What the Bloody Harvest Patch Says for Borderlands 3

Ever since Borderlands 3 launched on September 13^th, fans have been enjoying the zany shooter for its comedic first-person shooter relief, love-to-hate villains, and whacky fighting styles. A thrilling game series to grab a hold of the gaming world ever since the first Borderlands came out in 2009. Their reign on first-person shooters has stayed consistent throughout the years for its memorable moments of gameplay. Since the dynamic start, Gearbox, the developers of Borderlands 3, have tweaked and tinkered at some elements of the game throughout the past month and a half. While some updates have been praised by fans for creating much-needed balance, others say the fixes are merely temporary band aids on a heavily bleeding issue. Can the game keep stable without some proper heal regeneration?

This month saw the Bloody Harvest update, the 3^rd update so far for the game, the new free limited time public event starting October 24^th. Features include some spooky themes and unlockable Halloweens heads for the 4 characters in play. Certain bugs were fixed, such as crash reports and loading maps for a more stable gaming experience. General aesthetic additions and the company’s main hotfix focused more on the overall gameplay than the last update of weapon damage management. Gearbox also listened to the complaints about the player’s companions (Moze’s Iron Bear, FL4K's cuddly pets, and Zane's Digi-Clone) being too weak and are looking to adjust the damage according to the relevant skills and gear. This is huge, considering this has been a consistent complaint across all players focus for making the game more enjoyable and balanced with certain character builds.

Heading over to the Borderlands 3 subreddit forum, many have shown their approval to the new updates. Reddit users praised Gearbox’s focus on game stability, buffs for lesser-performing builds and playstyles, skippable cut scenes, loot pools, and more bank space. Some even poked fun at the game for the adjusted volume of the 2K and Gearbox logo intro movies saying “now they’re nerfing our memes.”

For performance and stability, Gearbox has stated in the patch update notes that;

“Game performance and stability continue to be our top priorities. The first fruits of that labor will be released in our upcoming November patch, with various improvements game-wide. We've also been hard at work improving the game's stability and more improvements in this regard are expected to be included in the November patch. Performance and stability will continue to be an ongoing effort with more fixes rolled out with each upcoming patch.”

That all being said, overall one complaint is consistent on the reddit forum and across the internet. Ever since the patch, players can no longer mark items as junk or favorite. Such marking helps with keeping order of the guns players have while easily being able to toss the ones they don’t need. The importance of marking items changes the flow of a daily runthrough or boss farming, considering the massive dump of guns players can collect.

On Gearbox’s official twitter account, they’ve commented on some of the bugs on the 28^th;

“This past week during the Borderlands’ Anniversary Event, specific Mayhem modifiers with weapon penalties were reduced and there was an increased chance for Anointed gear to drop. We've been listening and will not be reverting them back to their previous values tomorrow!”

No word on the marking items however.

Not all is lost as the developers seem to be listening closely to everyone’s pleas for certain fixes. Their passion to keeping the game the way the fans desire to play is admirable and speaks volumes to their love for their Borderlands series. Love that is, in turn, transferred to all fans alike around the world. Certainly, Gearbox has examples in games like Anthem of what not to do to keep their fans happy and playing weekly.

Enjoying the game is only half the fun as collecting the thousands of guns available along with testing out all the different styles with each character's gameplay. The content level of the game continues to rise for the players and its popularity will continue into the foreseeable future. A blast of a time, both for you and the guns.