’t bury everyone and I know it can be hard to choose, but no matter how much I like playing Amara, she is not the most likeable character, so maybe she doesn’t need to return. (Bring Moze back though. She’s going to be fun no matter what. To me she’s the most representative character of the mayhem philosophy behind the series, you know, a combination of firepower and recklessness. Or maybe the way to bring Amara back would be the two of them together as a couple.)

One-life Mode

I mean, why not. It’s the way I like to play the game. You could even add gravestones into the map for places where your previous characters (played in this mode) happened to die.