Borderlands 4 boss Randy Pitchford has been busy polling his Twitter followers as to what they consider to make for a really good game - and the shooter series' predecessors have been roped in to help.
Throughout this week, Pitchford has been asking his followers "about how to measure if a game is 'better' than another game." For instance, which stat correlates with a 'better' game - the average play time per user, or the percentage of all players who've played for more than 10 hours?
Alternatively, he asks whether user reviews or critics' reviews are better signifiers. Finally, he pitted the winner of those two polls against each other, with his followers deciding that a "high actual play time" is more indicative of a 'better' game than "positive user reviews."
Eventually, he said that he "tends to agree" with the result, in which almost two-thirds of the voters went for playtime over user reviews. That came with a caveat, however, in that "play time [should be] relative to the scale/scope of the game." For example, "a short game where more players stay with it for 100% of the game might be "better" than a long game where most players only experience 10% of it."
A few replies questioned Pitchford's wording, which he acknowledged was not perfect. But he did outline them with a few extra thoughts. "For a hobby-style game that doesn't really have an end," he said, in a description that certainly matches the Borderlands games' core audience, "I would think that more play time per player correlates with 'better' quality." Elsewhere, he points out that "a game designed for endless play that only earns an average of, say, 10 hours of play time per player could be a failure compared to a game designed to be only two hours of consumable content that where close to 100% of the players complete it."
With the thought process outlined, Pitchford then pitted two of his previous games against each other to try and assess players' perceptions of them. Asking "which game do you believe is 'larger' or 'longer'" when it comes to the time to fully experience the whole game, he asked players to pick between Borderlands 2 and Borderlands 3.
Interestingly, the consensus seems to be Borderlands 2. Granted, there's a lot of DLC to get through, but a few players have pointed out that the objectively correct answer is Borderlands 3, which does have more total content, even if players feel like Borderlands 2 is the correct pick. Pitchford seems to have been expecting something like this, making sure to point out that he's only looking for what people "believe" to be true.
It's an interesting time to be asking this question. Borderlands 4 is really not that far away - I would assume that a September release means Gearbox is probably not still ironing out the structure of its endgame and DLC, but I could be wrong. Granted, there's still some time for tweaking, especially for longer-tail expansions, but it's certainly interesting timing.
