T w e n t y S i d e d

I know earlier I praised several aspects of the Pre-Sequel gameplay. I don’t want to leave you with the impression that this is a brilliantly constructed game. This is a very uneven game, and for every brilliant idea they had to balance it out with something annoying, broken, or terrible.

And then you run into something like the encounter with Deadlift, which is all three.

The Setup

Early in the game you make friends with Janey Springs. She’s your tutorial questgiver and her job is to introduce the new mechanics (oxygen management, low-grav jumping, laser weapons) while also giving a little exposition and maybe telling the occasional quasi-joke.

She sends you to kill the banditHere on the moon they’re not bandits. They’re “scavs”. Which is apparently what moon people call bandits. Whatever. They’re people who shoot player characters without provocation. Doesn’t matter what we call them. boss Deadlift. She has a few reasons, but none of them really resonate. She wants him dead because he’s “a dick”, and because he has “something” you’ll need to get into Concordia. Getting into Concordia is the real goal here.

This feels a lot like the old lazy Borderlands 1 design where you have to kill a bandit king to get a key to enter a city that shouldn’t be locked in the first place. This is totally fine if there is a steady supply of jokes and lampshading to keep us engaged, but… there isn’t. Janey’s reasoning isn’t funny, Deadlift himself isn’t funny, and this setup isn’t funny.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Borderlands Part 20: Deadlift”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Each new game has a new slate of vault hunters. As with Borderlands 2, there are 4 canonical or “core” vault hunters, and two additional ones as DLC.

Let’s meet the new crew…

Wilhelm

Wilhelm is a boss in Borderlands 2. He’s Jack’s right-hand man, and Jack basically sacrificed him to make sure that the player would get their hands on the trapped power coreAccording to the wiki, there’s an unused audio log in the game assets where Jack states that he poisoned Wilhelm prior to his fight with the player, which was probably intended to explain why the player was able to defeat him when the combined might of Roland, Mordecai, Brick, and Lilith had failed to damage him at some unspecified point in the past.. Here we’re sort of playing through his origin story where he meets Jack.

In Borderlands 2 he was (or will be, if you see what I mean) 90% robot. Here he looks like a mostly normal guy. He’s addicted to cybernetic implants, and apparently between now and the events of Borderlands 2 he’s going to have an extreme metal makeover. If you spend points in the right skill tree you can kickstart this process yourself, making him half-robot in the process. I love this integration of character and gameplay.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Borderlands Part 19: The Vault Hunters”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.