T w e n t y S i d e d

It’s a pretty intense moment when Angel dies, Roland dies, Jack recovers the vault key, and Lilith is captured. It feels like it’s supposed to be the crisis moment in the plot, except it’s kind of early in the story for that. We have a lot of hours of psycho-shooting between now and the conclusion, and a lot of it feels pretty unimportant compared to what just happened. If this was a movie, we’d be entering the finale right now while emotions are hot. Instead we get caught up in a couple more door-opening exercises.

You need to reach the Info Stockade to find out where the vault is. Which means you need to blow open a pipe in the Boneyard so you can crawl through it. But to get there you need to lower a Hyperion bridge. Which means you need to get some explosives. Which means you need to get you Sawtooth Cauldron and steal some from the local bandits. Which means you need to reach their storage platform. Which means you need to get the elevator working. Which means you need to kill a local bandit boss. Which means… you get the idea.

It feels like Luke just took off in an X-Wing for the Death Star mission, but the director decided to cut away so we could spend a half dozen scenes with C3P0 and Mon Mothma. It’s not that this stuff isn’t fun, it’s that it feels like this is a bad spot in the game to pad things out. This isn’t just a problem with Borderlands 2, it’s a problem a lot of games have. If we go right from the crisis point of the plot into the finale, then we end up with the player being locked into the endgame almost as soon as they enter the third act. If you do this, the final stretch of the game can feel a little too linear, restrictive, and heavy on cutscenes. If we instead drop back into normal gameplay, then the story loses momentum because you can’t sustain that emotional high note for hours at a time, and certainly not across multiple play sessions.

Mass Effect went for the “locked in” approach. The moment you arrived on Virmire, you were basically riding a railroad to the endgameYou could technically fly around freely after escaping the Citadel, but you couldn’t go back and turn quests in, so there weren’t very many USEFUL things you could do.. In an ideal world, I suppose you’d be free to make a beeline for the endgame but also free to do sidequest stuff if you were looking for more gameplay. Obviously that approach doesn’t work for all stories and genres.

The point is that sooner or later the designer has to choose between their gameplay and their story. Borderlands 2 favored gameplay. That was probably the right move, but it still sucks the life out of the story.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Borderlands Part 16: Endgame”

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.

There’s an unspoken agreement here between the game designer and the player that major battles need to end with loot. This is a problem in the battle for Angel, since there’s no time for looting after the battle and doing so would be tonally wrong. We can’t very well have the player gleefully popping open chests around the corpses of Roland and Angel or scarfing up loot off the ground while Handsome Jack enacts his ambush.

One of the advantages of comedy adventure is that when the story gets stuck the writer can switch to comedy. That’s what they do here.

Lilith teleports the player away. You appear in an unknown room in an unknown location, surrounded by red chests. After looting them all (because why wouldn’t you?) you find the door and discover that Lilith was indeed able to send you to Sanctuary like she intended. You landed in the back room of Marcus’ shop, which you just inadvertently robbed. It’s a funny moment that helps transition from the previous drama back to the standard shoot & loot gameplay.

It’s also a disappointing reward, because the chests in this game are full of garbage.

You May Already Be a Winner. (But Probably Not.)

I haven’t deliberately clocked the chances of getting worthwhile loot, and I don’t think anyone has done any original research on this subject. The wiki doesn’t have anything concrete on loot probabilitiesExcept for the loot chests in the Dragon Keep DLC, because the workings of those are exposed to the player via 20 sided dice.. It says that red chests pay out “better” than grey ones, but you can intuit that yourself just from opening a few. What we don’t know is how much better.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Borderlands Part 15: Loot over Time”

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.