I love Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel.
I loathe Borderlands 3 and Destiny (all iterations).
Would I like Division 2?
I think it's going to come down to what you loved about the earlier Borderlands games, and what you hated about the last entry and Destiny - was it the characters and the writing with the loot aspect you loved about them? Was it the live service part you hated about Destiny and the endless hamster wheel grind?
Because if you're looking for a story or memorable characters, you're not really going to find it in The Division. Massive's approach to story in the games feels kinda like Cormack's with Doom where he thought story belongs in games as much as it does in pornography, so it very much takes a backseat because they didn't want writing to take precedence over gameplay or dictating what they can and can't do. It's not like it's completely absent, but you can tell that they make the content first and wrap the story around it, and it's going to come down to how well you stomach Tom Clancy stuff in general. That being said though, the game's world really makes up for the lack of a narrative, especially the first. I have yet to find a game, much less an MMO, that nails that isolated, oppressive atmosphere as well as it does. You don't need to be told by some yacking NPCs on a radio, or have exposition shoved down your throat about what effect the viral outbreak had on New York, you see it firsthand. You're running through empty apartments that families used to live in, you're scavenging through what used to be bustling shopping malls, and picking through the remains of a once lively street while NPCs in ragged clothes come begging you for whatever scraps you have left to give them. Even setting aside the whole loot side of things, it's something you should really experience because no game has done what it has (especially in its Survival mode that amps it up to 11), not even its sequel.
The first game hit its technical limitations fairly early on in its lifecycle, whether due to over-ambition or an inexperienced team I couldn't say, but they ended up not being able to do much with its endgame (namely because they had to resort to giving enemies more and more health to deal with how few they could have in an encounter at a time) so they wrapped it up and moved on to the second game. The content is by no means bad, some of which I'd say is even better than anything they did with the sequel, but I can understand why they did what they did. I also don't mean to paint the sequel in a bad light either, because for all its faults (whether you see its change in scenery from the dense snowy streets of New York oozing in atmosphere to sunny Washington), it does so much right in regards to the gameplay. It's the first time I feel like a looter MMO was made by someone who plays looter MMOs, because they just keep on adding ways to reduce grind and cut down on RNG. Gear in the game follows a similar approach to Borderlands whereby each piece belongs to a certain manufacturer that has certain traits, and if you want to build around specific pieces from specific manufacturers, you only need to look on the map to see which rotation region in the game is guaranteed to drop what you want. If you've played Diablo, this even applies to green set piece sets, so they make it a lot easier than most other looter games to narrow down what you're looking for, and practically hand you a filter of where to go and farm. There's a lot you can do with unwanted gear that you'll accumulate too - those manufacturers all have proficiency levels attached to them (as do your weapons and skills) which all get raised as you use them, so either you can wear it to gain levels with your chosen manufacturer, or you can donate it instead. There's also the usual dismantling methods where you can strip gear for its parts to make other gear, OR, as was introduced in the Warlords of New York expansion (which goes back to the first game's location after the snow has melted away), the ability to remove the stats and perks off of gear to build up a library for what's called recalibrating. Think of it as a bank that holds every single stat and perk an item can be rolled with, and you can keep building it up. Say you get a gun with +5% headshot damage and you add that stat to your library by dismantling the gear, and then you find one that has +10% headshot damage on it, you can then upgrade your existing stat bank to +10% instead, so if a gun drops and doesn't have +headshot damage on it, you can replace one of the unwanted stats with one from your bank.
It has quite a large amount of content too, with more being added fairly regularly. It does follow a seasonal model, but it's not as FOMO laden as Destiny is. The neat thing is that content you unlock in the season pass (that you get even without buying the premium track) is there to stay, and they often let you unlock past seasonal content too. They do add stuff outside of the seasonal model though, like a raid, hardcore group content, a 100 floor skyscraper dungeon akin to the Palace of the Dead in FFXIV, a game mode where you're trying to beat the clock against a power plant blowing up, a roguelike mode that results in rewards outside of it, and so on. Honestly, for the price, the second game will keep you busy for a really long time even with the content that's already in it, and from the sounds of it, they've just doubled down on adding more through 2025 when the next expansion drops. For being run by a skeleton crew while the rest of the studio works on Avatar and Star Wars: Outlaws, I'm impressed by the amount of work they put into it, and even when I don't intend to play a season, I'll still throw them a purchase of the premium pass just to give the devs some love for the effort they put into keeping this game running for so long. Because I can't imagine it's on Ubisoft's list of big earners.
I don't have much experience with the PvP side of the game, but they did mention in the stream last night that they're going to be overhauling it in the coming months. It has the usual assortment of PvP modes, but to my knowledge, The Division was the inventor of the extraction genre, and that's available in both games too. It's basically you dropping into a contaminated PvPvE zone that has the most sought after pool of loot (in the sequel you can use the currency from it to buy Exotics), but you need to extract it on a chopper first before you can claim it, and how successful you are with that depends on whether or not other players are going to go rogue and kill you for it. I didn't play it much because it was busted on PC at launch, and by the time they got ontop of that I was too invested in the PvE side of the first game.
I could wax lyrical about these games, but I guess it's all going to come down to personal preference and whether or not they click with you, so I'd recommend just giving them a shot and finding out. If you don't want to drop dollah on them, I think the 2nd game is on PS Extra, or you can nab them on Ubisoft+ or whatever their subscription service is called. Both games go dirt cheap fairly regularly on all platforms, so if neither float your boat, at least it's not a costly mistake.
Ok, so neither game is reliant upon player lobbies? I tend to play games offline anyways, unless I have friends that want to play.
Helldivers, notwithstanding, since that game is only fun with coop.
Both games can be played solo, but will also scale accordingly to the amount of buddies you bring, and will accommodate large level gaps. Naturally there's some sweaty endgame modes that you won't be able to tackle on your own, but there's hundreds of hours of solo play to be had, and past the box price or maybe season pass, you won't have to pay extra for any of it.
