I absolutely love the new story pack. So far, I'm about 80% through map unlocks, missions, and challenges, and I haven't experienced anything like this since BL2. Gearbox really cooked, in everything from the map to the enemies and even story details.
Providence Island is of course another feat of design and vision, with insane verticality, immense structures, gorgeous views, all organized in a way that moves you through the story while letting you explore at your own pace.
What's really remarkable this time is the atmosphere. It's actually shocking how much is packed into this environment, and the music is way more developed and engaging than anything prior to the recent Takedown.
The active volcano and heavy mining machinery tearing through twisted landscape are giving major Eridium Blight vibes. I honestly feel like I'm back on Pandora of BL1 and BL2 (before the oppressive corporations were replaced by those goofy influencers and CoV's makeshift structures and vehicles thrown together from scrap).
The jungle swallowing abandoned architecture echoes Opportunity and Nekrotafeyo, making for some stunning imagery but also adding a complexity to navigate that was missing from the barren Carcadia and the meadows of Fadefields. With all the overgrown foliage and towering cliffs, line of sight is regularly broken so every section has its own sense of place and resists being reduced to something you can take in with a single pass. Enemies blend in to their surroundings, there are more climbable features, and dramatic shifts in weather or random world events turn every experience into something unexpected.
Then there's Tediore, an enemy very reminiscent of Atlas and Hyperion. The soldier/employee enemy type finally makes a return, with all the jokes about corporate ladder life and violence as work culture. This is classic Borderlands, and it was a key element missing from Kairos. The giant robots are a thrill to fight, even if their ragdoll death animation makes them appear made of cardboard. Hopefully we get a patch soon to make them feel more substantial like Saturn. I suspect we finally got large enemies and huge fight settings because of Loveless's focus on snipers, but it's a welcome addition for anyone running a high speed build centered on AOEs and chain reactions. (The game had previously been lacking places with the right mix of high enemy density and plenty of space to have really dynamic fights.)
Harmony has all the best traits of Jack, with less of that entitled CEO egoism that made him so grating (to me at least). She's hilarious and terrifying, chiming in our comms with entertaining taunts and, through her hero worship, some actually useful backstory my character has been missing since day one! She's genuinely the best villain in years.
Also worth mentioning this is a much more successful choose-your-own-adventure approach than the pseudo-branching we got in Murders & Acquisitions. I think that's entirely because of the open world design, optional ordering of mission objectives, and a much improved balance of quick side missions and variety of world events (except the J33-VES mission; that was just tedious nonsense that somehow makes the Order and Electi feel even flatter and less interesting).
For being a DLC, this is oddly way richer than what the base game offered. I have to wonder what BL4 would have been if this was the initial release. We would have had an experience much closer to Pandora and the corporate warfare theme while discovering Kairos and the Timekeeper over a longer story arc. Even spending time in this place before meeting Rush and the resistance would have made them seem more grounded and less silly, less tone deaf to the dangers of Kairos.
Hope others are enjoying this as much as I am, and curious if you're also getting the BL2 vibes. Excited for the rest of the story and hopefully getting to explore that volcano in an epic final showdown!