{"id":38094,"date":"2017-11-30T06:00:55","date_gmt":"2017-11-30T11:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=38094"},"modified":"2017-11-08T20:55:12","modified_gmt":"2017-11-09T01:55:12","slug":"borderlands-part-18-origin-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=38094","title":{"rendered":"Borderlands Part 18: Origin Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel takes place in the space between Borderlands 1 and Borderlands 2. Instead of being developed by Gearbox, Publisher 2k Games handed the project to 2k Australia. <\/p>\n

Borderlands has something interesting in common with the Arkham series<\/a>:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The first game was a surprise hit with a fresh look and fresh gameplay, although it was a little rough around the edges. The final boss fight was almost comically disappointing.\n
  2. The follow-up was bigger, more ambitious, and more polished.\n
  3. The next entry was an awkward one-off prequel made by a new team so the publisher could continue to capitalize on the series while the original team tried to make the fourth game even BIGGER. This one felt a little off from the others.\n<\/ol>\n

    The final Arkham game turned out to be pretty bloated and unfocused. There’s no telling how the next Borderlands game will turn out, but I’m hoping the long development cycle of Borderlands 3 doesn’t mean the team has bitten off more than they can chew and we’re headed for another Arkham Knight.<\/p>\n

    I suppose I tipped my hand already with bullet point #3, but I really do think the Pre-Sequel is a bit of an awkward misfire. It’s got some great ideas and makes some genuine improvements on the formula, but it’s also missing a bit of the magic that made Borderlands 2 so much fun to play. I feel bad about saying this, since the Pre-Sequel is the last game the studio made before they shut their doors<\/a>. <\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

    Is This a Story That Needed to be Told?<\/h3>\n

    When we meet Jack, he's getting the crap kicked out of him by the Lost Legion. (The bad guys.)<\/div>
    When we meet Jack, he's getting the crap kicked out of him by the Lost Legion. (The bad guys.)<\/div><\/p>\n

    Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel<\/em> is the story of how Jack, a supposedly normal mid-level manager at Hyperion became…<\/p>\n

    Hang on, I need to clarify this point or I’ll get nitpicked to death: Yes<\/em>, in the opening cutscene Athena calls Jack a “low-level programmer”. But that makes NO sense. I mean, just look at his office…<\/p>\n

    Yes, this is really Jack's office. There's a picture of Angel on the desk, so you can't claim he's co-opted the office of a superior.<\/div>
    Yes, this is really Jack's office. There's a picture of Angel on the desk, so you can't claim he's co-opted the office of a superior.<\/div><\/p>\n

    THIS is supposed to be the offices of a “low-level programmer”? Nonsense. Heck, people that write code don’t get to shake hands with executives this high up the chain. Jack’s personalityThis world is made of extremely arch characters, and Jack’s personality has all the hallmarks of a stereotypical jerk boss and none of the hallmarks of a nerdy programmer.<\/span>, his authorityHe can hire people.<\/span>, his mandateThe company sent him to Pandora to observe the Helios base<\/span>, and his skill setHe never says or does anything to indicate he understands code, but his constant team-building talk in this story shows some decision-making and people skills.<\/span> all clearly indicate management. But then in Borderlands 2 he apparently designed the BNK3R robot, and here in the Pre-Sequel he supposedly invented the giant doom laser. In this game ZarpedonThe main villain. Yes, the name is goofy on purpose. It’s a pretty good running joke.<\/span> calls him an engineer in an audiolog. At another point Jack says he spent a lot of time programming growing up. <\/p>\n

    So he’s either a programmer, a manager, or an engineer. Whatever. I just want to point out that this confusion is coming from the game, not me. Since it doesn’t actually matter, I’ve decided he’s a manager who takes credit for things his engineer underlings invent.<\/p>\n

    Anyway. Let’s start over…<\/p>\n

    The Pre-Sequel is the story of how Jack, a supposedly normal mid-level manager at Hyperion became megalomaniacal CEO Handsome Jack. This time the player characters work for Jack, and are there to see his descent into villainy while trying to stop the bad guys from blowing up Pandora’s moon Elpis. Half of the playable vault hunters have a villainous bent to them. <\/p>\n

    I can see a couple of problems with this premise right away. The first problem is that showing a fall from grace means doing a character study. It means you need to dig into a character’s personality and show how they were undone by a tragic flaw, or explore what motivates them. I won’t say that a Borderlands story can’t<\/b> do that, but it does sound like a bad fit. The characters are very arch and broad. Handsome Jack was not a complex guy and his character would need to be given a lot more depth to support this kind of story. Furthermore, the previous game spent its entire runtime making sure we really hated him and wanted to kill him. Now the writer has to walk that back and make us empathize with him. Again, that’s not impossible, but it does sound like it would require a lot of screen time and is a less-than-ideal fit for the established formula of action and short comedic monologues.<\/p>\n

    If this is the office of a LOW level programmer, then what sort of extravagant pleasure palaces do they have for senior ones?<\/div>
    If this is the office of a LOW level programmer, then what sort of extravagant pleasure palaces do they have for senior ones?<\/div><\/p>\n

    The other problem is that the story is a bit at odds with itself. It’s a story about bad guys, who work for someone gradually becoming a bad guy. That’s fine. But these supposed bad guys are trying to do something heroic (save the planet) while the previous vault hunters were just on a treasure hunt. I don’t mind playing a hero and I also don’t mind playing the “bad guy” (or extremely naughty guy) like in Saints Row. But this setup feels kind of muddled because we’re not really one or the other. It’s not wrong or anything, but it doesn’t feel like a stable foundation for broad humor. <\/p>\n

    Finally, is this something the audience cares about? Were people really that curious about what made Jack such a jerk? I wasn’t. He was an annoying, arrogant, insanely powerful, self-aggrandizing douche. The thing that made him enjoyable as a character was his over-the-top villainy and his trolling. Building the game around an earlier, nicer, less-funny version of the character sounds like a path to disappointment. <\/p>\n

    We’re not going to drill down and tear this game apart a quest at a time. I’m just going to skim over it quickly and talk about how it fails to execute on its core premise. But before we get started with that, let’s look at… <\/p>\n

    The Good Stuff<\/h3>\n

    I know this game didn’t really delight fans. It has fewer sales, fewer fans, smaller mindshare, and a lower overall critical reception. There are fewer quests, fewer characters, and less gamespace. But despite those disappointments I think this entry actually made some really solid, smart improvements on the Borderlands formula. <\/p>\n

    1. Space Australia<\/h3>\n

    This is Peepot, the beer-swilling Aussie madman. I'm going to assume he's a 100% faithful representation of Australian culture and not in any way offensive.<\/div>
    This is Peepot, the beer-swilling Aussie madman. I'm going to assume he's a 100% faithful representation of Australian culture and not in any way offensive.<\/div><\/p>\n

    The bulk of the game takes place on Elpis, the moon of Pandora. The designers could have simply made Elpis just like Pandora, but they went out of their way to give the place its own culture and personality. Elpis is culturally “Australia”. They also didn’t just copy & paste the art assets from the earlier games. Since there’s no atmosphere on Elpis, they took the time to make buildings and structures designed to hold an atmosphere. <\/p>\n

    2. Movement<\/h3>\n

    The double jump and low gravity mean you can jump this gap. The extra mobility is very liberating.<\/div>
    The double jump and low gravity mean you can jump this gap. The extra mobility is very liberating.<\/div><\/p>\n

    Borderlands 1 had fall damage. Borderlands 2 got rid of that, and it was a major improvement. In a world this cartoonish, I don’t need the realism of dying when I jump off of a one-story building. <\/p>\n

    Pre-Sequel takes this idea to its logical conclusion: Double-jumping and ground-pounding. This is so fun I honestly find it frustrating to return to Borderlands 2. I really hope this feature sticks around in Borderlands 3. If we need an excuse for why people can double-jump all of a sudden, then just give all the players jetpacks or rocket boots or whatever. <\/p>\n

    Whatever excuse they use, I hope they also keep the ground slam move. It doesn’t need to do massive damage like in Pre-Sequel, I just want to be able to go straight down and do a superhero landing. I do it all the time in Pre-Sequel, and it feels amazing.<\/p>\n

    3. The Grinder<\/h3>\n

    Grinder? I hardly know her!<\/div>
    Grinder? I hardly know her!<\/div><\/p>\n

    The first two Borderlands games had the problem where it was trivial to break the economy. If you gather up all the loot to sell, then you’ll quickly have more cash than you can ever use. You’ll have so much that even if you feed it into the boring slot machine, it’ll still take ages to get rid of. You can ignore all that trash, but… this is hard for some people. There’s a certain psychology at work here, and people will often try to optimize their situation even if doing so makes the game less fun. In an ideal design, there will be a way to save the player from themselves. <\/p>\n

    The Pre-Sequel fixes this by giving you a machine that can take three of a given item and return one of the same item, possibly of a higher quality. So if you feed it three green shotguns it will spit out another shotgun, which might be upgraded to blue. It makes common loot (particularly green stuff) a little more interesting, since you still might get a useful blue out of it. It sounds overpowered, but in practice it delivers a steady trickle of interesting loot without breaking the game. The trick is that when you put three weapons in, the weapon that pops out will be the average level of all three, rounded down. You level up pretty regularly, so the weapons you’re hoarding are always gradually becoming obsolete. You might be able to mix your trash weapons together and make the occasional blue, but by the time you gathered enough to make a purple you’d be doing it with weapons that are far beneath you anywayThis probably changes in the late game when you’re likely to linger at the same level for a long time, but I’ve never known anyone to stick with the game long enough to find out.<\/span>. <\/p>\n

    This gives the player something to do with trash guns rather than converting them into useless money. In the Pre-Sequel, I often found myself a little hungry for cash. This also made me a lot less cavalier about death, since those respawn bills are now chipping away at a much smaller pool of money.<\/p>\n

    There’s also a quest early in the game that requires you to donate 50 trash guns. It also includes a lot of combat unrelated to the gun-foraging. It takes a long time to complete, but you get an orange-tier item at the end of it. I don’t know if it’s strictly worth it in terms of time, but I always do it because I’m pretty sure it’s the only mission in the whole series to give orange items as a quest rewardI thought about it for five minutes and I can’t come up with any others. I’m sure you’ll let me know if I’m overlooking one.<\/span>. Doing this quest puts a lot of downward pressure on your income. When combined with the grinder, it comes pretty close to being a balanced videogame economy.<\/p>\n

    4. Vastly Improved Introduction<\/h3>\n

    Welcome to the game. Okay, intro over. Let's shoot some stuff.<\/div>
    Welcome to the game. Okay, intro over. Let's shoot some stuff.<\/div><\/p>\n

    I don’t know why we had to wait until the third title to get this right, but we finally have a Borderlands game that takes less than an hour to get going. It’s less than a minute between Claptrap’s welcome and the point where you start shooting things. Yes, I realize this sounds odd coming from the guy who’s always complaining<\/a> about games that cut corners in the story and setting because they’re in a hurry to get to the explosions<\/a>. But look: I like my stories smart and emotionally impacting, and I like my action fast and awesome. And regardless of whether I’m playing a story game or an action game, I don’t want to spend five minutes having NPCs explaining to me what a HUD is. <\/p>\n

    You get your special ability at level 3, rather than waiting all the way to level 5. You get your shield right after your first encounter, rather than pointlessly making you one unlucky crit away from death for ten minutesThe game never explains why these expert mercenaries are showing up to dangerous jobs with no shield. And that’s fine, because unless the explanation is fun or hilarious I’d rather we skipped it and cut to the gameplay.<\/span>. The whole thing is smoother and faster and manages to set up the story without making you stand around waiting for Claptrap.<\/p>\n

    5. Concordia<\/h3>\n

    That's Pandora in the sky, the planet where the last two games took place. To the right of that is the Hyperion station, which loomed over the moon in Borderlands 2. It pretty much fills the sky now that we're standing on the moon.<\/div>
    That's Pandora in the sky, the planet where the last two games took place. To the right of that is the Hyperion station, which loomed over the moon in Borderlands 2. It pretty much fills the sky now that we're standing on the moon.<\/div><\/p>\n

    Borderlands 1 had these strange unpopulated towns. Borderlands 2 finally gave us a single city to call home, but it was annoyingly spread out and you’d spend a lot of time jogging from one side of the city to the other. This was mostly due to the huge central area, and that place needed to be roomy for the mid-game twist where the city took off. <\/p>\n

    But Elpis has Concordia, and it’s my favorite city in the series so far. It’s got all the amenities of Sanctuary in a fraction of the space, which means less hiking around. It also means the limited number of decorative NPCs can be placed closer together, which makes the place feel a little more alive.<\/p>\n

    Okay, I’m out of nice things to say for now. Next time we’ll get to the nitpicking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel takes place in the space between Borderlands 1 and Borderlands 2. Instead of being developed by Gearbox, Publisher 2k Games handed the project to 2k Australia. Borderlands has something interesting in common with the Arkham series: The first game was a surprise hit with a fresh look and fresh gameplay, although it […]<\/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-38094","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\/38094","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=38094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38094\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}