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dkirschner's Borderlands (PC)
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| [September 3, 2011 01:30:17 PM]
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And because I didn't write enough today...I'm calling off Borderlands. It looks great, neat concept, but I can tell it's going to be suuuuper repetitive. I put 5 hours in already the last few days and I've done two things: run and shoot. I've run across one thing: wasteland. I've shot two categories of thing: ugly dog-aliens and bandits. This game is just crying out for more variety. It's too bad because the shooting (in smaller doses) is pretty good shooting. The weapons are real satisfying to fire, they feel good. It's a game built around tons of guns. I read somewhere that there are like 17 million potential types of gun you can find. Wow.
Things off the top of my head that would make Borderlands better:
Borderlands needs more NPCs or interesting objects to interact with. I met like...4 NPCs. And it's too bad there aren't more because I liked them. The game is funny. There's a doctor without a med degree, a crazy redneck car rental guy, an old man without a leg, and a dancing robot...There's absolutely no interaction though between your character and anything else in the game, except this disembodied face/voice that is guiding you toward "the vault," the goal of the game. Even then she just talks at you, but at least it makes you seem special. No one else treats you as anything but an errand-person, and you can never talk back. Even interesting objects would be better than what's currently there.
There are objects to interact with, but they are (1) loot and (2) things containing loot. For me, there is waaaay too much crap strewn around to pick up. There are little ammo boxes and things all over the frikin place. I spent a lot of time staring at the ground (because you have to look down to push E to pick stuff up). I understand this is a game about loot, but Diablo with guns this ain't.
I guess a corollary of this would be less space. The maps are big, like real big, and luckily you can get a car to drive around (and run enemies over), but you've got to run a lot. I went in one boss HQ for this quest that I assume ends the first area, which I may go finish out of curiosity (just stopped before turning in the quest), and that mess took me like 2 hours to go find and get in and out of his hideout. The hideout is massive. Way off-putting for a first big mission. It would be cooler if there were more variation in what I had to do, but nah, just run and shoot enemies.
The HQ mission was really really tedious for a couple reasons. One, there's no map except the big one where you push M. There's no minimap. There needs to be a minimap because locations of things are not straightforward. There are cliffs and all kinds of barricades and things outside, and inside that HQ, there were like 50 rooms and it was super easy to get turned around. Second, Borderlands does my pet peeve, too many respawning enemies. I ran through the HQ most of the way, got a bit lost, found some robot I needed to repair, went to look for oil to repair it by backtracking, and had to kill roomfuls of respawns. Couldn't find the oil, so I just wandered for a while, killing more respawns, finally got to the boss, died a few times, had to kill respawns. Killed the boss, and they made me run alllll the way back through this giant complex, and you guessed it, I had to kill respawns the entire way. Then you have to run alllll the way back through this big outdoor bandit camp where, yep, there are respawns, and then run alllll the way back to town. So. Much. Unnecessary. Running. And. Shooting.
So I'm level 13 or 14. There are four 'classes' in the game, each of which has one special ability. You never get another special ability. So all the 'classes' are the same except for one extra thing they can do. Mine could 'phase walk,' which meant she could go invisible for like 10 seconds and melee someone. That's it. I basically got an invisible melee attack. WOOHOO. There are talent trees, but they are only like 4 rows deep, not really that different, and don't unlock anymore abilities! They only modify damage and do other predictable passive things.
There's really so much that could have been done to this game to make it better. I think to sum my grievances, it's barren. There's nothing there, and what is there is just the same thing over and over. Repeating. I thought the rewards of constantly upgraded weapons and doing quests would keep me into it, but I've played so many more interesting quest-loot games. Actually, I've got it. This feels like an empty single-player MMO. Not a good thing!
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dkirschner's Borderlands (PC)
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Current Status: Stopped playing - Got Bored
GameLog started on: Saturday 3 September, 2011
GameLog closed on: Saturday 3 September, 2011 |
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