So it's been a few days since Borderlands 3 released (at least at the time of writing this), and we've been glued to our monitors ever since. It really is just more of the same great Borderlands content, but updated. Frankly, it would've been disappointing any other way, it's all the fans wanted. Just take the same cell-shaded chaos that we know and love, add some new environments, skills, guns, characters, and missions, and it's ready to ship out! But, that's not to say that there aren't any flaws.

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The title had plenty of bad press leading up to its release, and it's apparent that it's still a couple of patches away from running efficiently. So, let's go over our early impressions, and talk about what we're smiling and groaning about in Borderlands 3.

10 Love: All Those Fancy Quality-Of-Life Changes

First of all, can we talk about how many quality-of-life changes BL3 has? Sure at first glance it looks like a snazzier BL2, but if we look a bit deeper, it's easy to see that Gearbox listened to the fans comments about the older games. We're talking things like instant ammo reloads, quick-selling, organizing guns, more customizable options, more gun variants, renaming some offensive enemies, and even adding in more movement options!

Seriously, this game is incredibly streamlined in the best of ways. It's absolutely what most of us were expecting from the people who invented the looter shooter genre.

9 Don't Love: All Those Bugs, Glitches, and Crashes

We get it, the game just came out. But, that doesn't excuse the shoddy interface of the Epic Game Store that makes it difficult to watch for patches or talk with other players. Basically, the game is buggy. Some people are saying that progress carries between multiplayer sessions, others are saying it doesn't.

Plenty of players are experiencing the flying bug thanks to the early "zero-gravity" story segment. And oodles of Vault Hunters are outraged at losing their characters and bank storage due to Epic's awful cloud saving. It's an incomplete product, no other way to put it, but what we have so far is still an absolute blast to play.

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8 Love: Being Able To Fast Travel From Anywhere

We intentionally left this out of the initial QoL discussion because it really deserves its own entry. There's finally "real" fast travel in Borderlands! Before, players could only fast-travel from specific points in each zone, and it made for a ton of backtracking per play session.

Now, Vault Hunters can travel to their cars, to different areas, even to different planets, all from the comfort of their in-game map. Of course, it's as buggy as the rest of the game, with fast-travel randomly not activating at times, but still, a huge step forward for the franchise.

7 Don't Love: Being Stuck Watching The Cinematics

Let us skip cutscenes and startup videos already! This is the first player-made mod we're hoping for, and it can't come quick enough. Because the game is so buggy, it also crashed a few times for us. Luckily, thanks to the constant auto-saving, real progress is rarely lost. But, because we're restarting the game often, we've quickly become sick of the intro videos before the main menu.

We're talking the dancing Claptrap, Gearbox Logo, and AMD video that we're stuck watching each and every time. But that's not all, the many cutscenes throughout the game are also unskippable! Which is odd, considering the game was designed for replayability. And we're not even going to mention how awful the initial load is for Direct X 12 users.

6 Love: All Those Hilarious Skins And Customizables

They've really stepped up the options in Borderlands 3. In the original, there were only some recolor options (though the recent GOTY Edition added some heads). in BL2 and the Pre-Sequel, there were tons of heads for each character and different color configuration skins.

Now, in the third game, there are heads, skins, and custom colors for every single skin! It's another layer of complexity that really adds a lot to each individual version of these fresh Vault Hunters. Plus, with the weapon skins, trinkets, ECHO covers, and even room decorations, Borderlands has never been more customizable!

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5 Don't Love: How Its Exclusivity Is Hurting The Players

We're sure that this has been talked to death, but Epic Game Store exclusives are no fun for the consumer. Yes, from a developer standpoint, they'd be crazy not to take the deal, Epic pays them so insanely well for said exclusivity. But, the store/launcher is rife with issues!

As of today, September 16th, there's even an issue with BL3 specifically where the cloud saves linked to the Epic servers have a bug, causing it to roll players save files back almost entire days! And that's not even close to all. Basically, we don't blame anyone for grabbing it on the console or waiting for the Steam release, hopefully, it'll be a bit more cleaned up by then.

4 Love: The Emphasize on Exploration And Discovery

One of the best new features in Borderlands 3 is the challenges system, and no, we aren't talking about the challenges that reward Eridium such as "Kill so-and-so amount of enemies with Torque weapons", though those are greatly improved as well. No, what we're talking about are the planet-spanning missions to find COV radio stations, salvage broken Claptraps, find vehicle variations, and even hunting rare monsters or bandits.

These are missions given by the beloved characters of the franchise that reward the Vault Hunter for exploring. Pair that up with the new "fog-of-war" mechanic for the map and our obsessive-compulsive brains are scouring every corner of every zone.

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3 Don't Love: How Much It Chugs Along For Seemingly No Reason

It might seem like we're talking too much about the performance of the game, but it's a pretty serious issue. Honestly, it'd be more of a drastic affair if the gameplay itself wasn't so top-notch. But, what we're specifically talking about is the optimization, it's obviously flawed. It's a luck of the draw if the game runs well or not, and for many people, on a wide range of builds and consoles, changing the graphical options rarely makes a difference, which is incredibly weird for any game, especially a PC release.

Basically, we're stuck in the camp of silky smooth 120fps gameplay running around, but then sub 30 with constant micro-stutters during combat. It really just puts a damper on an otherwise amazing experience, and we're not alone in thinking so. Players have been constantly asking Gearbox about an FPS fix for both consoles and PC, and hopefully, we'll have a patch coming soon.

2  Love: How Diverse And Responsive All The Guns Feel

The guns in Borderlands 3 are insane, more so than any game before it. In BL2, guns all felt different, but only by one or two variables. In BL3, even the difference between two grey-rarity shotguns is immense! There are manufacturer-specific effects, RNG random effects, Legendary Effects, alternate fire types, elemental effects, and even a part by part breakdown. Frankly, it's a whole new level of variability that really emphasizes what people love about the series.

It encourages players to switch guns on the fly almost constantly so they can experience all the new types of weapons like ones with auto-tracking, ones that bounce around the room, ones that shoot sawblades, and even guns with legs. We just can't say enough good things about the gunplay.

1  Don't Love: That The Humor And Story Style Hasn't Changed Since 2012

And finally, Borderlands is still way too much when it comes to on-the-nose references and memes. That's not to say that the game doesn't have its fair share of funny moments, just that its overall humor hasn't changed at all since the original game. This is obviously not a fact, but our opinion of course.

Though BL3 also still has the issue of forcing players to listen to said dialogue constantly while interrupting the flow of combat. Basically, the story missions have a lot of stop-and-go, where the player gets to play, but then after they've got to sit and listen to Lilith talk for 3 minutes straight while she gets stuck behind a fence trying to walk to the objective.

NEXT: Borderlands 3: How to Beat Katagawa Jr.