There’s a lot to love about Borderlands 3. It still looks great, shoots well and the broader universe continues to be interesting. But if there’s one thing that makes the game (and the series in general) stand out among the rest of the video game pack, it’s perhaps the abundance of juvenile humour.
Continuing where its predecessors left off, Borderlands 3 wears its irreverence on its sleeve and leans right into the comedy by taking the piss out of, well, everything in and out of the game.
While Borderlands 3 has no shortage of laughs (depending on your mileage since humour is subjective) and comedic bits, it definitely isn’t a comedy game.
In the most basic terms, a video game tells a story through the gameplay loop and there’s really nothing in the core of Borderlands that screams “comedy.” Anthony Burch, the writer for Borderlands 2, points out that the series is fundamentally a “shooting” game and there’s simply nothing funny about that.
When you boil it down to the simplest level, killing countless creatures and people or grabbing one of the game’s many thousands of guns isn’t exactly the best way to get people thinking “this is hilarious!” other than how ridiculously over-the-top the violence is.
An inherently uncomedic foundation means the game’s narrative is also somewhat forced to be serious in order to avoid too much tonal dissonance and Borderlands 3‘s story has no shortage of seriousness.
The basic premise involves taking down two obnoxious YouTuber-type personalities but there’s also an existential “saving the universe” element, beloved heroes return only to die in gutwrenching ways and there are enough traumatic backstories in there to make you need many hugs.
Personally, the most affecting story in the game involves attending the birthday party of a little girl, only to find out she died a while ago and the father is holding the party as a way to remember her. There are no jokes or shooting (well there’s a little bit), just melancholy.
Now if all the missions and stories in Borderlands 3 were like that, you’d end with with a seriously depressing game. Nobody wants that and that’s where the humour comes in.
All the fart jokes, the puns, the memes and shameless pop-culture references are the comedic toppings to help the serious dramatic stuff go down easier. Just because Borderlands 3‘s gameplay loop and story is serious doesn’t mean characters and moments can’t be comedic.
Burch explained that rather than having to design new systems to put comedy into Borderlands 2 just to make players laugh, the development team took existing mechanics and tried to wring humour out of those.
For example, Borderlands 3 has a gun that scream at you when you use it. There’s nothing funny about shooting a gun, but having a weapon be as obnoxious as possible while you’re using it? That’s a funny joke.
Humour is definitely part of Borderlands’ DNA and arguably its strongest weapon, but it definitely isn’t one of its central attributes. Call the series whatever you want, just don’t call it a comedy.
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