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My name is Artie Augustyn... and I'm an alcoholic. No I'm not, but I feel inclined to say that joke when given the opportunity no matter how predictable it has become. I started playing video games in 1997 when my parents bought me a Nintendo 64 and pleading for one for years. I was given Super Mario 64 and Goldeneye 64 on Christmas, and a year later on my Birthday I got Ocarina of the Time. I eventually moved up to a GameCube based on the brand recognition. I was soon persuaded into the world of Sony after playing Dynasty Warriors and Vice City at a friends house, and now I stand before you with an Xbox360, Playstation 3, Wii and PC.
For the most part many people have considered me a "late gamer." I never owned a NES, SNES, Sega Console, or Atari and I get a lot of flak for that. I've begun an initiative recently to go back and play older games that people hold to high praise and you can follow that on my podcast which I'm sure I'll mention a thousand times in this blog.
In terms of my views on gaming, I'd like to think that gaming will one day achieve a level of professionalism and seriousness such as movies or books. I think there are a few reasons that this goal has been kept back. Many gamers don't take the notion seriously, in addition to many leading voices not knowing what they're talking about, and in general everyone's disbelief that it's possible for games to be something more than what they already are. Although, I found Destructoid's views to make the most sense out of what I've seen so far, so I made an account on that sole reason.
I think that covers everything.
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ZPR means Zero Proof Reading. So this article is going to read LIKE CRAP.
I finished up Borderlands today after a spree of intense non-stop six hour sessions for the past three days. That game is alright. I wanted to beat it so I could get up to speed with what everyone thought was so great about that game. I guess I can see the appeal but I already have some ideas for what they need to do in the sequel try to bear with me: Less Loot You know out of two thousand or so guns I picked up, I believe I used around fourteen in the entire game. There is no reason this game should have so many throw away drops at every corner. On Irrational Games‘ podcast Irrational Interviews they had Todd Howard from Bethesda on to talk about random crap in games today. He mentions at one point in the podcast that Oblivion and Fallout 3 learned from other games like World of Warcraft on how to properly siphon drops at a steady pace. He explained that in games like Morrowind the really good drops would have a 5% chance of appearing for players of the game. To them that meant that if one hundred people played the game, only five of them would see this bad ass sword. After World of Warcraft though, they learned that for each time the player does not successfully get a bad ass loot, the percentage will increase. So if you start playing the game its still 5%, but if you go through two thousand loot boxes and lockers, it would eventually increase to 10%, 20%, 40%, 80%, and eventually 100% if you somehow dodged it for that long (afterwards it would reset to 5%). To me it seems like Borderlands doesn’t have this increasingly likeliness of getting great loot. I found one gun in the entire game that was instantly way more powerful than everything else I had. It was an SMG that did x2 damage with a base damage of 72 (so in reality it was 144). Every other SMG I experienced from that point (level 27) to my new game+ (level 38) was no where near as good. If there was an increase of percentage for getting similar type loots for my character, then I wouldn’t be hoarding the same gun for 1/3 of the game. Or… 
Detachable Parts Instead of introducing a steady increased rate of better loot, why not just downplay the importance of constant-looting. Imagine if each part of the gun could be detached and added to different guns. The barrel dictates fire rate, the clip decides the amount per magazine and reload speed, grips = accuracy, and scopes are just scopes. They could get more creative by having slots for elementals and allow those slots to be combined or merged in some way. I think this would allow for even crazier combinations than what the current Borderlands formula allows. They’d have to balance it somehow by having your level decide how much material can be used on a particular gun, but I think its better than just searching every pot for pies. This system would also still allow a bit of looting to be done, after all you’ll still have to find a barrel that has 50 fire rate with a low level requirement. Sounds like the best of both worlds to me. Varied Environments Borderlands’ art style certainly helped the barren desert-esqe environments look pretty cool… but they were all the same. Some places were a little varied; I enjoyed going through most of the bases and complexes in the game. However, the latter half of the game is plagued with practically the same location over and over again (aside from the second to last area which has snow). It sounds cliche, but add a lava level! A snow level. Get some forest temple going. It doesn’t have to be incredible original but just a little variance to what’s going on. An Actual Story I played the entirety of Borderlands on mute with headphones that were plugged to my iPod playing the GiantBombcast. From what I hear, I didn’t miss anything by doing this. The first ten hours didn’t interest me terribly, and the really dumb twists and double crosses that were explained through text didn’t make me rip those headphones off in anticipation of what was happening next. Anthony Burch is now working at Gearbox, and I’m hoping his insights on the industry will help. At the same time, Gearbox now has a history of games with bad stories. Brothers in Arms games were plagued with this problem, and Borderlands has the same deal. But at the very least, they have the gameplay down, so improvement in other aspects is totally possible. 
Other than that, it was pretty enjoyable. I don’t have a huge laundry list of complaints like other people do. This is probably in part because I played the game in single player and didn’t run into problems like loot dice rolls and a proper trading system. I’ll admit all of that stuff sounds terrible when you have jerk friends or playing with pubbies online, but yeah… didn’t really affect me. GOTY version is coming out sometime this year for those who missed the boat, and it’ll include all of that rad DLC that people have been talking about. I want to round up all the achievements for my 360 version, but other than that. I’m about done with Borderlands, and this entry. P.S. I posted this on a wordpress blog site somewhere else, so if you happen to come across it. Don't worry I'm not a hack... Well maybe I am but not for this reason P.S.S. TAGS DON'T SEEM TO BE WORKING LOLOOLOLOL P.S.S.S. Never mind
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Living the dream since March 16, 2006
Living the dream since March 16, 2006
It's true that you pick up a lot of crap guns throughout the game, but it's not all bad. At many points in the game, you have the chance of stumbling upon:
- a gun that is a totally different type than one you have. Example: the infamous shotgun that shoots rockets. Unfortunately this particular example is not too useful.
- a gun that is a fairly different type than the ones you already have. Example: an x4 SMG that consequently does ridiculously high damage, but has such low accuracy that it's better considered a shotgun
- a gun that is a higher "color" than whatever you're using. I at least can't help but get a little excited having a different color/grade weapon. It's part of scratching that itch. It's like a primal urge.
- a gun that has colored text. Just by having a weapon with red text may persuade you at least to try it to see what it does specially. Example: "the destructor has come" fires the entire clip at once
What I really liked doing in Borderlands was being open to accepting new weapons that weren't necessarily better by-the-numbers than what I was using. By doing this, I got the opportunity to switch up my play style and keep things fresh longer.
I will have to admit, though, that now, at level 61, having killed Crewmerax two dozen times or whatever, all that's left is the elusive cyan weapons and straight up comparing numbers. Still, that's after well over 50 hours of play, so I'd say I got my money's worth.
Maybe I'll add you on xbox and we can hit that up sometime.
Anyway, great read!
PS - Tags work, you just have to close every paragraph, since they don't work between line breaks.
Tags fixed.
Being able to disassemble weapons would suck for loot. Suppose you find a nice, powerful rifle, and then another "decent" one but rocking a monster of a scope. As it is that's two "keepers" and you're still on the lookout for a gun that's got the best qualities of both. If you could just yoink the scope off the one gun and install it on the other, you've boosted yourself to the best weapon of its class until you find something higher-level. The satisfaction there would be so short-term.
The story's not much but the characters in it are awesome. Missing out on the crazy things Scooter, Tannis, and that rogue Claptrap say is not alright.
I really enjoyed it but you nailed those criticisms.
Why no flamethrower, or an acid thrower? (they obviously have the animations for burning and melting baddies) The RPGs sucked to hell too, a tracking system would have worked wonders. I don't think I ever used a pistol, a revolver, an energy weapon or a shotgun regularly. Rifles and SMGs were all too sufficient. I'd rather what you said about parts for weapon upgrades and using the experience rewards as just upgrades for your ability. Making the turret mobile or maybe open up a Picture in Picture to control where it shoots.
It is still possible to have big open environments while also changing things enough so that it looks different. I don't see how saying the environment changes drastically every load screen is a bad thing. It means the world has more flavor to it and variety instead of gray desert, gray desert, brownish gray desert.
Your critique for detachable parts isn't very consistent with why you like regular loot in the first place. How is finding a shotgun that does 250 damage instead of 230 damage (or other small upgrades) any different than taking great parts of some guns and adding it to others? It's the same level of enjoyment really, and its not like the current loot system is that much more satisfying.
In my hypothetical system there would of course be balance. You could just find a gun with 0 accuracy, 0 fire rate, no scope, but 50 billion damage and attach it to similar guns but with 50 billion accuracy or 50 billion fire rate. There would have to be level requirements for the parts, or something similar. This system has been in existence for a long time in (as someone else pointed out) Diablo, where you just crafted your current sword better instead of finding a new one altogether.
And in my opinion I hated every character in Borderlands. The playable ones had funny one liners here and there, but after listening to Tannis, T.K., Scooter, Ned, and etc. for the first ten hours of the game... I wasn't interested in hearing more.
Thanks for reading, but it seems to me like you think Borderlands is perfect the way it is, which is definitely not true.
I was pretty surprised Borderlands didn't have much of a story. It started the player off on cinematics but pretty much ditched any storyline about 2 hours in. From what I saw in Borderlands, the writers seem talented enough to create a decent storyline so it really felt like a wasted opportunity.
Games that throw a lot of disjointed terrain at you provide a really crappy sense of place. Lost Planet was interesting because it went with this theme of a frozen-over planet. The sequel varied it with jungles and ocean platforms and stuff and the result just felt generic, just about every game out there since Super Mario Bros tries to cram the same crazy set of terrains into the character's way.
I've *played* games where you can pop parts off of one gun and drop them on another. Parasite Eve, for example. It was exactly like I said, you'd find one weapon that works for you and just improve it as you go along. You're always playing the exact same weapons, just looking to tweak out the stats as you find the higher level parts. That's the opposite of a good loot game.
A good loot game forces you to make this-or-that decisions... do you take the shotgun that's got better range or damage? Sometimes it's a serious challenge, like learning to use a rocket launcher for the first time because it's a new equipment tier and way more powerful than your outdated whatever.
And with the loot, like I said if it was balanced so you could just attach anything you wanted whenever you'd still have to make those decisions. More importantly it means you could find guns that only have one good stat so you hold on to it.
I don't see how holding on to one gun is a bad thing, or how the current system fixes that. Like I said I used one gun for a third of my entire playtime. I'd much rather find a few additions that modify that gun for half the game, then use the same exact things for the entire game.
It'd also open up experimentation. Maybe I'll drop a few other stats in favor of an elemental damage. Parasite Eve is not a comparison to Borderlands, they're not even the same genre and I doubt they would handle it the same way.
Your main complaint is that you'd always be using the same gun, but the fact is I WAS using one gun throughout the majority of Borderlands. This system obviously doesn't work as a means to show the variety of abilities when literally 95% of the guns I found were useless.
I'm not going to continue this.