A track mix on Deezer handed me something electronic I didn’t recognize, and the credit underneath said Michael McCann.
That was enough to stop whatever I was doing at the time. Solar Fields and McCann and are, to me, are two absolute geniuses in electronic music. (McCann’s best-known work is Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and Solar Fields is best known for Mirror’s Edge.) So, I went looking for the album the piece came from, expecting something small, and found Borderlands 3. Then I read the rest of the credits. Jesper Kyd, Cris Velasco, Sascha Dikiciyan, all on the same record. “Impossible!” was my first reaction.
I listened to the whole thing. Once, twice, three times, then fixated on a Raison Varner piece, then got the game.
The Problem with Borderlands 3 (And Why It’s Not a Problem)
Here’s the thing: the more I played, the less I liked it. It took me a while to name why because it might look like a complaint against comedy: everyone talks so much.
Your ECHO crackles the second a fight starts. There’s someone explaining something in your ear three seconds into the fight. The enemies can’t shut up about their gods or sacrifice: not a single one of them. When you do shut them up, you expect some peace and quiet, right? There’s none to be had, because the person in your ear is still talking, probably explaining a joke they made two minutes ago. Even the villains are livestreamers running a cult, which means their characterization is broadcasting at you by design. Speech in this game is all but continuous.
That is the house style. (And I had no idea about that going in.) Apparently, Borderlands has always been loud and cartoonish, and a fan would tell me that’s the whole appeal, and they’d be right.
When Dialogue Drowns Out the Music
The part I want to look at sits underneath the jokes. The gamer playing this will have to decide, time and again, what to listen for because three things are playing at the same time:
- Sounds, like engine revving or enemies screaming at the top of their lungs, usually garbled together with gunshot,
- Dialogue in your ear, and
- Background or ambient music
And dialogue almost always wins. That’s a defensible call most of the time: you don’t want to miss mission instructions or otherwise pertinent information. When the dialogue never stops, the occasional call becomes a permanent one, and the music spends the entire game in the basement.
That hurts this kind of score more than most. Electronic writing like McCann’s works by accumulation: a pad arrives, a pulse turns up underneath it, the texture thickens over a minute or two until the thing has somewhere to go. It needs uninterrupted time more than it needs volume. Duck it under a voice every five seconds and the cue never reaches the part it was written for. So, you’re essentially hearing the first fifteen seconds of an idea, over and over, for forty hours.
The entire album is like that, at full length, with nothing sitting on top of it. It’s on all streaming services, which makes this easy to test for yourself. Play a few tracks (I’ve included one below), then play the game or watch a game movie for twenty minutes, and listen for what you can’t hear.
When a Game’s Best Parts Don’t Add Up to a Great Game
So, the two halves of the title are both true, and that pairing is what I want to write about. We usually judge games as single objects. Good game, bad game, seven out of ten, and the number is supposed to cover a thing that was made by dozens of separate crafts stacked into one product.
Those crafts don’t land at the same level. One department can turn in career-best work and ship inside something that squanders it, and our vocabulary has almost no room for that, so the score gets dragged down to the game’s level and quietly forgotten. It runs the other way too, and we notice it even less: a game we love can carry a flat soundtrack or cheap animation, and the affection covers for it.
I’ve written about learning English from Mass Effect dialogue, which is built to land the first time you hear it, in any mix, even in a language you barely speak. That writing earns the priority it gets, because it’s carrying the story and the characters and most of what you’ll remember. (At the same time, the dialogue never feels excessive and barely extinguishes the flawless score.
Borderlands 3 gives its writing the same priority, and what the priority buys is another gag every few seconds. That’s the trade I couldn’t stop hearing once I’d heard it.
The Album Stays; the Game Can Wait
I lost faith around halfway and stopped. Maybe I’ll finish it someday, and if I do it’ll be with the volume mix tilted as far toward the music as the options will let me. It doesn’t go far enough!
The album is still in rotation. The save file is still sitting at the halfway point, and I’m in no hurry.