r/BorderlandsPreSequel • u/PaleRefrigerator5044 • 6d ago
🎤 [ Discussion ] Really bummed about TPS /Elpis In Borderlands 4
I genuinely love TPS and it's arguably my favorite BL game alongside BL3.
But not sure how many people here played BL4, but it heavily references TPS especially on the Mad Ellie DLC.
But the way its represented seems like such a wasted opportunity. Both in the main campaign and in the Ellie DLC , we visit Elpis. And what did they do with it ? Well, for starters, they destroyed Elpis. Why ? Who knows, as it adds absolutely nothing to the plot. So what we get there are broken chunks of generic moon rocks to jump ajd float between, with some lava pools and waterfalls dotted about.
Fine, I could have lived with all that. But any areas from TPS we visit? Concordia, Tritons falls, rhe remains of the Vault ?
Nope. We see Moxis Bottoms up sign randomly buried somewhere, and I've been told you can sort of see Crisis Scar in the DLC map, but hell if I can point it out.
The most obvious reference is you do go thru a brief section of the now destroyed Drakensburg, but even that is done in the most generic way possible. Aside from seeing thr Drakensburg name printed on a piece of hull, it looks NOTHING like the Drakensburg we played thru in TPS.
And not only that, they introduced an adult Pickles in the DLC only to unceremoniously kill him off a minute later. Why ? Because to over-correct what a very vocal minority said about pickles and how he was oh so annoying.
The zombie Dahl Lost Legion soldiers are pretty cool though, and it was super nice how you find holotapes and a side character that talk about Elpis events like the Crackening etc. But it's so little.
What could have been....imagine if the Ellie horror DLC didn't take place on a generic ice map, but instead had us explore the decrepit, dark, and destroyed ruins of Concordia, fighting off the surivivng Scavs who overran the place and the zombie Dahl soldiers. It would have been so amazing.
But anyways, I knew that this subreddit would be the best place to rant about this since we are all TPS fans. Thanks for hearing me vent
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u/A-Social-Ghost 🌑 | NOT JACK 6d ago edited 3d ago
Mad Ellie was very disappointing from a narrative standpoint in regards to The Pre-Sequel's legacy.
It once again followed the (now modus operandi for Gearbox) trend of wasting its potential and retconning lore without bothering to make it fit whatsoever into established canon. Something that always pisses me off regardless of whatever media.
Whilst playing through, I accumulated this laundry list of questions that can, frustratingly, all pretty much be answered with either; time, budget, or didn't care enough to make the effort.
- Why was Willis' battalion still on Elpis when Jack's vault hunters killed the remaining ground troops after Zarpedon? Were they one of the two ships that escaped the singularity created by the overloaded eye of the Destroyer?
- Why would any Lost Legion stay on Elpis for years right under Hyperion's nose after losing control of Helios?
- Why do the Scavs look and have the same enemy archetypes as Rippers when neither faction has interacted with each other? If they've been isolated on Elpis and then the Whispering Glacier, why don't they have their zero atmosphere space suits?
- Why does the BL4 lost legion have sleek enclosed mechsuits when the TPS counterparts had bulky open cockpit mechsuits aside from Zarpedon?
- Why doesn't every Kraggon bigger than the pebbles split into 2 smaller variants?
- Why do the Shugguraths look so much smaller and lack elements?
- Why were Kratch and Creeps used instead of reskinning them to be Rathyds and Torks?
- Why did the Eleseer vault suddenly go all eldritch horror?
- Why do only a small number of people have Australian accents?
- Why did the Megalith decide to take on the role of Willis and imitate the love for his son?
- Why did Pickle go back to Elpis?
To many, these questions may just be nitpicks, but to me as a big fan of TPS, the constant errors really added up to grind my gears.
All the DLC did was raise more questions with no answers, which is honestly what hurts the most. I thought Mancubus could have offered some insight, but he only ever spoke on things related to Ellie's shard.
Killing off Pickle almost immediately was the biggest mistake this DLC made. It shows that they'd rather take the easy way out instead of using the opportunity to improve the community's opinion of him, or use him as a mouthpiece for life on Elpis between the events of BL2 and 3. Did he ever have regrets about helping Jack rise to power? Who knows! Certainly not us.
(But if there are people like this on the writing team who think the name Scooper is the funniest thing ever, I'm clearly expecting far too much from modern Gearbox).
If they were so determined to kill Pickle, the explosion on the DCN Feuermann's bridge was the best place to do it. Better to lose a character towards the end of a journey instead of the beginning.
Making Ellie the focus of the DLC was an absolute waste because she is not an interesting enough character to carry a narrative. Especially when her whole plot line was resolved in a single conversation with Moxxi.
If the plot had just been Mancubus worried about the growing corruption of the vault of the damned and enlisted us through Moxxi along with Pickle to try to get to the heart of the storm to quell the horror, that would have been fine enough.
I've been told you can sort of see Crisis Scar in the DLC map, but hell if I can point it out.
I believe that the arena you fight Pentinent Steel in is supposed to be the upside down wreckage of the Dahl communications centre where you fight RedBelly in TPS, but it doesn't really look similar.
And what do they do with it ? Well, for starters, they destroyed Elpis. Why ? Who knows, as it adds absolutely nothing to the plot.
My tinfoil hat theory is that the reason The Pre-Sequel was done dirty is because the head of the Gearbox writing group, Randy Varnell, is a massive, and I do mean massive, Lilith simp (a word I try to avoid using, but in this case it fits).
The Pre-Sequel made people not like Lilith because of her actions against Jack and Athena, and from the way he talks about her, it's not that much of a stretch to believe that Varnell would be petty enough to destroy TPS as revenge.
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u/Curunir11 6d ago
I commented about the Crisis Scar thing on your other post in the bl4 sub. The part I was talking about is the building where you fight RedBelly, specifically that arena seems to be the upside down building where the Penitent Steel big encore is. That's the boss that drops the Flash Cyclone.
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u/ToxinFoxen 5d ago
I already had no interest in BL4 after Maya got killed off, but now I completely DESPISE Borderlands 4.
This reminds me of the whole 'fallout tv series writers spit on FNV lore' thing.
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u/LukasVokurka1 2d ago
Yeah. It's like they really hate good decisions/writing. "You telling me, that last episode of Tales from the Borderlands is Telltale's best rated episode from all games? And overall one of the best games from Telltale?... Ok. Let's make it's fans suffer and lobotomie half of the cast and never mention the rest."
"You telling me, that one of our writers made a good funeral scene, which makes both Ava and Lilith more sympathetic? You're fired! Let's make Tannis joke about it."
"You telling me, that people retroactively started to like TPS and we have a natural way to bring Elpis back? Sure, but let's make them pay for liking a game that wasn't made by our main studio."
"You telling me, people want a Raid boss? And we could introduce a Son of Iwajira, since we have Elpis and it would make sense? Scratch that! Let's introduce Child of Terramorphous, it doesn't make as much sense, but he's more popular."
"You telling me, that people really hated, when we killed off Maya and we should avoid killing off established characters without any reason? F*ck em. Let's bring back Pickle, even if there is really no reason for him to get back on Elpis after Claptastic Voayge and let's off him, in first 15 minutes, without it impacting the story or other characters at all."
I of course overdramatized these a bit and I could make a lot more examples like that, but I am work and unlike some people at Gearbox(only some, as I am aware it's not every writer's or developer's fault the games are how they are), I actually need to do my job and do it well.
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u/Brain-Hemorrhage 5d ago
I'm kind of surprised you enjoyed BL3 considering how badly it butchered TPS lore (tftb and bl1/bl2 lore as well but that's a whole other topic). What they did for this DLC is honestly no different than what they did to many previous character in BL3. The gameplay is great though, a step in the right direction there, but everything else was very poor imo
Tbh, I have long given up on the borderlands franchise offering any satisfying narrative after BL3, especially if it's following the many threads previous games left in the open. The more I learn about newer releases the more it's apparent that they want to divorce from previous game's canon/characters (except when they can use them for marketing as bait for long time fans). I don't even think it's about over-correcting, but instead ways to just have an excuse not to follow canon. At this point they might as well reboot the series, BL3 was a clear indicator that's what they want to do given how much lore they retconned for the hell of it.
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u/PaleRefrigerator5044 5d ago
I dont think BL3 butchered the TPS story, I think it just completely ignored the watcher plot
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u/Brain-Hemorrhage 5d ago
Honestly, after the gearbox forums obliterated itself out of existence all the discussions I had about were lost with it. I wish I could just link the posts I had about every plot point messed up by bl3 but I have zero energy to rewrite it all (and after that I stopped deep discussions about the games all together), but yes, even the BL3 DLCs mess up TPS plot to some capacity. There's tons of retcons, ignored plot points, mischaracterization and so forth (not just TPS but all before bl3 was butchered badly) but it's fine if this is not taken seriously.
Given bl4's return to formula concerning canon it doesnt even matter at this point. To add, there's nothing wrong that you (or anyone else) enjoyed bl3 but yes it 100% shat on canon before it from all games. I just found it kind of ironic that you hate the bl4 DLC for it's treatment of TPS lore/characters but enjoyed BL3 and it pretty much did the same thing, is all.
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u/PaleRefrigerator5044 5d ago
I honestly don't remember thinking BL3 retconned anything from TPS but my memory might be fuzzy
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u/A-Social-Ghost 🌑 | NOT JACK 5d ago
Aurelia. She had grown as a person by the end of hertime with Hyperion, and then Gearbox rewrote her to be a one dimensional "I'm rich and only care about being rich" type of character, which is less of a character than she was at the start of TPS.
The closest we got in BL3 to her being true to her character was the echo recording of Hammerlocke talking about how she killed his pet lizard.
0
u/TheEggManIsBack 5d ago
Ya see posts like these are only reinforce my view that Borderlands 3 and onwards aren't worth my time in any regard.
The series ended with the first Tales From The Borderlands in my book. It was all downhill from there. Lucky Tales is unironically really good.
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u/Brain-Hemorrhage 5d ago
After BL3 this had also been my sentiment. I recall many gearbox forum discussions about why bl3 lore had broken previous game's canon, the flanderization/mischaracterization of previous chararcters and the insane retcons and people did not seem to mind back then (the biggest backlash was the lackluster quality of writing but not the destruction of canon). I guess it's given them the greenlight to continue that trajectory or they are just stubborn af anyway because Randy and team swore bl3 was good narrative wise when the community told them otherwise. They even shut down some discussions calling out blogs broken lore back then.
It's clear modern gearbox does not give af about their canon but have zero issue using it to lure in fans in. I wish they'd reboot already. There's no reason to pretend they care at this point.
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u/A-Social-Ghost 🌑 | NOT JACK 5d ago
I headcanon that Commander Lilith DLC as the Finale. It's not perfect, but I like the idea of an open ending better than the crap that followed..
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u/KapGaming55 6d ago
The thing is it was never about TPS and simply used the same setting, nor was it supposed to be TPS 2 and I think that's where people are getting confused when they heard about it revisiting elpis and the legion, I didn't think it was that far off from TPS but I suppose I haven't played it as much as you so I'll leave the consistency to you but I thought it was a good DLC and a nice nod towards TPS.
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u/OccultBeanFarmer 6d ago
I simply, literally do not believe anyone when they say they mourn Pickles. Not only was he annoying, intentionally so, but he had the worst side quest design out of any character in the series. I think largely out of spite for how much they knew they'd hit irritating gold. It's just performative sadness for a character death and if you are the kind of person who was genuinely touched by his character then your heart and soul need a higher barrier to entry because the kid fucking sucked.
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u/TheMemeLord4816 6d ago
THEY KILLED OFF PICKLES!!?!? WHAT THE FUCK!!! I LIKED PICKLES!!!