Today’s game is Borderlands The Pre Sequel. I had my friend play this with me again and we had a fun time. Though I can’t say we’ll be playing again any time soon. As 1) It’s absolutely miserable to censor the information to protect his privacy 2) He’s under leveled on our save due to losing all his progress to the cloud, so he has to go play a bit by himself to level up. Mostly the issue is 2.
I feel like I’m struggling a lot more with this too. Maybe it’s just too much Halo changing how I play, maybe it’s my fever addled brain, or maybe I’m just getting old when I’m only around 2 decades old.
I just found myself being knocked down a bunch though and having to fight to revive. Part of me wonders if I’m playing the game wrong. It strikes me as a bit RPG-Like, so maybe I need to grind.
I did settle into a steady play style though with this burst shot rifle and my other one being one that shoots electric bolts. It’s been good so far, even if getting downed is semi common. I think maybe i just need practice.
As mentioned my friend needed to level up more. So we didn’t end up playing more than an hour and a half. It was fun though despite the challenge we faced. Once he catches up I’ll definitely be doing this again (despite my complaints about the challenge of censoring them).
Considering the raging success of Borderlands 2, I feel like TPS was more than serviceable. It was received quite badly, even though the gameplay was the same as 2 and the story was at least 65% as good as 2. Maybe the playable characters were not as great. But the world was very well crafted and I actually loved the way the Eridian arc was so much more present, even though there is no Siren character.
I'm currently doing 4. It feels like a soft hommage to the first game, but it also has some references to TPS. But it also feels like it was made for people who don't even know there are previous games. Of course, the ones who played the original are maybe outside the target demographic, which was already the case with 3 going by the villains of that game.
In short: I still love all Borderlands games equally and The PreSequel is definitely up there!
See I liked the story of TPS, but I just couldn't get into the gameplay myself. It was A LOT of the same from BL2, which you would think I'd love considering BL2 is one of my favorite games of all time.
But it felt as if they stripped away some of the things that made it great in 2, and then they slapped on that stupid Oxygen system on top of generally boring zones.
Mainly I just hated the fuckin oxygen though (and yes I know, you could play Claptrap and not deal with it, but I wanted to be Athena dammit.)
Oxygen is forgettable. It barely has a gameplay impact and seems to only exist to support the space theme.
But the grinder, I miss when I play 2 or 3. It gave me a reason to look at loot more closely and collect more, even if it was low rarity or irrelevant to my build. I liked having a more controllable way to get new weapons as an alternative to relying on drops and vendors. It's also a good sink for moonstones.
In a game about loot, making you care about loot is pretty important. In the other games, there's pretty much no reason to care about white and green drops, so why even drop them?
I can see how the oxygen thing gets frustrating in some early points in the game, but at some point it really doesn't matter much anymore. You'd either never die from it anyway or ride a Stingray everywhere.
In 4 they did the same flying mechanics but without the oxygen which is kind of cool.
I haven't tried 4 yet. I've never really been obsessed and the groups I used to play through the originals with are long gone in terms of availability to play together and push through. Maybe it's just my demographic and the realities of being an adult setting in. I'll pick it up eventually though, probably in some kind of crazy deal once all the DLC is done and included like I did with 3.
I still miss the rare gun grinds for BL2 and the amazing builds. Peak borderlands for me for sure. Didn't touch the spinoff(s) or most of the DLCs over the years simply because the only way to get my friend circles on board is playing around release time when hype is strong.
Next up is Nioh 3 though, with a satisfactory play through ongoing. So many amazing games nowadays. Borderlands pioneered a lot of combined systems that exist in these games. Satisfactory has it's own roulette with hard drives. Nioh is absolutely going hard with the looter... martial arts...action and super abilities from the yokai side. Nothing but love for the BL franchise. I still remember them handing out the psycho class at pax east, back when giveaways actually happened for the masses at expos.