<\/div>The character Pickle feels like an attempt to reverse-engineer the appeal of Tiny Tina. You’ve got a child character with an “adorable” design, but they’re also corrupted in some way. Tina is a demolitionist, and Pickle is a thief. But Tina subverts the “mischievous child” trope by having her “adorable mischief” be murderous destruction. Pickle doesn’t subvert anything. His Oliver Twist accent is trying pretty hard to be cute and there’s nothing really dark or subversive about his design or character. There’s nothing edgy or strange about this kid. He feels like a character that wandered in from a Disney cartoon. <\/p>\n
Part of the texture of Borderlands 2 is that everyone – good guys and bad guys alike – is a little crazy. Moxxi, Scooter, Marcus, Hammerlock, and Zed are all a little nuts and have occasional moments of surprise sadism in their character. For contrast, here in the Pre-Sequel we end up with a few characters who are just regular nice people. Pickle is kind and sane. Gladstone – who we meet later in the story – is nice and friendly with no creepy quirks or sadistic hobbies. Felicity is an AI that’s been held prisoner by a gang of nutters and forced to be their “girlfriend”, and yet she’s friendly, clear-headed, and not at all insane. <\/p>\n
Speaking of Felicity being an AI…<\/p>\n
Earlier in this series<\/a> I said: <\/p>\n [Head writer Anthony] Burch likes to do this thing where he’ll go for a really obvious joke or twist, and then telegraph that he<\/em> knows that you<\/em> know where the joke is going. It becomes this sort of meta-joke about expectations. He did this in the situation with the totally un-suspicious power core<\/em> when Angel betrayed everyone in Borderlands 2<\/a>. He did it in the sidequest No Hard Feelings<\/a>. He did it again with Pyro Pete in Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage<\/em>. He built an entire character around this gag with Captain Scarlett in the Pirate DLC. Likewise, Crawmerax has a section where you have to track down a bunch of assassins, only to discover they’re already dead. After the first couple it stops expecting you to be surprised and instead begins poking fun at how everyone knows where this joke is going. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n In contrast, this game sets up this situation where you’re looking for a “military-grade AI”. You meet Felicity over the radio, and even though her radio portrait shows her as human, it’s obvious early on that she’s the AI you’re looking for. But instead of telegraphing this and using the available tropes for humor, the game plays it straight and acts like you’re really supposed to be surprised. Pickle is the first to figure it out, and even then it’s only after the truth is too obvious to ignore. And then Felicity congratulates Pickle for being so clever, which means the writer is sort of patting themselves on the back for pulling off this twist, whether it surprised you or not.<\/p>\n To compare authorial voices:<\/p>\n Borderlands 2: “Yeah, you’re a smart player and I know I can’t fool you. Still, these situations are kinda funny when you think about them, right?”<\/p>\n Borderlands Pre-Sequel: “Gotcha! Good twist, right?”<\/p>\n It’s not wrong<\/em>. It’s not like this is some terrible crime against writing or anything. It’s just that you can really see the difference in writing style here, and that difference is once of the reasons Pre-Sequel doesn’t feel as vibrant or as funny as its predecessor.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jack sends the player to an old factory so they can figure out how to build a robot army. As we explore the facility (which is overrun with bandits and space-bugs) we just happen to meet Gladstone, a Hyperion engineer who just happens to be working on a constructor robot that can build a robot army, which just so happens to need a military grade AI, which we just so happen to have picked up during the previous mission. <\/p>\n In most stories, a chain of implausible contrivances like this is a non-no. But in a story like this one it just means we get a chance to tell some jokes via lampshading. Which makes it all the more baffling that the writer doesn’t do this. When we meet Gladstone we get three minutes of Half-Life 2 style cutscene where we are free to move around, but we can’t move on until the adults in the room are done talking. It’s the perfect time for jokes, and there aren’t any.<\/p>\n The jokes don’t have to be brilliant or anything, they just need to smooth over the contrivances.<\/p>\n “What are the odds that we’d just happen to meet someone building a robot army out here?”<\/p>\n “Are you kidding? I’m a Hyperion Engineer. We all build robot armies. Last year at the Hyperion Mercenary Day party the engineers got drunk and we wound up with five robot armies. We had to evacuate the station until they’d killed each other off.”<\/p>\n Or perhaps:<\/p>\n Gladstone: YOU have a military-grade AI?<\/p>\n Jack: What, you don’t? What kind of engineer are you?<\/p>\n Gladstone: I was gonna get around to it eventually, I swear! I’ve just been busy fighting scavs and all!<\/p>\n Or whatever. Have Jack take credit for securing Felicity. Have him yank Gladstone’s chain by pretending he doesn’t think Gladstone is good enough for the team, causing Gladstone to desperately and hilariously over-promise on his creation. If you’re really sold on convincing the audience that Jack is supposed to be an engineer, then maybe use this scene to sell it. Gladstone could try to dazzle Jack with technobabble and Jack could throw it back in his face with an even more ridiculous and jargon-filled question. There’s so much you can do with a scene like this to energize our characters, tell some jokes, and do some worldbuilding. Instead it’s just three minutes of exposition.<\/p>\n Three minutes isn’t egregious, but it could be a lot shorter. The game does the awkward thing where Gladstone meets the player, then Gladstone meets Jack, then Gladstone meets Felicity, then Jack and Felicity talk to each other. You could shave some time off this scene by leaving Felicity out. Later Gladstone calls and says, “I’ve been talking to this AI you nicked. She’s bang-on. A real ace!” This means Gladstone and Felicity can meet and exchange exposition without us needing to listen to information we already know. It would also collapse this triangular conversation into a two-person exchange, which can shorten things even more.<\/p>\n At any rate, the plan is to use Felicity’s robo-smarts to drive Gladstone’s armyIt doesn’t turn out to be an army per se. The constructor just makes a few robots at a time. But whatever.<\/span> of killer robots. This is the origin story for both the constructors and the loader robots the player fights in Borderlands 2. <\/p>\n I really like the idea behind this plot. It’s exciting and interesting, and “building a robot army” is a pretty cool concept for a questline. It shows Jack being a proactive and forward-thinking leader, and it even shows his skill at getting people to fall in line behind him. (And again, underscores how much of his personality fits the “manager” archetype and how poorly it fits “engineer” stereotypes. He does no engineering in this story, and leaves all of the technical stuff to underlings. He never shows any curiosity or knowledge regarding what they might be doing on a technical level. He can’t even remember Gladstone’s skill set. He just calls him “tech guy”.)<\/p>\n Felicity is enthused with her new job at first, but she recoils once she gets a sense of what she’s going to have to do. She hates the idea of inhabiting an ambulatory robot. She’s disgusted with the idea of killing humans in direct combatA military AI that hates killing so much she’s willing to try to kill her owners to avoid doing it? Yeah, that sounds about right for the Borderlands universe.<\/span>. She literally begs the team to copy her and put the copy into the robot, rather than dooming her only existence to piloting a stompy murder-bot. Jack seriously considers it. But then he refuses when he learns that it’s going to take two days to make the copy. The moon will be destroyed by then.<\/p>\n If this is supposed to be part of his fall to evil then this is a pretty weaksauce transformation. Felicity is a sympathetic character and it’s shitty what happens to her, but there’s really not much of a choice here. Granting her wish would doom everyone to death, including her. <\/p>\n If we’re trying to show this as Jack falling to the dark side, then what we’d really want is a setup where Jack has two clear options in front of him:<\/p>\n 1) Jack can defeat the bad guys through some other means and still save the moon, but receive no glory for himself. Then when he does #2, it feels like he chose<\/b> to do something wrong instead of being forced<\/b> to do something unpleasant. It would feel like he was being tempted by something. You could do a Macbeth kinda thing where he thinks he just needs to perpetrate one crime to meet his goals, but the costs keep mounting and requiring more bloodshed and rationalizing. Later he could justify it by claiming he had “no choice” and he really just wanted to save Pandora, thus showing his capacity for self-delusion that was such a defining trait of the character in Borderlands 2.<\/p>\n Sure, forcing one personOr ridiculously anthropomorphized AI, which we’ll just accept as a person for the purposes of this discussion.<\/span> to sacrifice their life against their will for the common good isn’t a “good guy” move. But by the standards of Pandora it’s basically jaywalking. We’re supposed to be witnessing the birth of a supervillain, not a cartoon character being subjected to the trolley problem<\/a>.<\/p>\n We could shrug all of these complaints off if this chapter made for a great series of jokes, but the whole thing is actually kind of depressing. <\/p>\n Also, the entire point of this questline was to build a “robot army”. Now at the end it turns out that we’re actually just building one constructor bot. Okay. That’s fine. But then this bot is never deployed. So not only is the quest depressing, but it’s also a big waste of time with no payoff. The only reason to have this sequence is to show how it contributes to Jack’s fall, and it doesn’t accomplish that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m not going to try to review the Pre-Sequel quest-by-quest. We’re doing a quick (by the standards of this site) overview of the plot. We’re not so much concerned with the “save the moon plot”, and instead I’m just examining the moments in the game dealing with Jack’s fall to the dark side. Anthony Burch […]<\/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-38156","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\/38156","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=38156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38156\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Gladstone<\/h3>\n
<\/div>
<\/div>Felicity<\/h3>\n
<\/div>
\n2) Jack can refuse Felicity’s wish, save the moon, become a celebrated hero, and gain power within Hyperion.<\/p>\n
<\/div>