Borderlands: Negatives
By Chris Cesarano
I had never quite gotten into the hype of Borderlands. In fact, I don’t think I even bothered to read over any preview materials in magazines or on websites. Everyone was excited because it was supposed to be some post-apocalyptic MMO that had procedurally generated loot (for those not aware, procedurally generated means the game creates the items randomly on its own based on predetermined guidelines. In other words, the weapons you pick up weren’t pre-programmed, but randomly generated on the spot).
I heard nothing but excitement for this game that was going to be “so awesome”. Then it released. Suddenly the few websites I still take seriously on this sort of thing had moderate praise and plenty of complaints. Meanwhile I was enjoying simultaneous release Brutal Legend thoroughly, a title which only a handful on my friends list were playing in comparison to the most over-rated post-apocalypse ever.
Though I suppose an “over-rated post-apocalypse” is a silly thing. No matter what it’s going to be chaotic and miserable, so being disappointed by the experience is like saying you were sad you only vomited for five minutes instead of ten.
I digress.
I finally got my own hands on Borderlands, which isn’t really a post-apocalypse so much as a sci-fi playing pretend. Oddly enough, I was disappointed that I enjoyed it more than I was expecting. So I guess I was, in a sense, sad that I only threw up for five minutes instead of ten. Glad I could put that analogy to good use.
My biggest gripe on the title is actually with the “story”. I use the term loosely here, as one of the developers may have just included some scribblings from their thirteen year old’s notebook just to make them happy. “Yes, Johnny, that’s your story in the game. Yes, I know it’s ‘so awesome’ and you can brag to all your dumb friends at school.”
If the game had settled on having no plot at all I might have been fine, but instead it pretends to have a story when the only real purpose to play the game is to accept and hand in quests. Hopefully in between you get to shoot things and make them fall down!
“But Christopher, you just pointed out that the point of the game isn’t the story!” some deluded fans that think this game was worth more than a rental may cry out. This is true, but any game that does not let me skip cut-scenes or speed through mandatory story missions at my own chosen pace is thus forcing a narrative upon me, at which point your story gets called into question. Every time you start a new game you will be required to view a cut-scene discussing some sort of Vault on a wasteland planet that allegedly holds some sort of treasure. Maybe it’s knowledge, maybe it’s technology. No one knows because no one is certain it even exists.
Ok, so I’ve clearly got some motivation. I’m a treasure hunter that is clearly looking to score on the discovery of this Vault. I can dig that. Then this Guardian Angel comes into contact with me and starts calling me friend, pretty much saying she’s there to help me find the Vault. In other words, she is there to force you into moving the plot forward. About halfway through I started wondering if her dialogue frequently included “Would You Kindly?”, because I was certainly not choosing to follow but merely obeying.
As stated, it’s not only that opening cut-scene you cannot skip (and before you complain, yes, I know you can skip the bus ride introduction, but it would be nice if you could skip everything else as well). I am forced to follow a little robot into town, then I need to speak with the doctor and do his quests one by one. A lot of games force this sort of thing onto you, but if you know the necessary steps you can basically cut through the dialogue and skip on ahead. Not so with Borderlands. You have to sit and wait for the little robot companion to shut up before you can finally flip the switch and open the door that moves the quest forward. Then the game forces you to watch the introduction of some NPC that hands you some quests in the beginning of the game but has no importance after. Not even a plot important character, but clearly important enough that his introduction must be viewed every fucking time you play the game.
Oddly enough, while this character got his own animated introduction despite having no importance to the overall plot, later characters that are crucial to the story get no such honor. Another character in this same section gets a similar opening and he dies in a later side quest. You don’t see it happen, you never learn why and you never embark on a side story to avenge the guy. He was important enough to get an introduction, but clearly not important enough for his fate to really matter. Even so, after those two animated introductions the whole shtick seems forgotten except for a few key bosses. Ones which you never get to speak with or get any sense of who they are. You merely kill them because you were told to.
How droll.
Once you’ve killed the second boss you are briefly introduced to the “villain” of the game, but you see no other sign of her until towards the very end. Once you’ve completed each of the side quests there is no choice but to rush through to the conclusion, where the one kind-of-story-important character betrays you kind-of. Suddenly the story hits the ground-running to a conclusion, where you discover the Vault (surprise spoilers, Liam Neeson wasn’t there) and…credits roll. Well, there’s a final boss fight where just about every class ability is made worthless, but otherwise it’s that simple. You are never told what is in the Vault. You are never told who the Guardian Angel is or why they care about it. You don’t even get much information on the villain. It just ends.
What was most frustrating to me was the fact that you never had a choice whose side you were on. This is a wasteland planet primarily inhabited by bandits. Anyone else on the planet isn’t exactly Lawful Good, either. Most people are out for their own skins doing whatever they can to survive. The dialogue of each playable character makes it sound as if they are no different. They are on this planet of Pandora for their own gratification. They want money and power, and they possess the lethal skills to obtain both.
Yet the Guardian Angel that employs you is clearly of the most goody-goody variety out there. Well, unless you consider the fact that she outright uses you for her own ends without giving you anything in return. She warns you about how evil the villains are and begs of you to help the weak. You’d think she was speaking with you because you were Batman or Superman.
It would have been nice if, at the beginning of the game, you could have chosen who you wanted to work for. The Guardian Angel, the villain, or yourself. Most of the game could have remained the same as you would have wanted to wipe out all of the competition anyway, but at least there would have been a sense of consistency. Especially if the dialogue would have been modified to reflect as such. After all, leaving it bare bones so players could easily choose two or three different paths would have reflected positively on the gameplay. Even then I could have been more forgiving on the story. Instead it feels as if all the players of this game can only choose between unlawful characters while being railroaded into the roles of Paladins.
Yet to be disappointed by a game’s terrible writing, poor story or even lack thereof is nothing new. What matters at the end of the day is whether the game itself is fun or not.
Well, I was able to play the game to completion, so we can safely assume it is better than Final Fantasy VIII. That’s not saying much.
Borderlands is a sterling example of why RPG mechanics rarely work with guns. Sure, Fallout 3 made it work with the V.A.T.S. system, and Mass Effect worked it decently enough, but overall a player expects bullets to land somewhere in the vicinity of where they are aiming. If an enemy is standing still or running straight toward you, no swerving side to side or any other major motion, and the sights of your sniper rifle are focused precisely on that bastard’s head, then the bullet should blow the bastard’s skull to pieces.
Borderlands does not agree with this logic, and thus an entire class of weapon that should be awesome to use sucks. Sure, the rounds from a sniper rifle are powerful when they hit, and when you play as the Hunter, the class specializing in precision weaponry, you get headshots more frequently than everyone else. Yet that will not stop the game from shooting at the ground half of the time when your sights were lined up with a bandit’s cranium.
If the developers wanted to combine role-playing mechanics with gunplay, there are better ways to do it than simply having bullets land where the sights are not aiming. First, allow the ability to aim down sites to be an unlockable feature that requires a certain level of proficiency. Use a cone crosshair system similar to Left 4 Dead or Call of Duty 4, where the area that bullets may land is larger at lower skill levels and slowly becomes smaller and smaller as they get better at using the weapon. When aiming down a scope, particularly with sniper rifles, simulate the inability to keep the hand still. Once reaching higher proficiencies the scope remains more and more still so headshots are easier to pull off.
In other words, don’t lie to the player about where they are going to hit. Make it obvious why they aren’t hitting where they are aiming. Of course, this also means the beginning of your game is going to be less fun than the later parts, but that’s better than having shoddy mechanics throughout the entire game.
Speaking of shoddy mechanics, the rocket launcher has to be the most worthless explosive device constructed in the history of gaming. There are times your rocket will literally go through a person’s body. One solid object somehow manages to phase between our dimension and another, passing through another solid object. I pondered if this is some alien effect exhibited exclusively on the planet of Pandora, but oddly enough it only seemed to occur with rockets and sentient creatures. Contact with any other physical material would cause a proper explosion.
In the event that the rocket launcher does strike your foe head on, the amount of damage done is what scientists like to call “disappointing”. In fact, sometimes it causes more damage to aim at the feet!
“lol ur such a n00b chris. ur supposed to aim at the feetz.”
Yes, in a fast-paced action game such as Unreal Tournament it makes more sense to aim at someone’s feet. The rocket projectiles are slow-moving and thus easy to dodge, so it is better to aim at the ground and cause splash damage. However, in the event that you do strike that person’s body, the rocket deals more damage. That’s because getting hit by a rocket is a one way ticket to dead-land. Therefore, while it may be a better idea overall to aim at one’s feet, if you can hit their body directly with a fucking rocket then that person should have more pieces left behind than a jigsaw puzzle.
I’ve never known a game where rocket launchers are so worthless. Maybe this choice was done so that the Brick character class was not over-powered, but there are better ways to balance that out. The reload time should take forever. Only one rocket can be loaded at a time. Ammunition as a whole is scarce so you want to save it for extra powerful foes. You know, proper game design. Instead, the folks over at Gearbox figured they’d balance it by making the rockets weaker, and thus nullifying the purpose of ever using the weapon to begin with. You can deal more damage per second with any other gun in the game. Seriously, why bother?
These flaws only become more evident when you hop on board the vehicles with your choice of rocket launcher or machine gun turret. In the event that you hit something with the rocket launcher, the damage dealt is negligible. The machine gun could be powerful, but that is on the off-chance that the bullets land anywhere close to where you’re aiming. Don’t bother with leading foes, either. That will just guarantee that the bullets randomly land someplace the enemy is going to be. Any instincts you have from other games? Throw it away, they don’t apply here.
For the few missions that force you to take down other vehicles you are better off on-foot using your own weapons. Try and use the built-in machine gun or rocket launcher and you’re bound to be blown up before you’ve even chipped the enemy’s paint. An SMG dealing more damage to an armored vehicle than a turret gun on a car is what those in “the biz” like to call a design flaw.
Of course, this all assumes that the developers even bothered to test to make sure everything in the game was well-balanced. It was clearly not, and even this can be exhibited in the game’s character classes. In particular, Brick. See, each class has a unique ability that you cannot unlock until you reach level five. Until then you are stuck with the default weapon proficiencies and whatever they give you. Brick specializes in shotguns and rocket launchers, but they don’t dare drop any of the latter until later. This means your only combat option is to run up to enemies so you are in range to do proper damage.
Brick is the only character where I almost died in the beginning of the game, all because my only choice was to take hit after hit so I could get in range to actually hit my foes. Once he reaches level five he gains an ability to regenerate health while dealing greater melee damage, which is swell and all, but there really should have been a weapon for him at the start that he could use until he had that nifty ability. Otherwise he’d just be taking damage with no method of recovery.
Even worse is later on in the game when you are forced into boss battles where his ability is useless. Either the foe is too far away to strike at or they are simply too huge with weak points he cannot reach. You are forced into using guns, your specialty being a shotgun that also requires a close range or a slow-moving rocket that may or may not hit. Brick is the only character who literally becomes absolutely worthless during certain points of the game.
In addition is the Hunter class, who goes from being quite vulnerable and under-powered to having way too much power available. He later gains an ability to cut through enemy shields and deal direct damage to the enemy’s health, one that is nearly a necessity in order to survive the final map of the game. Meanwhile his class ability to send his hawk friend out to torment foes becomes severely over-powered, able to strike down multiple foes in one go. In short, the guy goes from a fledgling support to a super-power house.
The only classes that have any sense of balance are the Siren and Soldier, whose abilities tend to have some value throughout the entire game. They are also the most capable of holding their own throughout the entirety of a single-player game, whereas the Hunter has a hard time of it at the start and Brick…well, he’s just screwed the whole way through.
Speaking of being screwed and lame segues into new topics, I’d like to take a moment to discuss the enemy respawn system in Borderlands.
Let’s say you enter an enemy facility that is all closed-in corridors and not a lot of overall space. You clear out a few rooms and pick up some loot you want to sell. Fortunately for you there are vending machines at the entrance to the facility that you can sell stuff at, or perhaps buy some of the new inventory that just popped in a couple minutes ago. Unfortunately every guy you just killed seems to have come back from the dead, and by time you reach the vending machines you’ll have to fight through each room you just cleared out minutes ago.
This happens all the time in Borderlands, and becomes especially harrowing later in the game when you’re fighting powerful new foes in the streets of an abandoned town. Before you even have the chance to progress enemies from behind will begin respawning, suddenly pincering you between a rock and a wall of spikes.
Once again the sense of balance is called into question. Things like focus and usability tests are supposed to make sure products provide as little frustration to a player as possible. This is allegedly what all those game testers and quality assurance folks in the credits are hard at work fixing. Yet if they were doing their job properly bad ideas like this wouldn’t exist.
In some of the larger maps and environments the respawn effect aren’t too bad. You won’t be back tracking for a while so when you do go back it’s just more of the same. Plus, most of the time you can just drive past or over enemies (but forget using the turret guns, as mentioned earlier). Yet in smaller areas it becomes a problem. In fact, it most often should not exist.
The very start of the game this effect is most annoying. Every time you leave the town you will have to fight reptilian dog creatures and bandits. Ok, fine, I can deal with that. However, every time you come back you’ll have to fight them again. Instead of marking the town as a safe haven where enemies won’t follow you, they will follow and continue to torment. Even in a game where the primary attraction is to shoot things players like to have a break. This is especially true when you throw elements such as loot into the game.
Which brings me to this allegedly awesome procedurally generated weapons thing the game has going for it. Friends clamored about how awesome it would be that the game makes its own weapons. The developers released a news item early last year stating the game had made well over 100,000 weapons and was still going. Great, right?
Not really. In fact, if no one had even told you that the weapons were made by the game itself no one would ever notice. See, each weapon has a base set of appearances built in by the developers. Let’s say three to five different models per gun type. The game can randomly change their colors, which is nifty, but otherwise the only difference in terms of gameplay is whether it has a scope or not. Looking down a scope is nicer than having to stare down a gun’s sights. So what does it mean when the developers say the game “makes its own guns”? Well, it takes a random gun model, applies a random coat of paint, and applies some random numbers. Damage, accuracy, zoom range (which is partly effected by the gun model and scope), and maybe a couple of added features to it.
Naturally there are rules applied to the system to make sure guns balance out. If the gun has elemental properties then it will deal less damage. If it is really powerful it may have less accuracy. Basically all the rules the developers themselves would follow, they have programmed the game to follow.
Technologically, it’s pretty nifty. It basically means the developers programmed the game to do their work for them. Instead of tweaking hundreds to thousands of weapons they merely had to tweak the rules for the system. However, in terms of gameplay it really doesn’t mean much. Especially because the only loot to look forward to are the guns, which presents problems.
See, Borderlands is trying to play like a game such as Diablo or, my personal most under-rated favorite, Too Human. Finding items and treasure is supposed to be awesome. The problem is, aside from the guns, there is little loot to care about. You can also grab grenade types and shields, but overall there isn’t much to be grabbing. Compare this to, say, Too Human, which has seven or eight types of weapons as well as seven or eight types of armor, as well as various items such as charms to modify your character with. Every fifteen or so minutes you would check on your equipment and maybe find a little somethin’ somethin’ for your troubles. Borderlands? Not so much.
Especially if you play as the Siren class, who favors elemental weaponry. It is uncommon enough to find weapons that inflict additional elemental damage, but finding good elemental weaponry is even harder. Chances are once you’ve found a gun that finally suits your needs, you’ll be sticking with it for quite a while. This turns looting into nothing more than filling up your inventory until you can sell everything, which isn’t so fun if there’s nothing for you to even spend your hard earned cash on.
In the end the Siren character will either have the choice of using weapons with elemental effects in an attempt to take advantage of their class abilities or favoring standard weaponry. While the elemental damage adds quite a bit, you’ll likely remain under-powered compared to your allies in the long run. You’ll make a decent support character, but most of the damage will belong to your friends. If you choose to play single-player as a Siren then, well, expect the game to be a tad tougher.
It would have been nicer if the game somehow allowed the player to modify weaponry to have elemental properties. While this could certainly mess with the game balance, the developers can easily limit what kind of weapon is modified. A weapon whose level is five below the player’s current level, for example, will be weaker than everyone else’s. However, going through the process of imbuing elemental properties suddenly brings it up to par. Just make sure the player isn’t allowed to modify a weapon higher than five below their current level. Making the imbuing process expensive is another excellent balancing mechanic, and in the end the player keeps hold of weapons for longer in case they wind up being excellent loot in the long run.
I certainly had a fun time with Borderlands, but its value is very limited. The professional game designers at Gearbox are supposed to understand fun and balance, aren’t they? Isn’t that why they’re making games in the first place? In the end the title feels similar to Left 4 Dead 2. It’s been rushed out the door without being properly tested to make sure the game isn’t only bug-free (which it’s not), but also plays balanced and fun for everyone. Instead it’s a clunky shooter that can hardly pull off the loot elements that are supposed to make it all worthwhile.
This is what everyone was so hyped up about? Damn are you all gullible.
This describes my feelings towards the quality of this game very well
Tell me how wrong I am in the forums!
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