Pardon the late entry. Last week was quite busy at the day job, six days back-to-back. When I finally got through that, I was thoroughly derailed from my own attempts at armchair indie game development. I mostly ended up playing Borderlands 2.
Borderlands 2: A blast from 2012 that received DLC as late as 2014, plus one extra in 2019.
This was because the recent release of Borderlands 3 reminded me that I never finished it, nor even touched Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, despite owning it and all the DLC for it thanks to frequent 2K Games sales over the years. I had to ask myself, "If the new game is mostly just the old game with a few new things tacked on, why not just save myself the price of a AAA game and go back to playing the old games I already own?" Made sense, so I re-channeled all of my Borderlands 3 hype into seeing how the 2012 game held up.
Playing Borderlands 2 a bit, I could see why the game did not rank real high enough on my priority list to finish the game even back when it was released. As far as playing Diablo in the form of a first person shooter goes, the Borderland series has the formula down pat. But what a grind it is. You're just murdering a never-ending supply of hilariously dysfunctional enemies to collect loot whose ultimate purpose is to make your character's numbers go up. Again and again, for dozens of hours, that is all you do.
I would like to play this DLC. It'll take about 40 hours to get there.
The grind made the game mind-numbing, even if the gunplay was pretty alright. As I am largely inoculated against the appeal of grinds, the only reason I was playing at all was to try to get at
the quest content, which involves a rapid-fire gamut of returning or throwaway characters who each have an irreverent shtick to crack their immature jokes. I guess I am pretty immature myself, because I was totally into that. But would running that grind just to get to that content be worth it? Probably not. Would the time invested in this game be the single most fulfilling use of my electronic gaming time? Almost certainly not (though damned if I can figure out what is).
Still, I feel like a bit of a heel for raining on Gearbox's parade. They tried to make it a thoroughly entertaining experience, bless their gunplay-ridden little hearts, and did a pretty good job, too. Their fun loving attitude pervades every crack of the game, from the outlandish NPCs to the design of the weapons and environments. Given the spirit of the series, knocking Borderlands feels a bit like kicking an ironically homicidal puppy that is certainly accomplished more in its life than I have. It's not Gearbox's fault that the Borderlands property feels a bit mediocre and diminished when dropped in the collective pool of all the games I could be playing.
See ya discounted to $10 in two years on another 2K sale, I guess.
If anything, it's my fault for being a bit of a weirdo. A weirdo who burned out from far too many grinds to ever want to grind again. A weirdo who has latched onto an ideal of a certain kind of game, a bit like how a cheese aficionado might turn their nose up at any processed dairy that does not look like a weeping abscess because it has a unique character that those inferior mainstream cheeses never will. I've simply been gaming for too long, and own far too many games... which I promptly ignored because I am bad at time management. Such was Borderlands' fate with me, and it is in pretty good company.
Oh well, off to try and create mediocre and diminished stuff of my own.
"More Like Bored-erland"
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