{"id":37858,"date":"2017-08-10T06:00:40","date_gmt":"2017-08-10T10:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=37858"},"modified":"2017-08-10T08:00:04","modified_gmt":"2017-08-10T12:00:04","slug":"borderlands-part-5-breaking-tone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=37858","title":{"rendered":"Borderlands Part 5: Breaking Tone"},"content":{"rendered":"

People call Borderlands “action comedy”, but that applies more to the second two games. I honestly find it really hard to nail down the tone of the first one. The trailers sold us action comedy, but when you played the thing it was sometimes dark and grim. In a few spots it was genuinely funny. For parts of the game it was mildly amusing by way of being over-the-top ridiculous. Most of the time it left you alone to blast dudes in the face for hours at a time without delivering any dialog, and the only thing supporting the supposed humorous tone was the cartoonish art style.<\/p>\n

The second game has a modest contingent of critics that don’t find the game funny at all, and even describe the game’s humor as childish and lame. I’ll take a look at the humor (or lack thereof) a bit later in this series.<\/p>\n

A Quest of Sidequests<\/h3>\n

I'm Zed. I'm gonna ask you to kill three different bandit kings before I'll give you permission to go to the next town.<\/div>
I'm Zed. I'm gonna ask you to kill three different bandit kings before I'll give you permission to go to the next town.<\/div><\/p>\n

Borderlands doesn’t really have a story. It has a bunch of disconnected sidequests that are chained together and linked to plot-driven doors<\/a> to force you to do the quests.<\/p>\n

You arrive in the town of Fyrestone, which only seems to have a single inhabitantDoes T.K. Baha count? He actually lives outside of Fyrestone. And hang on, why DOES this blind one-legged man live all alone outside of the town walls?<\/span>. Dr. Zed greets you and immediately sends you out to fight skags and bandits. You repair some machines, wipe out a local bandit leader, clean out a giant warehouse filled with psychos, then clean out a mining camp full of psychos. You fight a couple more bandit bosses. All of this takes several hours.<\/p>\n

Part of the reason it takes so long is that the main quests alone don’t give you enough XP. If you ignore the sidequests, then sooner or later you’re going to be fighting guys that have two or three levels on you. Due to the way the game scales damage based on levels, this can make even trash mobs feel like dangerous bullet sponges. In practical terms, it’s much easier to simply do a couple of sidequests every so often in order to to keep up with your adversaries. <\/p>\n

Which means that you’re often very far removed from working on your goal. You’re fighting through a cave so you’ll have enough XP to attack the warehouse to get the key to open the door to reach the fortress so you can fight a boss for an item that will cause an NPC to open a door to the next area. It’s the problem of nested sidequests<\/a> I talked about during the Mass Effect series. You rarely feel like you’re working on pursuing your real goals.<\/p>\n

The first few hours of the game go something like this: There’s a plot door as soon as you start the gameIt opens once you’ve listened to three minutes of tutorials.<\/span>. Then you fight down a linear path until you get to another plot door to enter FyrestoneClaptrap opens this door for you once you loot a chest for him. This is actually the “open a chest” tutorial.<\/span>. Then there’s a plot door to get out of town to where the monsters areClaptrap opens this once you’ve done the tutorial for accepting quests and picking up stuff.<\/span>. Then another door to reach the next area where the first boss livesThis “door” is actually a wall of rubble that you need to blow up. The game makes you buy grenades to open the way, but then when you get there it’s already been wired with explosives and you don’t actually use the grenades. This was just a tutorial on how to buy grenades.<\/span>. The next “door” is actually a ditch that you can only get over in a vehicle, so you have to do some quests to get a working car. After that is the biggest plot door in the region. This one:<\/p>\n

Angel calls me up to tell me the boss I'm going to fight is really tough. She's full of helpful tips like that.<\/div>
Angel calls me up to tell me the boss I'm going to fight is really tough. She's full of helpful tips like that.<\/div><\/p>\n

You wouldn’t believe how many people you have to kill to get the key to open this stupid gate so you can murder all the people on the other side of it, so you can open a door to the next region where there will be more dudes to murder in order to open more doors with more dudes behinds them.<\/p>\n

You’re supposedly here looking for a hidden vault. Your character is even called a “Vault Hunter”. But nothing you do advances this goal. You have no destination. No information. For the first half of the game, nobody you work for offers any hints about the vault. They just ask you to kill random jerks and you do it because your choice is to do those quests or stop playing the game. In a few cases they at least set up a basic cause-and-effect of, “If you kill this guy I’ll open the door for you.” but in many cases (such as with Zed) you’re obliged to just do whatever people ask you to do and hope one of these jobs opens a door.<\/p>\n

You get to the end of the mining camp and kill Sledge. It turns out Sledge has a piece of the vault key. When you get back from killing Sledge, Dr. Zed agrees to open up the door that will allow you to drive to the next region of the world. This is awkward because you still don’t have a destination. It’s not like anyone has told you “Seek the vault in Bone Canyon, out beyond the Bandit Hills, right beside Lake Shoot You In The Face.” Nobody has said, “Go east.” Nobody has even given you a lead. After hours of fighting, your entire reward is permission to go to a new area, and you’ve never been given any in-game reason to believe this will advance your stated goal. This reward is only a reward for out-of-character reasons: We’ll finally have some fresh scenery and new monsters to fight.<\/p>\n

To be fair, Angel is sort of used to justify this. She says cryptic stuff like, “Sledge has something we need.” She doesn’t say what he has or why we need it, but if we accept the premise that our character trusts the mystery computer lady beaming a grainy video feed directly into their brain, then I guess we sort of have a fig leaf justification for doing these quests. The problem is that the writer made her “mysterious” by way of robbing you of all motivation and volition. <\/p>\n

Instead of story, these stylized intros are doing all the heavy lifting for giving the game a sense of style. They do a much better job than Angel at making things feel cool and important.<\/div>
Instead of story, these stylized intros are doing all the heavy lifting for giving the game a sense of style. They do a much better job than Angel at making things feel cool and important.<\/div><\/p>\n

This makes for a very shapeless and unsatisfying tale. This is a story about a journey, and a journey needs a destination. I don’t care if you’re Frodo walking to Mt. Doom or a couple of stoners on a road trip to Los Angeles with dreams to meet the aging 80s heavy metal star they idolize. If it’s a story about a trip, then the audience needs to have a sense of where we’re going. <\/p>\n

Alternatively: If it’s a story about finding a mystery item (like Indiana Jones looking for the Ark) then we need to be gathering clues (like Indie chasing down the headpiece that reveals the ark’s location) so that we have some sense of progression. Either way, basic story structure requires that our heroes take actions that advance their goals.<\/p>\n

This is true of Diablo II. In that game, the cutscenes tell the tale of Marius and his doomed voyage to the East<\/a>. You’re chasing the Lone Wanderer and following in his wake. Without those cutscenes, this would just be a story where you went from place to place until you randomly bumped into the antagonist at the end. The story is what makes this feel like a voyage with a purpose in mind.<\/p>\n

The way Borderlands is structured, we don’t really get a feeling of progression. We don’t think, “Man, we’ve almost reached the Mountains of Mystery. They were so far in the distance and now we’re right on the doorstep.” We just go from one region to the next without ever getting any indication that we’re moving towards our goal. All of the places have similar visuals and climate, so we don’t even get the sense that we’ve traveled very far. <\/p>\n

People will defend the game by saying that they never cared about the story. That’s fair enough and it’s certainly understandable, but given the obvious Diablo roots I don’t think it’s unreasonable<\/em> to hope the game could achieve some kind of basic sense of progression towards a goal. You can argue you didn’t care that you were lacking in-world justifications for doing the quests, but the point I’m making here is that games are generally better<\/em> if we can get some kind of narrative momentum going. I mean, if the story isn’t going to do its job – if it’s not providing us with motivation or even humor – then why have it? We might as well revert to the barbarism of 1993’s Doom where you abandon all pretense of story and simply wander around looking for keycards to open doors. <\/p>\n

The sad thing about Borderlands 1 is that in terms of production costs, the developers paid for<\/em> a story. There are characters with character models and voiced dialog and scripted dialog triggers and quests with quest markers and more dialog triggers. You could use these tools to build a story with stakes, tension, humor, mystery, and resolution. But instead we end up with something functionally equivalent to a DOOM keycard – you’re forced to fight your way through guys in order to reach a goal that’s not personally important to you or your character, in order to open up the next area.<\/p>\n

It’s a safe guess that this is the result of the last-minute re-write of the game. Borderlands 1 gets away with this because we didn’t have any particular expectations for story. It’s hard to miss something that was never there in the first place. After all, what do we care if the developers waste their money writing and recording pointless dialog? But it would be a disaster if Gearbox tried to drop back to this sort of thing in Borderlands 3 now that we have two entries with a more traditional story structure. They didn’t start with a focus on story, but once the later entries invested in story it became part of the identity of the series. <\/p>\n

Patricia Tannis<\/h3>\n

Tannis is one of the key characters in the story, and yet she doesn't get a slick intro like Zed. Instead she's in this dark room with flat lighting and nothing in the way of distinct scenery.<\/div>
Tannis is one of the key characters in the story, and yet she doesn't get a slick intro like Zed. Instead she's in this dark room with flat lighting and nothing in the way of distinct scenery.<\/div><\/p>\n

Tannis is the closest thing we have to a working character in Borderlands. Her backstory is multi-purpose:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. It lets us see the savage dangers of Pandora through the eyes of a civilian.\n
  2. It explains how those dangers drove her “crazy”.\n
  3. It tells the story of how the Dahl Corporation ended their mining operation and left all of their enslaved prison miners behind, which explains why the world is wall-to-wall with psycho killers and bandits.\n
  4. It fills in some exposition on The Vault, the key, and how all of that stuff works.<\/ol>\n

    It’s not great and most of it is accomplished through simple audiologs, but they get the job done. Her “Crazy” personality is a good hookEven if the execution doesn’t really work.<\/span> for a character and she even gets the occasional funny line, but I can’t help but think that her backstory must be a leftover from the grimmer, grittier phase of development. There’s a lot of misery and not a lot of jokes, and her PTSD style delivery strays from the more madcap tone that other parts of the game seems to be aiming for. <\/p>\n

    Another curious detail about the game is that some of the major quest givers aren’t voiced. Shep Sanders and Lucky both have backstories that are hinted at but not told. They’re part of the main questline, and yet their dialog is delivered entirely through text. Their character models are generic NPCs, and not unique models like Dr. Zed, Scooter, Tannis, and Marcus. <\/p>\n

    Tonal Shift<\/h3>\n

    Like Tannis, this guy feels more like scenery than a character. He's a generic NPC model standing in the dark, in flat lighting, in a nondescript shack. He isn't really animated and his pose has him facing away from the player.<\/div>
    Like Tannis, this guy feels more like scenery than a character. He's a generic NPC model standing in the dark, in flat lighting, in a nondescript shack. He isn't really animated and his pose has him facing away from the player.<\/div><\/p>\n

    When Zed sends you to meet Shep he says, “You’ll find a kid named Shep. Sledge skinned his whole family and built a tent out of ’em. Tough luck.” That’s pretty gruesome. But it’s also kind of absurdist. When paired with Zed’s understated description of the events, it kind of takes the edge off of it. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say it was funny<\/em>, but I think it fits with the Borderlands tone much better than if Zed just told you in hushed tones that Sledge executed Shep’s parents and siblings while Shep watched. <\/p>\n

    My guess is that the original designs and backstories of Shep and Lucky were just too dark and gritty to work. Maybe these guys had grim stories like Tannis that killed the mood. Unlike Tannis, these guys weren’t integral to the plot and so it was safe to reduce them to silent quest dispensers. I admit this is all speculation on my part, but it does help explain why these named quest-givers feel so incomplete.<\/p>\n

    Assuming I’m right and these guys were much more fleshed-out characters before the 11th hour style overhaul, then reducing them to voiceless quest dispensers was probably for the best. While it’s disappointing to spend so much time with these placeholder characters, this is far better than the awful, cringe-inducing tonal whiplash of Dead Island<\/a>. Given the choice between “silent NPC” and “trainwreck”, I’ll take silent every time.<\/p>\n

    Tonal Confusion<\/h3>\n

    This is a skag. The two sides of its head split apart to reveal this toothy sideways mouth.<\/div>
    This is a skag. The two sides of its head split apart to reveal this toothy sideways mouth.<\/div><\/p>\n

    In one part of the game you’ve got a series of audiologs from Patricia Tannis that chronicle her adventures on Pandora. She began as part of a research team in search of information about the vault. The group was picked off one at a time by various local dangers until Tannis was the only survivor. <\/p>\n

    Her story is not an outrageous misadventure full of jokes, but instead a fairly grounded series of ugly misfortune. At one point she was pinned under the corpse of one of her colleagues as they were devoured by skags. At another point a colleague was mortally wounded and begged her for a mercy kill, which Tannis was reluctant to do because it would leave her all alone. She tells these stories in a detached and almost clinical monotone. No jokes. No big emotions. Just a deliberate recounting of events for the audience. <\/p>\n

    For contrast, there’s another mission where a guy in the town of New Haven asks you to look in all the dumpsters around town to find all the porno magazines his wife threw away. At the end of the job it jokes that the money he pays you is a “little damp”. It’s an absurd job for someone to post to a bounty board, an absurd problem to have in a space-age futureDoes Pandora not have internet porn?<\/span>, and an absurd task for a vault hunter to undertake. I don’t know if I’d call it funny in the sense of making me laugh, but it clearly has humorous intentions.<\/p>\n

    Here Scooter (top-right) is over-sharing with regards to his mother and our next quest giver.<\/div>
    Here Scooter (top-right) is over-sharing with regards to his mother and our next quest giver.<\/div><\/p>\n

    When Scooter the local mechanic sends you to fix the Catch-A-Ride systemThe gizmo that spawns cars.<\/span> he says that the system is, “more busted than my momma’s girl parts.” I get that Scooter has this crazy rural vibe and the joke isn’t really about what happened to his mom, but that he’s such a crass moron that he’d talk about his own mother in such insensitive terms, but still. Ew. <\/p>\n

    Later on in the story Scooter sends you to meet a guy named Lucky. Along the way, he reveals that Lucky is responsible for the whole “busted girl parts” thing that happened to his mother. To me this made it sound we were being prepared for an upcoming fight. I thought the game was setting up the next villain, and I’d have to fight Lucky when I got to him. But then I found him and he was a generic no-voice NPC model. It was very strange. The topic never comes up again.<\/p>\n

    (But it does get mentioned in Borderlands 2. If you do the Clan Warfare questline, you’ll discover the Zafords had a son Lucky, who Scooter buried alive in a shallow grave. I don’t know what Lucky did to Scooter’s mom, but apparently Scooter made good on his promise to pay him back for it. This also means that if you’re going to imagine a voice for Lucky while you’re reading his quest text in Borderlands 1, then you should make sure he has a really strong Irish accent because that’s how the Zafords sound in Borderlands 2.)<\/p>\n

    Moxxi didn't actually get a splash intro in the main story of Borderlands 1, so here's her intro from the Pre-Sequel.<\/div>
    Moxxi didn't actually get a splash intro in the main story of Borderlands 1, so here's her intro from the Pre-Sequel.<\/div><\/p>\n

    This gets even stranger when fan-service and cosplay icon Moxxi enters the story in DLC. She runs a fighting arena where she screams flirtatious things and innuendo while you murder psychos. Then it’s revealed that Moxxi is somehow Scooter’s mother, despite the fact that she looks to be the same age, if not younger. Also they have completely different accentsThe Pre-Sequel patches over this by showing that Moxxi is deliberately covering up her native redneck accent.<\/span>. Worse, this reveal seems to have been done for no reason. The two don’t have any amusing family banter and in fact they don’t really interact very much in the rest of the series. It’s just a jarring reveal for no payoff.<\/p>\n

    What this means is that Scooter is a comedy character, and Moxxi is a comedy character, but their relationship has this bizarre non-comedy backstory about busted girl parts and some hick named Lucky being buried alive. <\/p>\n

    We can’t tell exactly what happened to the story and characters in this game, but the abrupt shift in tone late in development evidently made for some really strange seams between the various parts. Tannis is basically grimdark, a few of the sidequests are absurd and comedic, and this stuff with “Scooter’s mom” is strange and tonally disjointed. <\/p>\n

    It feels like there are more than two different versions of Borderlands 1 in this particular stew, and whenever I go through one of these tonal slam-cuts it makes me curious about all the different iterations of this game that wound up on the cutting room floor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    People call Borderlands “action comedy”, but that applies more to the second two games. I honestly find it really hard to nail down the tone of the first one. The trailers sold us action comedy, but when you played the thing it was sometimes dark and grim. In a few spots it was genuinely funny. […]<\/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-37858","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\/37858","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=37858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37858\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}