When I first moved to China I was working for 2K Games China. The project was to be Borderlands Online, but it was unfortunately cancelled before release. Despite this, I never got around to playing Borderlands 2. I played the first game, but never the second. Now it’s time to correct that.
Starting the Game in 2024
Opening Borderlands 2 in 2024 is it’s own experience. There are so many screens to get through until you get to the actual game. First, you have to wait for the game to check DLC and to create an online session. I guess this is an always online game. I’m not sure if this is DRM since the game is designed towards co-operative multiplayer. On Red River I implemented a system that could seamlessly switch a game from single player to LAN or online so it’s possible to do without being permanently online. But in that game we used one of the clients as the host and I think Borderlands 2 wants to use online servers to prevent cheating. Maybe, I haven’t looked under the hood.
Next, you need to go through the Terms of Service and the EULA. Then you need to get past a screen telling you about a bonus key for owning the first game. I don’t know or understand what this bonus is because I haven’t played the game yet, but that’s… good, I guess? Next, you see a full screen as telling you to wishlist Borderlands 4. It already feels like a lot.
Next are a bunch of screens telling you about SHiFT, which is their matchmaking system. Set a username. Read more out of context stuff. I started to feel like the AVGN, just let me play the game!
Anyway, after getting past all of this I was finally able to start playing. Thankfully, you don’t need to go through these screens again. This is the part that actually gets fun.
Story and Missions
The basic story is the same as the first game. There’s another vault with treasure in it, everyone wants to open it, and you play as one of the Vault Hunters trying to find the vault. It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s simple and efficient. A story designed to get you stuck into shooting guns at things as fast as possible.
The early missions are cleverly designed to teach you about the basic mechanics of the game. You’ll learn about the different weapon types, how to use vehicles, about side missions, how to use shops, upgrade your character, pretty much everything is covered.
After a few hours of gameplay the hidden tutorial ends from then on it’s a pure rail shooter. Borderlands is open world and you can go wherever you want, but when you do a mission you will follow a specific path through an area and encounter the same enemies. This is both a good and a bad thing.
It’s good in that it allows the developers to design set pieces that you can play through as the story progresses. The story missions are the best part of the game, when you start encountering different factions fighting each other, or new and challenging enemies, and the dubstep starts dropping as bullets spray all over the place you can’t help but have fun.
Unfortunately this breaks down when it comes to the side missions. They essentially boil down to fetch quests that involve replaying areas you’ve already completed. After a while it becomes repetitive, fighting the same encounters over and over, with no real variety. The rewards from these side missions are barely worth completing, as I’ll talk about later, and they only really exist so you can grind your XP and level up.
I notice that I generally enjoy the game when I’m playing the story missions. The side missions just don’t hold my attention enough and I often get bored going through them. Part of this could be down to the writing. It feels very 90s, which is fine, but it ranges from “Tony Hawk’s except with guns” cool to “I’m 14 and this is badass” cringe. Generally the side missions have stories, but they just aren’t written well enough to be engaging.
Overall I do enjoy playing the game so far, but I’m starting to just focus on the story missions and ignore the side missions completely. I’m here to have fun, not grind away so some numbers go up.
GUI Woes
One gripe I have about the game is the GUI. It’s clearly been designed with consoles in mind, which is fine, but it’s completely unintuitive for a PC user. Relying on keyboard options or vague areas you can click, it feels very unnatural. When equipping a weapon, as an example, the weapon information often covers up the options you want to select, and I still don’t know how I’m actually equipping weapons. It feels like I do something different every time. But it kinda works, I guess.
It’s hard to criticise too much. I guess the game is primarily designed for play on a controller and I can see how it works with a controller in hand rather than a mouse and keyboard. But it’s a shame they couldn’t have put a little effort into the PC port to allow the menu to be easier to use for keyboard/mouse, as that’s how PC gamers prefer to play FPS games.
Blindly Choosing Weapons
There are 6 types of weapon in the game: pistols, shotguns, SMGs, assault rifles, sniper rifles, and rocket launchers. Each of them feel different to shoot, and it’s fun to use them against the variety of enemies you’ll have to fight as you progress through the game.
The problem is that the game has added variety to these weapons in the worst possible way. Every weapon you pick up has a set of statistics. Fire rate, damage, reload speed, and so on. These statistics seem to be randomly generated, and 95% of the weapons you find will have worse stats than the weapon(s) you are using.
They basically become inventory clutter that you sell as soon as possible. But then you realise that every shop you come across doesn’t sell any weapons worth buying. You can also spend money on ammo and health, but the game gives this back to you generously. So there’s basically nothing to spend money on. So you end throwing away all the useless weapons, because why sell them for money that doesn’t spend?
Collecting weapons basically becomes a case of quickly checking how much a weapon costs, and ignoring it if it’s too low. Once you have decent weapons, you’re basically not going to find anything interesting. Even the mission rewards are often weapons that are worse than the best you’ve found so far, which is why it ends up feeling pointless doing the side missions.
Then it gets to the point where you realise there aren’t even 6 weapons. There’s just one. You hold onto the best weapon in each category, switching out any time you run out of ammo. The weapons themselves aren’t different enough to make using one over the other interesting. You just choose the one that does the most damage, switching to the next best when you run out of ammo. Compare this to the original Half Life, where every single weapon has it’s own feel and abilities, making choosing one weapon over another an interesting choice.
I know a lot of games have weapon drops like this, Diablo being one of them. But I’ve never been a fan of games with loot like this. I don’t like having to stop and examine every weapon in case it makes me attack a fraction of a second faster, or does an extra point of damage. But Borderlands 2’s implementation makes it so that all but one or two weapon drops are even worth checking out.
The Economy of Death
Death is nothing more than an annoyance in Borderlands 2. You have several robots throughout the world that will scan you and reconstruct your body if you die. This costs a small amount of money each time. Since money is used for nothing else, this essentially makes you immortal.
Before you die properly, you get a last chance to fight. If you manage to kill an enemy while laying on the ground, unable to zoom in, you get resurrected with full shield and and low health. This part is actually fun, creating a bit of tension as you play through an area. Unfortunately it’s undone by the essentially free resurrections.
On the one hand this gets you back into the action quickly as respawn points are generously distributed. On the other hand this means there is no real penalty for dying. It has been designed with Cooperative Multiplayer in mind, so it helps keep the game fun with multiple players, but it also means you stop worrying about dying at some point. It just becomes inconvenient.
Stubbing My Toe
One particularly annoying bug that keeps cropping up is collision on certain steps and platforms. You will keep getting blocked on platforms or steps that you clearly aren’t supposed to, having to jump over them just to get through a doorway or continue along a path. A couple of times I’ve almost been annoyed by a death because I get stuck on terrain I shouldn’t have.
This gets even more annoying as jumping is clunky in this game. You can jump long distances, but you move through the air slowly and have little control in the air. This works well on the rail shooter missions, not so much when you need to jump over a tiny step to get into a shop.
It happens so often that I’m surprised it wasn’t spotted in testing. My suspicion is that it is a bug unique to the PC version, and that most of the QA was done on consoles. I may be wrong though.
Driving Around
A really fun part of the game is the vehicles. Getting in one and driving around is a lot of fun. They have been designed with multiplayer in mind, having separate seats for weapons to give something for other players to do, but that doesn’t make them less fun in single player.
It’s a shame that very few missions take advantage of vehicles. They end up being just a quick way to get from point A to B so you can start the next mission. Of course, after you’ve discovered an area, you can just use one of the many teleport stations to get there quickly, bypassing the need for vehicles altogether. It’s a bit of a shame as vehicles could have been expanded upon to add a bit more variety and fun to the game.
Final Thoughts
Borderlands 2 is a fun, yet repetitive game. And the unfortunate thing about being repetitive is that no matter how fun it started out, it eventually becomes monotonous, boring.
The story is enough to give you an excuse to jump in and shoot at things. It’s an excuse to have fun. But it’s not enough to want me to keep playing to see what happens. Thankfully the story missions have been designed well and I feel myself wanting to keep playing to see what new set pieces come out of it.
The side missions, unfortunately, are just padding. I know some people enjoy the grind, and this game will definitely tap into that, but for me I’d rather get stuck into the story and the campaign.
While the PC port has it’s issues, it’s not completely terrible. Once you start ignoring or dropping weapons you don’t need to interact with the in game menu as much so it’s less of a problem. The collision detection bug is annoying, but it doesn’t hinder gameplay too much. It can still be a fun experience despite the game being geared towards consoles.
But that’s it, really. Borderlands 2 is fun. Then it’s repetitive. Then it’s boring. Then after some time you play it again and it’s fun once more. Then it’s repetitive. Then it’s boring. Rinse and repeat until game is finished.
