After suffering waves of negative reviews on launch, mainly because of its poor performance, Borderlands 4 is again going through some trouble as its new $30 DLC, while good, is way too short to justify such a high price.
With only 32 percent of players recommending the DLC on Steam, earning it the “mostly negative” marker, Borderlands 4‘s Mad Ellie and the Vault of the Damned is being heavily criticized by players due to its extremely short length and content size, which in no way justify its high $30 asking price, despite its overall quality.
The DLC, nominally a story pack, adds a new vault hunter, a new map zone, two major and 16 smaller boss fights, new gear, and a bunch of cosmetics. The issue is that you can go through this new zone and its content in about a couple of hours, which the community thinks is simply not enough for a full-price “expansion pack,” as the DLC wants to present itself.
To put things into perspective, The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine, an expansion pack that would go on to earn the RPG of the Year award despite not being a standalone game, cost $20 at launch and offered 40 hours of gameplay and a complete, separate experience for Witcher fans to enjoy.
“I feel like $30 is just too much for what this gives,” one negative review reads. “Three-hour-long DLC for $30? You can buy Silksong for that money, [and] even less,” says another.
Some even think there aren’t that many praiseworthy qualities in the DLC, since many say the story, while being short, is also boring.
“The story. Trash. Kinda short, especially for $30, but the ending was just so boring and abrupt,” says one negative review. These points are repeated in several other reviews, while some other players think the DLC overall is good but not worth the investment at this price point.
Considering we live in a world where companies charge $25 for updates and single characters in 20-year-old games, I’m not surprised Gearbox went and overpriced its DLC. We can only expect that to happen more and more as time goes by, but fan reactions could be the one thing we have left to oppose these practices, until that, too, starts to lose meaning.
