Another Glorified Arena Expansion

One would think the creators of the BorderlandsConceptually, Borderlands is Mad Max but set on an alien planet, with magic. The game play might be action-shooter-RPG fare, with a bit of Diablo thrown in, but the aesthetic is pure, Australian post-apocalyptic exploitation. would have some basic understanding of what their audience wanted. While, sure, they put far too much focus on Handsome Jack, the primary antagonist of Borderlands 2 who then ended up taking over the whole franchise, they also have past experience they could work off of, illustrating what worked and what didn’t in each of their previous games and expansions. When developing content for the sequels, one would think that Gearbox, 2K, and their associated studios could look at past expansions and say, “you know, this really wasn’t a good idea. Let’s not do it again, especially not as a paid expansion…”

And yet, that’s precisely what they did with “The Holodome Onslaught”, the first full expansion for Borderlands: The Presequel. They could already see that people hated the last expansion that was nothing more than battle arenas, “Moxxi’s Underdome” for Borderlands. And they knew people hated that the creature arena in Borderlands 2 was locked away behind early purchase DLC, such that they eventually relented and let people get it packed in with digital copies of the game later on. So why on Earth did they think that making yet another quick set of battle arena missions for Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, and charging expansion pack money for it, was a good idea?

The concept for the expansion is simple: having completed the main adventure, the Vault Hunters are then tasked with heading to a new area on Elpis, the moon of Pandora, to meet up with a holo-trap who has missions for them. He wanted the hunters to head into a battle arena and fight wave after wave of increasingly difficult missions, all so the hunters can kill a bunch of stuff and prove their worth. Meanwhile, Axton and Tina, who missed the retelling of Athena’s adventure during the main game, ask her to retell it quickly while you fight. That’s it, that’s the whole adventure.

To be very, very blunt, this should have been packed into the main game, or at least included as a side area as part of a larger expansion. We’ve had pack-in battle arenas before. Fink’s Slaughterhouse was part of the second game, and it let you fight a bunch of bandits in increasingly difficult missions. The Ore Chasm came later in that game, and it similarly let you fight waves of Hyperion goons in increasingly difficult missions. These are standard parts of the games, and Gearbox clearly understood packing them in with main titles.

That’s why locking away the Animal Slaughterdome as a pre-order bonus / paid DLC for Borderlands 2 was so galling. It was clearly meant to be part of the main game but was simply locked away before the game was released so they could charge people for it after. Hell, even if you didn’t have the little expansion but you had a party leader who did, you could go in and fight in that creature arena because all the content came preloaded in Borderlands 2, it was just locked away rudely. That was stupid.

This is worse. It’s not only a paid DLC, but there’s little more content to it than any other basic battle arena setup. You get five main missions, and then a repeatable Badass version of the mission that you can play until you get bored. Spoiler, I was already bored in the first mission of this set, and it didn’t get any better after that point. If you’ve played one of these types of arenas you’ve played them all, and you know exactly how the missions go. Head in, kill things in waves, shoot until they’re all dead. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

The batch of enemies fought this time are the Eridians as well as Lost Legion soldiers, two of the new enemy types added into the main part of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. So you get a bunch of weird aliens, and alien-like soldiers, to fight until everything is dead. It’s really not that difficult, especially when you consider the Eridian creatures are all rather squishy, so the whole battle is a series of quick kills before wandering around an arena that is frankly too large for the number of enemies you have to fight until, at some point, the whole mission is blessedly over.

The game does try to add new things in. Unique to these missions are optional side objectives you can do, like killing giant, alien eyes, or saving scientists, or the like. These are okay, but the problem here is that the objectives can be handled in the first few seconds of the mission, on the first wave if you want, and then it’s back to basic killing because there’s nothing else special added to the mix. Do your objectives, and then it’s back to five waves of boring, tedious killing. I seriously was checked out by the end of the first mission because there was so little to do that I hadn’t already done countless times before.

That’s not to say that a setup like this couldn’t work. “Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep” included a battle arena set of missions that unlocked after you completed the main expansion, and that area let you fight all the new creatures that were added into the expansion. It was a nice bonus area included that let you squeak a little more content out of the game, if you so chose, but also let you avoid it all if you didn’t feel like playing yet another arena. You’d already gotten your money’s worth in the main expansion, so if you skipped this it wasn’t like you made a bad decision.

Here, though, the battle arena was the whole of the expansion. One new zone, six new missions, all of it set in the arena, and that was it. Had this been a bonus area unlocked at the end of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel I wouldn’t have minded. A little extra content to get your money’s worth. But making it a full paid expansion, one that you should have gotten a full adventure for considering what you paid, feels like a slap in the face. “We could have made you something bigger, but you’ll buy anything so buy this,” I can hear Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford saying when this expansion was in development.

But he was wrong. This expansion sold well, on top of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel selling below expectations. It was part of the reason why further expansions, past the first two released, weren’t put into development. Gearbox had a whole plan to support this game just as much as they did Borderlands 2, but crappy sales sank their plan. And really, when you play through this tiny little expansion you can understand why all the players avoided it. This expansion sucks.