I'm sure there's 33 pages of complaints about the game here, but I have to add my own.
This game was a huge, huge disappointment for me. I put about 20 hours into it the first couple of weeks, and then have almost never looked back.
Where to begin...
I guess #1 is the story. Yes, it's funny. Yes, it's got lots of nerd humor. But the world isn't cohesive. The storyline is one slapdash reason to go from point A to point B. And the ending.....
Har har har. A fake McGuffin. God you guys are so fucking funny AND clever. If they didn't do a good enough job totally making me not care about the story before, the ending was the cherry on the shit sundae.
#2. The weapons. The thing that is supposed to be the central fun element of the game turned out to be only be half as much fun as they thought. Just like Diablo, 80% of what you pick up you sell. 90% of what you pick up isn't what you're looking for. 8% of what you find is an upgrade, and 2% actually blows your mind with how good it is.
The lack of armor, tweaks, upgrades or anything else just left a big hollow feeling in me as I played through. Shields were either epic, or not getting used. Artifacts are equip-and-forget upgrades as well. The itemization was just too simplistic. The ONLY thing that struck me as truly cool was the Class Mods. But again, because of the underlying issues with itemization...I stuck with one 95% of them time and sold the rest.
#3. The RPG aspects. The character upgrades, like the itemization, was shallow and simplistic. The only mildly interesting part is customizing your niche for team play. But the rest is like a bad knock off of WoW. "Reduce this cool down, increase damage by this percentage." Snnnoooooooreeeeeeeee. The character abilities rarely add anything new. The token elemental abilities again feel out of place. Having corrosion and shock and fire on certain weapons made sense. But magical special orbs that make all your specials elemental? It just didn't make any sense, and again felt like they were just throwing stuff together. A shock gun is cool. A phase-shifting hottie who attacks with ACID? Uh.......no.
#4. The co-op play. Again, this had me really excited. A full-blown co-op shooter/Diablo hybrid? But they planned it out so fucking poorly.
If you are playing with a low level person, either you have to re-roll a character so they can do quests, or they are doomed to be power-leveled by you. They won't be able to use ANY of the shit they get in your game because of level differences, and will miss out on a lot of the quest-chain rewards.
It's hard to "bring people into a game of Borderlands" and even people that are playing together regularly have to be careful to advance together. It was just so poorly planned. The last one of my friends to get Bordelands got absolutely shafted. His first experience with the game was running around with three 20's, and getting one-shotted by everything we fought while doing no damage to it. I think he played a total of three times.
#5. Handling and consolization. This was a
pathetic job of a port. They barely made any attempt to optimize controls or options for the PC, meaning any time I reinstall BL, I have about 10 minutes of .cfg and .ini tweaks ahead of me, where half of that data is stored in places OTHER than the game directory. Holy fucking shit, I normally don't get mad when ports are half-done, but these guys seriously gimped their game for the PC. The shooting feels WRONG and the default controls are annoying.
I had some fun with my friends in BL, I won't deny that. I even bought the Island of Dr. Ned purely for the zombies. But I feel like I wasted money on BL for how much I got out of it, and regret not pirating it. The future expansions have just reinforced the idea that the whole game is a big fucking joke. I wish them the best as they continue to capitalize on the humor and nothing else.
Lastly, hosting is NOT fixed, even today. About 2 months ago, a friend and I had recently reinstalled and found BL was the only thing we could play atm. After 20 minutes of dicking around with the connections (router DMZ and others), I finally was able to get myself to host. But it's not fixed by any extent. It's about as problematic as it was after the first major patch.
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Topic: Borderlands (Read 68768 times)