Borderlands 3: A Brief Retrospective

It’s been 6 years since Borderlands 3 released, and 16 years since the venerable franchise launched – an instant hit that popularized the “looter-shooter” genre. And for all that time, I’ve been a diehard fan of the franchise.

It’s had its highs and lows like any long-running IP, and while the lows have been really low, on the whole, it’s stayed true to its roots as an FPS, keeping the genre alive with some of the best mechanics in its class.

The writing on the other hand…

Look, Handsome Jack is one of the greatest villains to ever grace a video game; this is incontrovertible. He was well-written and brilliantly-acted, with a depth to his character that still resonates today.

Which is why I was so pissed off when Borderlands 3 released, and we got saddled with two of the most annoying characters in not only the franchise’s history, but in video game history in general.

The Calypsos fucking suck. Again, this is incontrovertible.

But – and this is a big one – I legitimately feel that they could’ve been every bit the mainstays that Handsome Jack has become. Which is why I decided to write this little article to explain my rationale.

FYI, this is going to require some in depth knowledge of Borderlands 3, so if you haven’t played it, I’m afraid you’re not going to get much out of this.

Your Villains as Streamers

Unless you’ve been living under a rock this last decade, you’re probably familiar with streamers – people that record themselves doing something (video games, art, watching movies, irritating people with their bullshit “pranks,” lounging half-naked in a hot tub, etc). They’ve taken the online space by storm, and quite possibly represent the future of content creation as a whole.

Their fans are ravenous, their paychecks are in the seven figures, and millions of people hang on their every word.

And bear in mind that these are streamers as they stand today.

Is it really beyond the realm of possibility that, with a communication infrastructure that spans six galaxies, these idiots sitting in front of their webcams might be viewed as gods by a certain subset of their fanbase? Especially if they have supernatural powers beyond the ken of mere mortals?

The concept of the Calypsos is actually quite an interesting one, and when I first found out that that’s where the story was headed, I was totally on board. After all, coming off the heels of Handsome Jack, I thought that the Gearbox team might be on to something.

Then I started playing the game.

What started as an interesting concept was immediately boiled down to its most boring aspect: Streamers are annoying. Then, as is the Gearbox way, the writers dialed it up to 11, and the Calypsos became the most insufferable assholes in the franchise’s history. And not interesting assholes like Handsome Jack, either. Just Plain Jane annoying douchebags that made me want to stick icepicks in my ears every fucking time they opened their goddamned mouths.

Seriously, it got to a point that I just muted my TV whenever they started talking.

So, if you look at it from that point of view, the writers were 1000% successful.

Get ready, because here comes that “but” again.

BUT… What if we tried a more nuanced approach? What if we took the streamer concept, vivisected the Calypsos from tip to taint, and rewrote them so that they weren’t horrible excuses for video game characters?

You with me so far? Cool, let’s press on.

Deprogramming the Cult Leaders

To my mind, the core of the Calypsos is their relationship to each other. Not the outward-facing “streamer” personalities that took center stage, but how they feel about one another, deep down in their heart of hearts.

Now, this was alluded to a couple of times throughout the game in the form of ECHO Logs and cinematics – the pair can’t stand each other for the most part. It’s only when they have an external enemy to focus on, or an objective to fulfill, that they unite even for a moment.

But it wasn’t explored nearly enough for my taste, so we’re going to pretend that it has been here.

You’ve got Troy, the once-conjoined twin to Tyrene, who is forced to leech power and energy from his sister in order to survive. He’s awkward, he’s lanky, and he is forced to walk in Tyrene’s shadow.

This, right here, is their relationship.

Rather than have Troy be an irritating carbon copy of his sister, what if we throttle back his personality? What if we have him completely eclipsed by his sister, despite his work at building up their streaming empire? Always lurking in the background, trying to set up a camera angle, or being verbally berated by Tyrene.

Hell, what if we have him be an entirely silent antagonist? Crushed into subservience by the overwhelming weight of Tyrene’s personality, and the knowledge that he cannot survive without her.

Wouldn’t that build up some serious resentment? Wouldn’t that create some interesting character moments? How would that Troy react the second he was given a taste of power by absorbing Maya’s siren abilities?

You could’ve had a schism in the once-monolithic bloc that was their cult as their viewers and members are forced to chose sides. You could’ve had Troy unleash all that resentment and rage on Tyrene, draining her for all she’s got until she becomes one of the husks that she’s so proud of making.

Or, you could have her finally crush her brother once and for all, keeping her as the “girl-boss” that every developer seemed to be searching for at that point in gaming.

Either way, by not going all in on irritating the player, you would’ve had a much more nuanced story that maybe challenged the player in the same way that Handsome Jack’s arc did.

Keeping What You Can

Now that we’ve fixed Troy, we can take a look at the squeakiest fucking wheel in the game (well, next to Ava, but my brain tends to literally block her out, so I forget about her), Tyrene.

As the “face” of the Calypso twins, she’s the one taking center stage more often than not. She’s the Siren, it’s her voice that we hear over the ECHO communication – as she would say, “She’s the star.”

So you might be wondering, how do we fix her?

The answer is that we don’t. As a matter of fact, we could arguably push her even further. If I had my druthers, I’d remove most (if not all) of the childish behavior (i.e. the fart jokes, etc – dear God the fart jokes…), but, on the whole, I wouldn’t touch a damned thing. If anything, I’d make her even more vicious – maybe have her be physically abusive to Troy, or actually show her slaughtering her cult members with a psychotic gleam in her eye.

This is now possible because she has a counterpoint in Troy; he is the silence to all her noise. It allows you to push the envelope even further, because you don’t have to listen to them in stereo anymore, and you’ve got a juxtaposition to fall back on.

This also lends itself to more mature writing – it gives you a chance to delve even further into the dark side of unchecked fame, power and control. What does that kind of worship do to a human? Especially a maladjusted one that already has the powers of a god?

If you had billions of followers across thousands of planets all screaming your name, ready to kill for you, die for you, even kill themselves for you, what does that do to your psyche? Do you start to believe them? Do you lose touch with reality? Do you truly believe that you are a god?

By allowing Tyrene to truly take center stage, we now have the ability to explore those concepts and themes.

Yes, as the base game stands today, we’ve got the endless repetition of these two idiots talking about how powerful they are. They won’t shut up about how they’re going to be gods, and how they’ve got all the money, and all the followers, blah, blah, blah.

And while this may be true, nobody fucking cares, because they are so excruciating to deal with. By throttling back Troy, and hitting the gas on Tyrene, we’ve got a nice little dynamic that we can use to show rather than tell the truth of what they’re endlessly prattling on about.

In Conclusion

I firmly believe that if the gameplay hadn’t been as perfect as it was (drop rates for legendaries aside), the Calypsos alone would’ve been enough to sink Borderlands 3. We would’ve gotten no DLC, no Takedowns, no seasonal events, the game would’ve been consigned to oblivion once word got around about how bad these two idiots were written.

But the funny thing is that it really wouldn’t have taken much to fix them. One simple change to Troy Calypso and you could’ve kept the majority of the campaign intact, and actually made the twins interesting villains.

At least, that’s my two cents on it, anyway.

If you like what you’ve read, maybe go check out my YouTube channel, where I do pretty much the same thing to movies and TV shows. And if you like all of that, go ahead and stop by Amazon to grab one of my books – I just recently released Ash, the follow-up to my most popular book, Hollow.