T w e n t y S i d e d

Once the player is done with the robot “army” thing, the team returns to Helios Station to kick the bad guys out. On one hand, it’s nice to get off the moon and see some fresh scenery. On the other hand, I really miss my low-gravity double-jump ground-pounding. I guess I’m just never happy.

As part of re-taking the station, we have to rescue a bunch of scientists. These aren’t generic nobodies. These are named, voiced characters with unique personality quirks and character models. Which leads us to…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Borderlands Part 23: The Big Googly Eye of Helios”

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.

I’m not going to try to review the Pre-Sequel quest-by-quest. We’re doing a quick (by the standards of this site) overview of the plot. We’re not so much concerned with the “save the moon plot”, and instead I’m just examining the moments in the game dealing with Jack’s fall to the dark side.

Anthony Burch has writing credit on this game, which is odd because very little of the game feels like his work. For example…

Why is Everyone So Nice?

The character Pickle feels like an attempt to reverse-engineer the appeal of Tiny Tina. You’ve got a child character with an “adorable” design, but they’re also corrupted in some way. Tina is a demolitionist, and Pickle is a thief. But Tina subverts the “mischievous child” trope by having her “adorable mischief” be murderous destruction. Pickle doesn’t subvert anything. His Oliver Twist accent is trying pretty hard to be cute and there’s nothing really dark or subversive about his design or character. There’s nothing edgy or strange about this kid. He feels like a character that wandered in from a Disney cartoon.

Part of the texture of Borderlands 2 is that everyone – good guys and bad guys alike – is a little crazy. Moxxi, Scooter, Marcus, Hammerlock, and Zed are all a little nuts and have occasional moments of surprise sadism in their character. For contrast, here in the Pre-Sequel we end up with a few characters who are just regular nice people. Pickle is kind and sane. Gladstone – who we meet later in the story – is nice and friendly with no creepy quirks or sadistic hobbies. Felicity is an AI that’s been held prisoner by a gang of nutters and forced to be their “girlfriend”, and yet she’s friendly, clear-headed, and not at all insane.

Speaking of Felicity being an AI…

Earlier in this series I said:

[Head writer Anthony] Burch likes to do this thing where he’ll go for a really obvious joke or twist, and then telegraph that he knows that you know where the joke is going. It becomes this sort of meta-joke about expectations. He did this in the situation with the totally un-suspicious power core when Angel betrayed everyone in Borderlands 2. He did it in the sidequest No Hard Feelings. He did it again with Pyro Pete in Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage. He built an entire character around this gag with Captain Scarlett in the Pirate DLC. Likewise, Crawmerax has a section where you have to track down a bunch of assassins, only to discover they’re already dead. After the first couple it stops expecting you to be surprised and instead begins poking fun at how everyone knows where this joke is going.

In contrast, this game sets up this situation where you’re looking for a “military-grade AI”. You meet Felicity over the radio, and even though her radio portrait shows her as human, it’s obvious early on that she’s the AI you’re looking for. But instead of telegraphing this and using the available tropes for humor, the game plays it straight and acts like you’re really supposed to be surprised. Pickle is the first to figure it out, and even then it’s only after the truth is too obvious to ignore. And then Felicity congratulates Pickle for being so clever, which means the writer is sort of patting themselves on the back for pulling off this twist, whether it surprised you or not.

To compare authorial voices:

Borderlands 2: “Yeah, you’re a smart player and I know I can’t fool you. Still, these situations are kinda funny when you think about them, right?”

Borderlands Pre-Sequel: “Gotcha! Good twist, right?”

It’s not wrong. It’s not like this is some terrible crime against writing or anything. It’s just that you can really see the difference in writing style here, and that difference is once of the reasons Pre-Sequel doesn’t feel as vibrant or as funny as its predecessor.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Borderlands Part 22: Stay Awhile and Listen”

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.

Before I take this sharp stick and begin poking at the story parts of the Pre-Sequel, let’s talk about one of the odd mechanical quirks of the Borderlands series.

Weapon Proficiencies

In Borderlands 1, we had Weapon Proficiencies as a system of long-term power building that was completely decoupled from the looting and leveling stuff. It wasn’t very interesting. Basically, every time an enemy dies (regardless of cause) you gain some sort of special XP for the particular weapon you’re currently holding. Occasionally this XP will cause you to rank up in that particular weapon type. This incentivizes focusing on a couple of weapon types rather than just using whatever seems fun at the moment. Or it would, if the game ever bothered explaining it to you.

What happens is that once every few hours you’ll gain a rank and get a tiny text notification will appear on the screen for a few seconds. Every rank will give you a miniscule bonus to weapon accuracy, damage, fire rate, reload speed, etc. for the given weapon. Odds are you might not even notice it amid the chaos. And even if you did notice it, the game didn’t tell you what it meant. It wasn’t interesting, it wasn’t ever explained, and once you do figure out how it works the only thing it accomplishes is to make the game less interesting by pushing you to stick to a couple of weapon types. It was one of the many strange half-formed ideas in Borderlands 1 that hinted at how the design doc was never really nailed down.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Borderlands Part 21: Absolutely Badass”

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.