<\/div>This fight is a little wonky. There’s a save point right before the fight, so you respawn nearby if you die. That’s nice. The problem is that there isn’t much ammunition around. It’s a long, long battle across the top of the dam, and I’m often a little low on bullets by the time I get to Roland. There’s no way to replenish your ammunition before the fightThere are few boxes around, but those are a very small supply compared to the upcoming fight.<\/span>.<\/p>\n If you’ve been picking up loot along the way, then you might be able to switch to some trash weapon to get you through. For example, if you’ve depleted pistol and shotgun ammo with your two main weapons, then maybe you can get through by equipping a crappy assault rifle. But it’s not usually very fun to go into a major boss battle equipped with trash weapons. And of course, this is a boss fight so trash weapons might not be strong enough to get the job done. This fight in particular is all about doing damage as quickly as possible so you can hurt the boss before the next wave of mooks appears.<\/p>\n You can jump back to town to refill, but the fast travel point here is one-way. Guys respawn when you change zones, which means you’ll have to re-do the entire fortress all over again – both inside and on top of the dam – in order to get back to the bossThis happened to me on my first run through the game. I didn’t pick up on the detail that yellow travel stations were one-way, and so I had to re-do the entire dam. I was not happy.<\/span>. And by the time you get there, you’ll probably be right back where you started: Standing on the threshold of a boss fight and low on ammunition.<\/p>\n It’s not that this fight is “too hard”. Sometimes it’s a breeze, and sometimes it’s a bit of a slog. But how difficult it is usually comes down to luck: What quality of weapons are you using, and are they ammo-hungry? Have you been spending your inventory upgrades on backpack space, or ammo capacity? If you happen to be relying on a shotgun and an SMG then you’ll probably be fine. If you’ve been relying on assault rifles and sniper rifles then you’re going to be starving for bullets before you’re done crossing the dam. <\/p>\n The constructor also has a way of eating bullets. In a normal boss fight you’re usually dealing with a boss that has a fixed pool of health. But the constructor can just keep spawning in reinforcements. Kill two robots, then back off because you’re low on health and shields. By the time you’ve recovered there are two more robots on the field. You’ve just spent a bunch of bullets and made no progress towards killing the boss.<\/p>\n Also, this is one of the spots in the game that can really highlight the difference between characters. Axton can summon a turretWhich has infinite ammo as long as it’s active.<\/span> that will keep the mooks busy, which allows him to focus his attention (and his ammunition) on the boss. Meanwhile Maya’s power will let her hold one of the mooks still for a few seconds without damaging it, which is of very questionable benefit here.<\/p>\n It kind of comes down to DPS: If you can do enough damage to the mook robots to brush them out of the way quickly, then you’ll have a few free seconds to work on mama bot before she spews out more mooks. But if you’re too slow – either because you’ve got lousy aim, or because your weapons are trash – then this fight will go from “challenging” to “insurmountable”.<\/p>\n This might be a deliberate design decision. This is one of the few boss fights in the game where you can explicitly fail within the story. If the fight takes too long then Hyperion swoops in and takes Roland away. He’s thrown into the Hyperion Friendship Gulag. You can then go to the gulag and try the same fight again with slightly more favorable terrainThe gulag is more open, so you can engage at a distance. The fight at the top of the dam is more confined.<\/span>. It’s possible this fight is here as a hurdle to make sure you’ve got enough levels \/ skill \/ gear, and to encourage you to level up a bit more if you’re falling short in these areas.<\/p>\n That’s fine, although I really think there should be a bullet vending machine before the fight.<\/p>\n Once everyone is back to town, Roland sets up the plot for the rest of the game:<\/p>\n Jack is trying to open a new vault. He’s using the vault key from the previous game. In Borderlands 1, you spent the game collecting the pieces of the key. Then you gave it to Tannis for no reason and she turned around and gave it to the bad guy. The bad guy opened the vault with it. After the finale, you collected the vault key and… gave it back to Tannis for some reason?<\/p>\n Well, that’s twice she’s been entrusted with the vault key and twice the bad guys have taken it from her. Jack took the key from her between the last game and this oneTo be fair, this time they had to beat her instead of tricking her.<\/span>.<\/p>\n In the previous game, Tannis explained that the vault was only available to be opened for a brief window, once every two hundred years. In this game they’ve retconned things a bit so that the key can only open a vault once every 200 years because it needs to “charge up”. This is understandable, since the previous game had kind of written the story into a corner. <\/p>\n It turns out that speeding up the charging process requires a ton of eridium, so Jack is running a huge mining operation to gather the stuff.<\/p>\n Why Is Borderlands Funny? If you ask some people, they’ll tell you it isn’t. That’s fair enough I guess. If someone tells you a joke and you don’t laugh, then the joke wasn’t funny. End of story.<\/p>\n When people talk about the game being not funny, the most common moment cited is the quest from Sir Hammerlock where he tasks you with finding a new name for Bullymongs, the four-armed snow beasts that harass you out in the wilderness. <\/p>\n The quest goes like this: Hammerlock hates the name “Bullymong”, and he suggests “Primal Beasts” as an alternative. He has you kill a few to “test out” the name. When Primal Beast” doesn’t work out for various reasons, he switches to “Ferovore” and has you kill some more. Eventually that falls through. Frustrated, Hammerlock suggests “Bonerfarts”. <\/p>\n Yes, “Bonerfart” is an idiotic and childish name. And for some people it was so childish it was irritating. Do you really expect me to laugh at the word Bonerfart? Do you think I’m a ten year old?<\/i> But for me the joke wasn’t the joke, it was the context for the joke. It’s a lot like the humor in Leisure Suit Larry<\/a> and how a change in gaming culture (or I suppose simply the existence of gaming culture) destroyed the framework on which that humor was originally built.<\/p>\n I didn’t laugh at “Bonerfart” either. But I did laugh when I saw that the in-game HUD was participating in the joke by updating the interface with Hammerlock’s new names. That was unexpected, silly, and fun. It made me laugh.<\/p>\n A bit more humor came from the fact that Hammerlock is (supposedly) a scientist who speaks in a British-ish accent. Americans tend to associate that genre of accent with upper class culture, so having this upper class scientist acting childishly added another layer of absurdism to the whole thing. Also, there was the ridiculous notion that a zoologist would ask you to “test out” a proposed species name by having you kill some of the creatures in question. <\/p>\n I’m not trying to convince you the quest was funny. I’m just trying to show where I think the humor was coming from.<\/p>\n Back in 2013 the Student Game Developer Alliance hosted a talk by Borderlands 2 lead writer Anthony Burch where he talked about comedy in games, “Anthony Burch – Dying is Funny, Comedy is Easy<\/a>“. You can watch the archived talk on YouTube:<\/p>\n In the talk he asked the question, “Why aren’t more games [trying to be] funny?” and then went on to propose a few possible answers. It’s a good talk and worth a watch. Don’t let the supposed two hour running time scare you off. The video is only 40 minutes long (not sure why YouTube is misreporting it) and his talk is only the first 20 minutes. The last half of the vid is one of those useless Q&A sessions where the A’s don’t make sense because the people asking the Q’s weren’t given microphones and thus can’t be heard on the recording.<\/p>\n I agree with his point that most games are mechanically funny. You often play as an absurdly powerful avatar of destruction, and that absurd level of power suggests a humor we never see in the game. <\/p>\n It’s hilarious when Skyrim bandits say “It must have been the wind” and resume their patrol with six arrows sticking out of the side of their head. It’s goofy when guards in Hitman fail to recognize the huge bald murderer they’re chasing because he’s suddenly wearing a different color suit. It’s wacky when you make a bad turn in Grand Theft Auto and punt a pedestrian into opposing traffic. It’s silly fun when you put a live grenade into Three Dog’s pocket in Fallout 3<\/a>. Games are often asking us to ignore these humorous situations or images so they can continue their “serious” or “epic” tale. Why don’t more games just embrace the lunacy? Why set the tone of the story against the tone of the gameplay?<\/p>\n I think this Bullymong quest is a good example of why. If this was just another boring quest to kill X Bullymongs for arbitrary reason Y then the vast majority of people wouldn’t complain. Critics and players would just shrug, “Quests are just an excuse for gameplay. Who cares if it’s boring and predictable?” Sure, story nerds like me might fuss a little, but most people won’t care.<\/p>\n On the other hand, if you make a joke and it doesn’t elicit a laugh, then people will<\/em> notice and they will<\/em> complain. The audience has decided they’re okay with a serious quest that doesn’t really work for emotional or logical reasons, but they won’t be nearly as charitable with a joke that doesn’t get a laugh. I guess this makes sense. A boring quest is just boring, but an un-funny joke is irritating. Choosing to go for comedy makes failures more visible and more damaging. <\/p>\n Still, I really wish a few more games would embrace the inherent absurdity in their mechanics. There are so few genuinely funny games. It feels like it would be a safer bet to go for comedy than to fight for mindshare in the already crowded market of anger and fury.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The player reaches the imprisoned Roland at the end of the dam. The Hyperion robots have him in a plot forcefield and the player has to deal with the constructor robot to free him. As the name suggests, the constructor robot makes other robots. This Dam Fight This fight is a little wonky. There’s a […]<\/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-37980","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\/37980","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=37980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37980\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/div>The Warrior<\/h3>\n
<\/div>Why Is Borderlands Funny?<\/h3>\n
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