Vampyr
12-13-2012, 10:17 AM
I'm not sure how many people here played Borderlands 2, or are still playing, but I am, and I was wondering what everyone thought about the game now that it's been out for a while and is winning some awards that are given out at this time of year. So far it's really just been the VGA's, but it won best multiplayer, best shooter, best character (Claptrap) and best male performance.
I've been playing the game off and on ever since it came out...and I think I'm honestly a bit disappointed in it. I don't think I'm going to be investing the ludicrous amounts of time that I did into the first one.
To enumerate my reasons why:
1. The game isn't difficult, but it is frustrating. I can't think of a single time where I've died, and thought "well, I deserved that, I should have done X instead of Y." When I die it's almost always because some guy spawned on the map right beside me, someone threw a grenade from off screen, or someone just one shots me and I go into fight for my life mode.
1a. What is the deal with fight for your life mode. I spend 50% of every fight in it, because you're 5x as tanky in this mode than you are alive, moving around, and with your shields up. You can stay in fight for your life mode forever, kneeling on the ground, shooting something until you kill it and get back up, where you will proceed to get instagibbed by something else and repeat the process.
1b. It's impossible to be tanky, even when speccing into a tank tree. Having a good offense is about 100x more helpful in ensuring your survival than having a good defense. Speccing into the defense trees means you will kill things much slower, and only be able to take a few more shots than you would without the tank skills.
1c. Enemies have ways to kill you that are not telegraphed until its too late. The most noticeable offender here are grenades. In most other shooters, grenades are either super visible or make some kind of sound when they're nearby so you know to try and move. In Borderlands 2, enemies chuck grenades like they are going out of style (sometimes you'll walk towards a group of enemies, and grenades will just rain down on you), but the annoying thing is when enemies throw them from off screen and you never see it, or they get thrown in the middle of a huge firefight and you can't see the little piece of grey matter floating through the air among all the elemental effects going off.
Grenades also do enormous amounts of damage and have a huge blast radius. So there are a lot of times where you think you're far enough away from one, and it still blows you up.
1d. Enemies have extremely erratic animations, where they bounce up and down in splace and essentially break dance all over the map. This isn't as big of an issue on the PC where it's easier to aim, but on the Xbox it becomes impossible to get crits unless you are at really close range.
2. The revive button is broken. Nine times out of ten, when I walk up to the person I'm playing with to revive them, the button doesn't work. The screen says "click X to revive", but it doesn't work. In order to get it to work I have to look away from the person until that message goes away, then look back at them to bring it up again.
3. Quests are sometimes a pain in the ass because of how difficult it is to find things on the map. In Borderlands 1 I felt like the map design was pretty common sense and easy to figure out how the lay of the land worked. In Borderlands 2 there are a lot of times where I just can't figure out how to get to a waypoint because the topography is impossible to read from the map.
This wouldn't be as big of a deal if it weren't for the fact that some hills that look like you can climb up them, you can't, and there are some ledges that look safe to jump off of, but are actually beyond the end of the map and result in you getting insta killed if you walk beyond a certain point.
4. Bosses are really difficult, not because of how strong they are, but because of how much health they have, which results in me just running out of ammo sometimes and having to suicide to go back and buy more, then I don't have to use it killing all the enemies on the way to the boss because they haven't respawned yet.
5. Rare loot never drops. Seriously I've put a ton of hours into this game and I don't have a single orange yet. It's not an MMO, so you don't even really get to show your loot off, it's purely for your personal pleasure. Why does it never drop?
6. Reloading most guns takes approximately 10 years. Not really, but it's a long goddamn time, especially if you've specced into a tree with "kill skills" (they only activate when you kill something), because you spend the entire length of the effect reloading.
I think that's about all I have to rant about. It's still a good game, and I'm going to continue playing it a bit, but for all the good moments it has, it has way too many that are punctuated by extremely frustrating moments.
For some reason they felt the need to make a much harder game than Borderlands 2, but couldn't think of a better way to do it than ramping up the amount of health enemies have (which has the side effect of making your guns feel not very powerful), and giving them cheap ways to kill you with no way to increase your tankiness.
I've been playing the game off and on ever since it came out...and I think I'm honestly a bit disappointed in it. I don't think I'm going to be investing the ludicrous amounts of time that I did into the first one.
To enumerate my reasons why:
1. The game isn't difficult, but it is frustrating. I can't think of a single time where I've died, and thought "well, I deserved that, I should have done X instead of Y." When I die it's almost always because some guy spawned on the map right beside me, someone threw a grenade from off screen, or someone just one shots me and I go into fight for my life mode.
1a. What is the deal with fight for your life mode. I spend 50% of every fight in it, because you're 5x as tanky in this mode than you are alive, moving around, and with your shields up. You can stay in fight for your life mode forever, kneeling on the ground, shooting something until you kill it and get back up, where you will proceed to get instagibbed by something else and repeat the process.
1b. It's impossible to be tanky, even when speccing into a tank tree. Having a good offense is about 100x more helpful in ensuring your survival than having a good defense. Speccing into the defense trees means you will kill things much slower, and only be able to take a few more shots than you would without the tank skills.
1c. Enemies have ways to kill you that are not telegraphed until its too late. The most noticeable offender here are grenades. In most other shooters, grenades are either super visible or make some kind of sound when they're nearby so you know to try and move. In Borderlands 2, enemies chuck grenades like they are going out of style (sometimes you'll walk towards a group of enemies, and grenades will just rain down on you), but the annoying thing is when enemies throw them from off screen and you never see it, or they get thrown in the middle of a huge firefight and you can't see the little piece of grey matter floating through the air among all the elemental effects going off.
Grenades also do enormous amounts of damage and have a huge blast radius. So there are a lot of times where you think you're far enough away from one, and it still blows you up.
1d. Enemies have extremely erratic animations, where they bounce up and down in splace and essentially break dance all over the map. This isn't as big of an issue on the PC where it's easier to aim, but on the Xbox it becomes impossible to get crits unless you are at really close range.
2. The revive button is broken. Nine times out of ten, when I walk up to the person I'm playing with to revive them, the button doesn't work. The screen says "click X to revive", but it doesn't work. In order to get it to work I have to look away from the person until that message goes away, then look back at them to bring it up again.
3. Quests are sometimes a pain in the ass because of how difficult it is to find things on the map. In Borderlands 1 I felt like the map design was pretty common sense and easy to figure out how the lay of the land worked. In Borderlands 2 there are a lot of times where I just can't figure out how to get to a waypoint because the topography is impossible to read from the map.
This wouldn't be as big of a deal if it weren't for the fact that some hills that look like you can climb up them, you can't, and there are some ledges that look safe to jump off of, but are actually beyond the end of the map and result in you getting insta killed if you walk beyond a certain point.
4. Bosses are really difficult, not because of how strong they are, but because of how much health they have, which results in me just running out of ammo sometimes and having to suicide to go back and buy more, then I don't have to use it killing all the enemies on the way to the boss because they haven't respawned yet.
5. Rare loot never drops. Seriously I've put a ton of hours into this game and I don't have a single orange yet. It's not an MMO, so you don't even really get to show your loot off, it's purely for your personal pleasure. Why does it never drop?
6. Reloading most guns takes approximately 10 years. Not really, but it's a long goddamn time, especially if you've specced into a tree with "kill skills" (they only activate when you kill something), because you spend the entire length of the effect reloading.
I think that's about all I have to rant about. It's still a good game, and I'm going to continue playing it a bit, but for all the good moments it has, it has way too many that are punctuated by extremely frustrating moments.
For some reason they felt the need to make a much harder game than Borderlands 2, but couldn't think of a better way to do it than ramping up the amount of health enemies have (which has the side effect of making your guns feel not very powerful), and giving them cheap ways to kill you with no way to increase your tankiness.