Borderlands 4: Story Pack 1 - Mad Ellie and the Vault of the Damned

Reviews that raise the price mostly say the pack is not worth it. They quote $30, €30, £26.99, AUD 50 and CAD 40, and some point out that this is about half the price of the base game. Many like the content and object only to the price: "Good, but not $30 dollars good." One of the most upvoted reviews puts it plainly: "This is a small story pack, not an expansion, and it should be priced accordingly." Most of the fair prices players suggest fall between $10 and $20, and a few split the $30 into roughly $15 for the story and $10 to $15 for C4SH. Players compare it with Borderlands 2 story DLC that sold for $10 to $15, and with Phantom Liberty, Blood and Wine and Starfield's Shattered Space. 15% of reviews bring up sales or discounts, mostly to advise waiting for one.

The few who defend the price make specific arguments. One reviewer works out that $15 in 2012 is about $33 today, others point out that the price included a new Vault Hunter, and one compares it with a trip to the cinema.

Reviewers who give a time mostly put the main story at between an hour and a half and four hours, and 73% of the reviews that call the pack short also raise the price. Some say it feels like a bounty pack with a new character attached, and many measure it against earlier Borderlands DLC. One wrote that "i felt it should have been the half way point, not the completion point." Both sides cite Steam's achievement stats, which reviewers say showed under 4% of players finishing the story. Critics read that as a bad sign, and one defender uses the same numbers to argue that few of the people complaining had played everything.

The pushback on length comes from 30 reviews, all of them positive. They report about five hours for the main story on a fresh character and 10 to 20 hours with side content, and some say the shortest times come from maxed-out characters rushing through ("Took my wife and I about 6 hours or so to complete, which seemed long enough to me.").

8% of reviews report bugs in the pack, and 13 say a bug kept them from finishing a mission, a quest or the story. The same problems recur: enemies spawning inside walls or floors so that "clear the area" objectives never complete ("enemies being stuck in walls which would force me to go to the main menu and come back"), bosses that never spawn or stay stuck in the ceiling, quest items lodged in walls, scans and objectives that never trigger, an NPC who vanishes, grapple points that don't work, and dialogue that skips itself. Players name the quests "It Grows in the Deep", "Doc Reluctantly" and "What Lies Dreaming". One review calls the pack "a near-endless stream of bugs, ranging from annoying to softlocking." Reviews written in September still describe softlocks.

One review says "EVERYTHING that is repeatable/farmable/doable in this dlc is a copy-paste of base game content." Others list what they mean: enemies adapted from rippers, threshers and creeps, returning drill sites and bunkers, Nightmare Rifts that work like the base game's world bosses in a new arena, and a Dahl mech boss fought twice. The burrowing threshers that hide underground for long stretches get singled out. A few defend the enemies, saying not all of them are reskins and that the mutating Damned Legion is a highlight.

Players with endgame builds say bosses die in seconds even on the hardest difficulty, and one calls the fights "tank and spank." Others single out the final boss and the abrupt ending. "the last boss is arguebly the weakest boss of the entire game," wrote one, and another said "Ending was so anticlimactic it pretty much ruined the whole DLC." A smaller group enjoyed the boss fights or the ending, and one praised the final boss's design: "the character artists have COOKED with that boss design."

Bundling C4SH with the story is a complaint in 6% of reviews, which see it as a way to justify the price ("Unfortunately they tied C4SH to the dlc so they could justify the price.") and want him sold on his own, the way Borderlands 2 sold its DLC characters. Reviewers report that an update on September 10, the day Story Pack 2 released, split the pack and C4SH into separate products. Five owners of the original bundle say they lost access to C4SH: "They separated the story content and the vault hunter, but didn't grant me the C4SH dlc so I cannot load my save and need to re-buy C4SH separately."

A few reviewers say the update that came with the pack brought crashes they never had before ("I played the main game for months and never had a crash. Ever since the Mad Ellie DLC, the game will randomly crash."), along with returning stutter, fresh shader compiles, lag for players who aren't hosting co-op, and frame rate drops in C4SH's third-person skill. Others describe Borderlands 4's long-running PC performance, such as needing frame generation or getting 15 FPS on a high-end card. In all, 6% of reviews complain about crashes or performance, and a smaller group says the game runs fine or better than before.

Reviewers who struggled to get around describe too few fast-travel points, unlabeled portal doors to the Speakeasy hub that they had to memorize, long detours around walls, platforms and blood water that kill without warning, and an ECHO-4 guide that points the wrong way. One summed up the pack as "three hours of walking back and forth over poorly designed glacier," and another wrote: "They need more fast travel points and/or shortcuts." One defender recommends using the Speakeasy exits to cut travel time.

Once the story is done, players who farm for builds find little to come back for. They want a raid boss ("where are the raid bosses") or a new endgame activity, and say the bosses are too easy for endgame builds. A few note that a raid boss and a takedown were announced as later free updates.

The update that came with the pack also changed Borderlands 4 itself, and a few players were hit by it. The level cap went up to 60. Cross-character progression marks the map as explored for new characters and starts them at level 4. Some players had their inventory upgrades reset: "I just lost all of my storage deck upgrades when I started this DLC." A few welcomed the level cap rise and the shared progression.

Nightmare Rifts are a new world event that pulls players into a horror arena with bosses and their own loot pool. Players like the idea but say the rifts spawn too rarely, and some of the new legendaries drop only there: "The new rift boss area is cool but the spawn rate of it is too low." One April review notes a patch that made them appear more often.

Unskippable dialogue wears on a few players: "Listen to people talk, kill 3 enemies. Repeat for way too long." Some turned the dialogue volume down to zero.