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Gearbox has once again clarified their purpose in making upcoming nerfs to Borderlands 4.
The developers were replying to questions surrounding the infamous crit knife. Last week, creative director Graeme Timmins said that they intend to make changes that won’t revolve around ‘bad gear.’
Today, they engaged with the community again, returning to the issues around the crit knife.
Associate creative director Grant Kao said this:
We will be adjusting it. The crit knife’s potential output diminishes playstyle variety.
The gun builds that use the crit knife have other options and will have more options coming soon.
Timmins chimes in with the final word:
Our intent is always to expand the number of builds, so any adjustment we make is in service of that goal.
But What Does It All Mean?
Some players may still not see what Gearbox means when they’re talking about the crit knife like this. But we just have to go back to when it was first discovered.
For those who don’t remember it, crit knife became a sensation when it was first discovered. There was an element of chance to getting the crit knife, so it wasn’t like everyone literally has it.
But something else happened when fans found out about it. And this is that they stopped trying out other characters and builds.
And with everyone focusing on Vex and her Bloodletting passive skill, players were all playing the same character and skill tree.
Variety Is The Spice Of Life
This all misses the point of Gearbox making these new character with their elaborate skill trees. It’s not that they are imposing variety to players.
Gearbox wants players to feel like they can express themselves with the character they want. And they want to feel like they can’t make any wrong choices, at least in terms of characters.
There should be circumstances where other Vault Hunters like Rafa or the upcoming C4SH will be better to play as than Vex. Subsequently, Vex players could get sick of playing her if she’s too powerful for too long.
Gearbox made an even more elaborate system for generating guns. The point of that whole system is for players to experiment and find new powerful guns too.
Gearbox doesn’t want there to be only one crit knife that’s worth getting. If they wanted to, they could have made a game that revolves around only one crit knife.
More guns and weapons should enable more strategies and more ways for players to express themselves. And that’s what we hope we can look forward to when this week’s patch finally comes up.
