I've just now clicked on Shep for the first time and I'm reading his quests. Claptrap has popped up in the background to say, "HELLO! DID YOU KNOW SHEP SANDERS HAS JOBS FOR YOU?" If I don't accept all of these quests then he will harass me about it forever.<\/div><\/p>\n
Completing a quest involved stepping through an extra screen that simply repeated the text of the previous screen. The stats for each weapon were woefully inadequate and left out key information needed to make meaningful comparisonsThere was a mod that reduced the font size of the weapon stats, which allowed the game to display more properties. Apparently the information was there and able to be displayed, but the infobox could only show the first three properties.<\/span>, which is a pretty glaring omission in a game that involves so much looting. There were replenishing loot chests near spawn points, making it effortless to farm them by simply restarting the game. There was no indication of which of your half dozen open quests was needed to advance the main story and which ones were just side-jobs. <\/p>\nSometimes side-jobs would be fully voice acted and sometimes story missions were reduced to reading text boxes. The quest balance was wonky, particularly in the early game where you might take a job at your current level only to find yourself dealing with multiple elite foes a couple levels above you. Lots of scenery had wonky collision boxes that could lead to getting stuck, walking through stuff, or running into invisible walls. There were over-large open areas that required excess walking and places where you were obliged to get out of your car and walk for no real reason. It’s a game for four people that has cars that only hold two, which resulted in a lot of needless confusion and messing around if you’re just trying to get somewhere and get things done. <\/p>\n
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Is this information something that needed to create a game-stopping popup? I feel like it wasn't.<\/div><\/p>\n
The HUD crowded the center of the screen for no reason. Some tutorial popups were linked to a particular spot, meaning you get them every time<\/strong> you walk down a particular corridor. The loading screen tooltips don’t stay on screen long enough to read them, which might actually be good since many of them were bad advice. (My favorite tooltip is the one that suggests that when your car is under fire, you should get out and use the car as cover. Your car is basically a bomb on wheels that takes damage from both players and foes. It has a wonky hitbox and it’s basically the LAST thing you want to be near in a firefight.) Tutorial popups could appear onscreen during inconvenient times (like in a fight) and there was no way to get rid of them except to wait them out.<\/p>\nDeep Breath.<\/strong> Okay. Glad I got all that out of my system. <\/p>\nOh! And there were a couple of spots where it looked like you could explore some of the map, but it was actually the edge of the playable area and you’d ragdoll and die if you jumped down.<\/p>\n
Okay. Now<\/em> I’m done.<\/p>\nBut I liked it anyway. Kinda.<\/h3>\n
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People are on fire, I've just gotten a critical, I picked up some loot, and I just killed a guy. I don't know what I'm doing or why I'm shooting these guys, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't like it.<\/div><\/p>\n
So the first game was wonky and rough around the edges. It had a core gameplay loop that worked really well and delivered an experience that you just couldn’t get anywhere else, but it had a way of annoying you every couple of minutes with its various shortcomings.<\/p>\n
But if there’s one thing that drives home how this game was built while the design doc was in a state of constant flux, it’s the story. The story of Borderlands presents you with a goal you never really pursue, allies with whom you have no reason to care about or work with, a guide character that has nothing useful to say and nothing to offer you, and a villain that doesn’t really do much to oppose you and becomes irrelevant before you ever settle up with them. The story is threadbare yet overlong. The characters are “wacky” yet short on actual jokes. There are many environments but a lot of them look very similar and the structure of the journey sort of robs you of any sense of travel or accomplishment. <\/p>\n
I’m not going to bother deconstructing the story quest-by-quest, but I do want to skim over it at a high level and talk about a few of the problems. Not because they really hurt the game (I never heard anyone actually complain about the story except to say it wasn’t interesting) but because it will make an interesting contrast when we get to Borderlands 2. Some of the problems with Borderlands 2 can be seen as over-corrections to Borderlands 1, but we have to look at both before we can make the comparison.<\/p>\n
So You Want to Hear a Story?<\/h3>\n
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Marcus is evidently a REALLY good artist!<\/div><\/p>\n
Borderlands starts with two introductions. First Marcus the merchant sets up the basic premise while we’re treated to hand-drawn images of the events in question: On the planet Pandora there’s a legend of The Vault, a mysterious alien treasure trove of weapons, wealth, and technology. The legend is generations old, and our heroes are here on Pandora in search of it. Once we’ve got the basic backstory, we cut to a brilliant music video style intro with some licensed music and a little action to show off the main characters. <\/p>\n
Once the music has us pumped up and ready for action, it all comes grinding to a halt while we’re treated to a laborious and mind-numbing unskippable tutorial. We’re greeted by Claptrap the robot and it takes him an agonizing three minutes to explain such fantastical concepts as the player’s HUD and the respawn station. During this time you can’t move on or do anything useful. You just have to follow him around and listen to him talk to keep the tutorial moving. <\/p>\n
Part of the joke of this character is that he prattles on to the point of driving people bonkers, but there’s not nearly enough humor in that joke to justify making this opening so tedious. It’s particularly egregious when the concepts being explained are so obvious. You could cut this section out entirely and it wouldn’t hinder the player’s understanding of the game mechanics or the world. <\/p>\n
If Borderlands is the offspring of Diablo and Halo, then it has failed both of its parents. Diablo would let you click through the text boxes and cut right to the action, and Halo wouldn’t lock you in place and make you watch someone explain to your character what a health bar is. <\/p>\n
Diablo II lets you begin spending skill points and building your character as soon as you level up for the first time, but for some unfathomable reason Borderlands makes you level to level 5 before you can use your class-specific power. In Borderlands 1, that can take the better part of an hour. When combined with the unsatisfying starting weapons and the “kill 5 skags” approach to quests, it makes the introduction to the game a complete chore. <\/p>\n
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Angel beams her pirate signal DIRECTLY INTO YOUR BRAIN.<\/div><\/p>\n
The other thing that’s going on during this tutorial is the Angel character begins talking to you. She can project her face directly into your viewEven before you’re given the HUD, which makes no damn sense but whatever.<\/span> and presents herself as a guide and guardian.<\/p>\nThis character does not work. She’s supposed to be our guide character, similar to Deckard Cain in Diablo II. She’s supposedly here to give backstory, set stakes, and encourage the player. The problem is that she doesn’t really accomplish any of those things. <\/p>\n
At the start of a chapter, Deckard Cain would tell you about the threat you’ll face at the end of the chapter. He might give some backstory to provide context. In contrast, Angel’s dialog follows a very simple and extremely repetitive pattern throughout the game. Directly before a boss fight she’ll say something like, “Be careful. You’re about to face your greatest challenge yet. I believe in you.” Then after the fight, “I knew you could do it! You really are the hero this planet has been waiting for.” <\/p>\n
The wording changes each time, but it’s the exact same idea. She doesn’t tell you anything meaningful about the threat you’re going to faceActually she does give you some protips on Sledge. They’re obvious things that you probably already know by level 15, particularly since you’ve already faced a boss just like him at the end of the previous murder-dungeon, and she didn’t feel the need to call you up before that fight.<\/span>. She doesn’t tell you how your efforts have changed the world around you. She doesn’t tell you anything to make you care about the people you’re fighting for. In fact, you could swap her lines of post-fight dialog around and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. Her dialog is completely disconnected from the game and she never tells you anything <\/p>\n
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Angel (upper right corner) calls me up to tell me I did the thing I just did.<\/div><\/p>\n
“But Shamus, first you complained that Claptrap talks too much and now you’re complaining that Angel doesn’t tell you enough. Aren’t you being inconsistent?”<\/p>\n
Actually both of my complaints are regarding the same problem: Talking is not storytelling. You can have as much or as little dialog as you like in your game, but regardless of how much there is it should be valuable to the player. It should be worth listening to. If you’re going to spend the player’s time on words, then those words should teach them something they need to know, tell them something interesting about the world they’re exploring, or develop one of the characters. Good dialog will accomplish at least two of those things. (And sometimes even all three.) Often the dialog in Borderlands accomplishes zero. Sometimes it might give you some character flavor. That’s nice, but then that same character beat will be repeated later.<\/p>\n
Deckard Cain had interestingYour mileage may vary.<\/span> lore, and you were always free to skip it. Borderlands has unskippable dialog that doesn’t tell you anything, or simply repeats the same character note again and again.<\/p>\nLike I said, this is not a game that sells itself on storytelling and we’re not here for some Planescape Torment type experience of mystery, intrigue, and discovery. We’re here to blast psychos and search for rare loot. The design team already had their hands full hammering out this new style of gameplay. If you’d asked me what one part of the game they could afford to cut corners on, I’d have suggested story. A good story would have made the game better of course, but the story didn’t need to be good the way that (say) the gunplay needed to work.<\/p>\n
But I’m going to nitpick it anyway. Because I must<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Based on what the developers have said about the game, Borderlands was apparently a title that came together at the last minute. It shows. Almost every part of the game seems to be missing something obvious. The Airing of Grievances In the PC version, the multiplayer matchmaking was handled through the now-defunct Gamespy, which was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[609],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-borderlands"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37855\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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