<\/div>That’s a “death wall” force field that will atomize you if you try to cross it. You need to jump through some hoops to enable Claptrap to deactivate the shield so you can pass safely. My problem is that this door doesn’t look like it should be that hard to get around. The space on the other side of the door is open to the elements, which means you should be able to get there via climbing or flying. This wouldn’t be a big deal, except that the previous quests had you do a bunch of work specifically to enlist the help of a fleet of flying machines (called Buzzards) and they’re supposedly under your control now. In fact, they show up the moment the forcefield comes down. It should be trivial to get over this door. Even if hitching a ride on a Buzzard isn’t an option, later in this mission Roland climbs far more daunting cliffs than the ones on either side of this door. Not being able to bypass this door makes about as much sense as being trapped on an escalator. <\/p>\n
To rub salt in the wound, the mission to grant Claptrap the ability to open this door is also the mission that got Bloodwing killed. A sympathetic character died for this cause, so it’s annoying that, in retrospect, all of that screwing around was apparently pointless. This would be fine if it was played for a joke or lampshaded, but it isn’t. <\/p>\n
I’m not saying I think the developers should have added a Buzzard ride or a climbing minigame. (Please no.) I’m saying they should have changed the scenery so that these two options were no longer (visually) viable. It’s the old problem with 90s shooters: I’m fine with not being able to climb over a chest-high wall, until the moment you put my goal on the other side of said wall and require me to go miles out of my way through waves of foes. Just make the obstacle more visually insurmountable and the sidequest will be easier to swallow. <\/p>\n
Anyway, it’s finally time to meet Angel…<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Angelic Exposition<\/h3>\n
<\/div>For the last game and a half Angel has pretended to be some kind of AI. This lie was implicit in Borderlands 1. Of course, it wasn’t necessarily a lie (yet) in Borderlands 1 because the writer never figured out what she was. It wasn’t until Borderlands 2 was written that her faux-computer schtick retroactively made her behavior deceptive. Her claims of being an AI are far more explicit here in Borderlands 2, and it’s not until we reach her that the truth comes out in a series of reveals:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Angel is a person, not a computer.\n
- She’s also a Siren, like LilithWe don’t learn what Angel’s powers are. We can infer they must have been dangerous, since later the story hints that she accidentally killed her mother with them.<\/span>.\n
- Handsome Jack is Angel’s father.\n
- Yes, Jack is charging the vault key with eridium. But the twist is that you can’t just shove the eridium into the vault key. Instead you pump the eridium into a Siren and she can charge the key.\n
- Angel is being kept alive by the constant flow of eridium into her system. If it stops, she dies.\n
- Angel is trapped in this one room all the time, hooked up to this giant key-charging machine. The only thing she gets to do all day is help her dad manipulate people. Jack gets to exploit her power while at the same time convincing himself that he’s helping his daughter.\n
- Angel wants to die to escape this existence.\n<\/ol>\n
<\/div>Angel is hovering inside the bubble. Jack is yelling at us over the jumbotron. Roland is shouting from the walkway above.<\/div><\/p>\nThat’s a lot of stuff to reveal at once, and it makes this entire section pretty dense. There’s no central boss monster to fight, but the relentless pace of the robot attack ratchets up the challenge into boss fight territory. The goal of the fight is to shoot several pipes leading into Angel’s chamber. This will cut off the flow of eridium, which will stop the vault key from charging and also kill her. <\/p>\n
It’s one of the few sections of the game where you fight beside the original vault hunters. Roland is there for most of the fight, and Lilith shows up near the end.<\/p>\n
Jack doesn’t want you to kill his daughter \/ charging adapter. As the fight drags on, he keeps changing tactics. He tries to threaten you. He tries to guilt you. He tries pleading with you. Then he goes back to threats, only more serious. Angel argues with him. Angel shouts directions at Roland. Roland argues with Lilith. It’s a madhouse. It feels like you’re trying to have a gunfight while on a conference call.<\/p>\n
At the conclusion of the fight Angel’s prison powers down and she dies. Jack teleports in, shoots Roland dead, and ambushes Lilith with a collar that… I don’t know what it does. It doesn’t mind control her, but it does seem to hurt her a lot and prevent her from using her powers without his permission. He orders her to kill the player, but she teleports you away.<\/p>\n
Highly Motivated<\/h3>\n
<\/div>Yes, it's very sad that Angel is dead, but can someone PLEASE pick up the stupid vault key before Jack ambushes us?<\/div><\/p>\nI certainly can’t accuse the writer of taking shortcuts when it comes to character motivation. Every single character now has multiple things pushing them towards the final confrontation.<\/p>\n
Mordecai wants to avenge his bird. Everyone wants to avenge Roland. Everyone wants to rescue Lilith from her torment at Jack’s hands. Everyone wants to stop Jack from charging the vault key (Lilith is his new charger) and gaining control of the Warrior, which everyone believes will let him crush all resistance instantly. <\/p>\n
Jack was originally just in this for power and glory, but now it’s personal. He’s been humiliated and his daughter is dead. From here on out he’s a little less funny and a lot more dangerous.<\/p>\n
Both the good guys and the bad guys need<\/b> to have a final showdown. Jack wants to do it after opening the vault so he can win easily. Jack is rushing to open the vault and working to stall the heroes, and everyone else is scrambling to reach him as soon as possible.<\/p>\n
I can’t think of another game with a clearer or more intense set of motivations for the lead characters. Even brilliant story-based games like Witcher 3 aren’t quite this thorough about establishing the emotional stakes.<\/p>\n
I don’t know that Borderlands needed<\/b> this level of emotional tension. I was fine with the story when it was a simple good guys vs. bad guys story. But I can’t fault the writer for a job well done.<\/p>\n
That said, I do have a problem with this scene. Because of course I do…<\/p>\n
Hang on a Second<\/h3>\n
<\/div>Jack has just shot Roland. (Hence the blood all over my monitor.) Not sure why I'm standing here doing nothing, though. I mean, can I at least TRY to shoot him?<\/div><\/p>\nOkay, I actually have three problems with this scene:<\/p>\n
1. Shut Up Already<\/strong><\/p>\n
I don’t think I’ve ever had a “boss” encounter with this much talking before. Angel is giving you exposition and encouraging you. Jack is taunting you via the jumbotron screens around the room. Angel and Jack are arguing with each other. Roland has to ask Angel for explanations (to stuff she already told the player) and she has to shout directions to him. Roland is shouting encouragement at the player and explains what he’s trying to do. Angel shouts when she spawns some ammo for you. Roland shouts when he drops his turret. Lilith and Roland argue a little when she finally shows up near the end. Lilith shouts some swaggering barks as she nukes guys with her siren powers. And the whole time you’ve got chattering robots, gunfire, and explosions rounding out the soundscape.<\/p>\n
2. Why Doesn’t Roland Respawn?<\/strong><\/p>\n
In this game the respawn stations are an explicit part of the fiction of the world. This isn’t an out-of-universe abstraction like the save system. It’s not something nobody talks about, like respawning in Diablo. Respawning is a thing that happens in this universe and the characters know about it.<\/p>\n
In the first game, Claptrap laboriously explains what the respawn station does, who runs it, and how it works. In this game, the machine has snarky little comments to make at you as you respawn. The machine explicitly charges you money to rebuild you, atom-by-atom.<\/p>\n
And then Handsome Jack one-shots Roland and he falls over dead. No respawn. You can make the excuse that Jack “turned off respawn” for Roland, but then why does it continue to work for you?<\/p>\n
3. Why Can’t I Shoot Jack?<\/strong><\/p>\n
Jack’s ambush goes off without a hitch. He shoots Roland, tosses out some snark, and puts the collar on Lilith. But the only reason this works is because this is a cutscene and the player is reduced to a passive viewer. <\/p>\n
How Can We Fix This?<\/h3>\n
<\/div>Sirens: Gotta catch 'em all!<\/div><\/p>\nThis is the part in my analysis where I usually try to “fix” a broken scene by suggesting some edits. I usually constrain myself to the same basic budget limitations that the original writer operated under. So I can’t “fix” a scene by suggesting a half hour of mo-capped cutscenes, a bunch of additional gamespace, or a new gameplay mode. I try to stick to changes to existing assets, like different dialog or a change to the scenery.<\/p>\n
But I’m stumped. I can’t fix any of these problems without creating more.<\/p>\n
We could fix the problem of “why doesn’t Roland respawn?” by showing Jack sabotaging the respawn station. Maybe just as Roland is respawning, Jack blows it up and Roland is atomized or whatever. But that just compounds the question of what Lilith and the player are doing while all of this is going on. Also, if Roland dies during respawn then Trek nerds might might start thinking he’s just stuck in the machine and can be salvaged later. For this scene to have the intended emotional punch we need to make it clear to the audience that Roland is 100% dead, right now. The abrupt shock of seeing him die is the whole point, and any additional confusion or after-the-fact exposition will erode that.<\/p>\n
We could have Jack explain that he’s disabled the respawn station, but then why don’t Lilith and the player blast him in the face while he’s running his mouth? His ambush has to be a quick one-two punch, and there’s no room for exposition in there without making the scene really clunky.<\/p>\n
<\/div>Roland is dead, but *I'M* still alive, right? So why am I standing here doing nothing while Jack tries to murder me?<\/div><\/p>\nWe can explain why the player can’t act by putting them on the other side of a forcefield, but then it doesn’t make sense for Jack to try and make Lilith kill someone protected by a forcefield. Also it would be fiddly to make it clear where the forcefield is, given the camera distance. And besides, we don’t want to watch Jack’s big scene through a sparkly “forcefield” filter. <\/p>\n
We could set up Roland’s death by having Jack announce during the fight that the respawn gizmo is off, but then… what if the player dies? This game doesn’t have a game over screen, and you really don’t want the player to have to replay a battle with this much emotion and dialog in it.<\/p>\n
I have no idea how to fix this without fundamentally redesigning the entire confrontation. But this fight has already been built up by the preceding scenes, so those would need to be rewritten as well. I think if we kept pulling on this thread the entire second act would come apart.<\/p>\n
I stand by my assertion that this fight is a little too talky, the unjustified loss of player agency is annoying, and Roland’s non-respawning death is a plot hole. But I concede that I couldn’t do any better, and in fact you might not be able to fix this without ruining all of the newly-energized character motivations I talked about above. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It takes a lot of door-opening, fetch-questing, and button-pushing, but eventually the player breaks through the defensive layers to reach Angel. But before we get to her, I need to gripe about a plot door. This one: That’s a “death wall” force field that will atomize you if you try to cross it. You need […]<\/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-38059","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\/38059","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=38059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}