Borderlands 3 is the newest addition to the Borderlands franchise. The fans of this series are no strangers to adding challenges to the games to make them more difficult. This is seen from the multitude of players of Borderlands 2 who tried melee only runs. One fan of the franchise and YouTuber, Senza, decided to try and beat the game using only Tediore reloads and has succeeded.
Tediore is a weapons manufacturer in the Borderlands universe with a particular function that makes them different than everyone else. The function the guns have is that when they are reloaded, the character throws the gun like a grenade and it explodes. As the guns increase in rarity and level the damage, they deal with the reload explosions increases as well.
The video of the full run is here, but viewers should be warned that it is NSFW.
Borderlands challenge runs through the game with these stipulations usually revolve around using a single character. Melee only runs in Borderlands 2, usually featured either Zer0 the Assassin or Kreig the Psycho. These classes had skill trees that made them very useful with this type of play. The Tediore reload only run revolved around the new character Moze. She has a skill tree, titled Demolition Woman, that focuses heavily on explosions allowing players to deal more damage by doing the Tediore reload.
Senza has stipulations to make his run as legitimate as possible. The only damage to enemies he can do is with the reload of the gun, no legendary class mods, and no use of legendary shields. He cannot use any legendary Tediore weapons that would have any kind of increased damage or strange mechanics, boosting the damage or doing damage that may not be from an explosion.
The run was not without its share of challenges. Senza recounts the difficulties he had with the boss enemy Shiv, who charges at the player making getting the perfect throw of the gun a difficult thing to do. He also talks about the run-up to another boss where the enemies did a lot of damage despite the enemies being at the same level as him as well as running into Anointed Enemies. Then there is a mission that forced Senza to fail the challenge by making him kill enemies by running them over rather than killing them with the reload of a Tediore weapon. Senza was able to find a weapon to ease the difficulty of the challenge once he landed on the planet Promethea.
It will be interesting to see if this challenge gains more traction like the melee only challenges did in Borderlands 2.
Borderlands 3 is now available on PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Stadia.