Last time I complained about the maps being very big but also very empty. It turns out this does get better further into the game. The maps are still huge, but the enemy count does get better. Maps feel more populated, fighting arenas are close to how busy and hectic Borderlands 2 gets.

A different complaint though, although Borderlands 3 has the biggest weapon and elemental variety to date, I don't feel compelled to switch weapons during a fight. Borderlands 2 had a good habit of throwing armored, shielded and flesh enemies at you in the same fight, and encouraged you to make use of slag, while also switching a few other elements. In Borderlands 3, I'm mostly picking my weapon at the start of a fight, based on either what I see the first few enemies are, or what I predict it/they will be, and then I stick with that, forgetting to use something else.
Part of this might be the game not punishing you enough for elemental mismatch, but I think it might be due to my weapons being too powerful.

And that leads me to a different quirk of the game: too many legendaries drop. I'm far from finishing this, but my loadout is full legendary. For as long as I've played Borderlands 2, I never came anywhere near close to this. If I had a legendary or two, and everything else purple, I'd consider myself lucky.

The weapons are fun though, and you can get unexpected synergies. I have a shield that 100% absorbs shock damage and restores itself, a shock sniper rifle that does splash damage, and I just go about everywhere one-shot killing mobs with the sniper's splash and throwing shock grenades at anything stronger, with no fear of any of it splashing back on me.

Characters and story are still meh. I can tell at times they're trying to make jokes... trying. I was pulled back and unimmersed a few times from the jokes/dialogue. There's one where someone complains how stupid it is to play the same virtual [game] for 7 years, a clear reference to Borderlands 2. I think Gearbox is annoyed people didn't like TPS. Then there's someone using "shiznick"... this one was odd, cause the ONLY place I know this word from is from someone working in the vidya industry. Haven't heard/seen anyone outside of that use it. This makes me wonder just how isolated in echo chambers are these people, when they try to use slang that the outside word just doesn't use.

The game does grow on you, but mostly because of the guns. I've started getting used to the visuals too. They still feel a bit out of place at times, it still feels like there's too much detail and clutter, but I'm getting used to it and it doesn't distract me so much anymore. And there are places that feel like they could be a Borderlands 2 DLC.

But there's one thing I do need to warn people about. You might have stutter issues with the game. I first thought it was cause my potato PC, but it seems it has been an issue from launch. It's still possible that your experience might vary, and better specs will handle it better. As for the cause, it's the texture streaming. I've found 2 solutions, but both involve manually changing settings outside the game, and both have downsides. One is to disable texture streaming, by launching with the argument -NOTEXTURESTREAMING. This just loads everything from the start. Downside is it increased system requirements. Everyone recommends at least 8GB VRAM and 16GB RAM if you do this. It works for me even without meeting the VRAM, but it cuts down fps. The other solution is to track down GameUserSettings.ini in your save folder, and set TextureStreamingAdaptiveBoostScaleOverride=1.000000. From what I've read, this makes the game prioritize fps over actually loading textures. It kinda breaks texture streaming as in it doesn't seem to want to load better textures, and one time I even got stuck with LOD textures on close objects. It also doesn't try to use all the VRAM. I'm stuck at max 2.8GB. But it works at removing stutter, I get good fps, and for the most part the game still looks fine.

I think so far I'm having more fun than with TPS, but I wouldn't say it's overall a better game. Me having more fun with this is more down to me not liking the gravity gimmick of TPS.