What I want in 2012: Borderlands 2

This is just a no brainer. No single game has ever gotten me together with real, God honest, wouldn't lie to you, actual, physical people more often than Borderlands. First of all, it has experience. We all love experience, right? It's like integrated, light roleplaying mechanics are becoming the game design equivalent of a clock radio or an iPod dock. Well Borderlands took those exp bars and jammed them all up inside a futuristic post-apocalyptic shooter with some pretty slick graphics and more guns than the average human mind can comfortably conceive without training at Westpoint. So now you're filling bars by shooting Mad Max extras in the face with shotguns that fires rockets. That's great. Game sold already. Wait, now you're telling me that the entire thing is centered around a four player cooperative mode reminiscent of Sega's unbelievably entertaining Phantasy Star Online? Oh, and there's loot. Holy CRAP there's so much loot... Gearbox, how did you get ahold of my dream journal and please don't tell people about that weird thing my sleep-brain made me do to Ryan Gossling...




I would spend hours upon hours in Pandora on an open session with players going in and out of my world helping me creep ever so gradually towards the most anti-climactic ending that has ever been seen in any form of media (No, it was not Lost, it was Borderlands). But hey, the story isn't why I was there (for once). I was there because Borderlands lights up that part of my brain that craves meaningful progression, and that other, less compelling part of my brain that craves human interaction. Speaking of which, when I got to my apartment for that year's Summer stock I could not believe that there were three other men all with their 360's and a copy of Borderlands ready to scrape together three crappy, thrift store televisions (The kind with the RF jack. Remember those things?) and take the game all the way through General Knoxx's Armoury and beyond. I thought I had found a precious little gem of a game that no one else really knew about but, apparently, it was kind of a big deal.




So now we have Borderlands 2 and that's kind of an even bigger deal. From what I hear there's going to be more guns. From what I hear there's going to be more Pandora. From what I hear Anothy Burch is going to un-suck the ending of this one. I'm sure there will be more loot, I'm sure there will be more classes, and i'm sure there will be many, many, many more hours dumped in to progressing through a virtual world of post-apocalyptic mayhem while my progress in the real world comes to a screeching halt. And I could not be more excited about it all.

Developer request: a voice identification system that will allow me to block children and d-bags before they ever even reach my server. I do not want them. Anyone who does not drop in ready to cut the inane chitchat and shoot that giant shock-scorpion in the carapace with an exploding revolver will be dropped anyway, so just help me save some time, guys.