Internet Rant: Borderlands

I, like many other people, played a lot of Diablo II. The vast hours spent scanning piles of drops for that socketable claw with just the right +skills for the whirlwind Assassin, and the endless piles of exploding cows on my Necromancers are recalled with fondness. Good times. World of Warcraft eventually came out and slaked my thirst for loot for several years. I've also played my fair share of multiplayer shooters, from UT to TF2. Lastly, Road Warrior is one of my favorite movies. Say what you want about Mel Gibson; we both know he's a total badass in that film.

Naturally, when I learned that a game was coming out that was a co-op FPS with a Diablo-like feel set in a Mad Max universe, I was very excited. The art style was fresh and interesting. More importantly, though, was the promise of 87 bazillion guns. Gearbox studios developed an entire AI whose sole purpose was to generate guns. Shotguns with scopes that fire acidic rockets? Awesome. Impractical, maybe, but still totally awesome. Pistols that sometimes electrocute your enemies so their heads explode? Oh yeah, we've got that shit covered.

The game is available for both console and PC. I have strong feelings about shooters on consoles being a waste, but I'm told they'll often have twice the sales figures of their PC counterparts. I guess I have to accept that people are stupid and like to cripple themselves when aiming. Obviously I bought the PC version. Interviews from before the game came out asked if the PC version was going to be just a straight console port. The answer came back,
"No, the PC one is being built from the ground up."
Good. Proper. This is actually a blatant lie, but we didn't find this out until we bought the game.

There are 4 different character classes in Borderlands. Each class has one unique skill that sets it apart from the other classes. Each class has skill trees that don't add any new abilities or buttons to press; they solely enhance your existing abilities. They've given each class a sort of specialization with certain weapons. Through these talent points your class can become more proficient in a select few weapon types. In this game there are four ways to kill enemies: Shoot them, throw a grenade at them, melee them, or activate your class' unique ability.

Let me expound upon this. You all know about those retarded crybabies in WoW who have awful specs and claim they don't want to be forced to play the class the way Blizzard feels it should be played, like a rebellious, nerdy form of sticking it to The Man? In WoW that doesn't work, and we all pretty much know why. Borderlands caters to that crowd of retarded crybabies. People will frequently be using sniper rifles on Brick, the big melee character who specializes in rockets. I feel this sort of thing happens frequently for one major reason:
The game is too fucking easy.
This concludes the positive portion of the review.

Allow me to explain what you will experience should you want to play Borderlands multiplayer. First, you'll need a GameSpy ID. This ID is the name that will be shown for your character in all multiplayer games. Naming your character is solely a vanity option that can be changed at any point in the game, like changing the color of their shirt. Once you're online, you'll likely want to find a friend to play with. At this point you may check your Steam list and see who's playing Borderlands and see that your buddy is also playing. You send them a message over Steam asking for their GameSpy ID. You get that, get rid of the Steam overlay, and send a friend request to the account name. If this part managed to not fuck up they'll see a request on their side. Once they accept that it sends another window back to you letting you know they want to be your friend, too. Yaaay.

Now you've got a person on your friends list, so you think you'll send them a message and coordinate a game. Oh wait, there's no chat interface in this game when you're in the lobby. That's ok, right? Back to the Steam overlay. You let them know you're gonna host a game and you want them to join it. They say ok, and you host a game. Once your game is up you toss them an invite. Unfortunately they can't join because you didn't forward your ports on your router. Yes, fucking seriously. Port forwarding.

You tab out to the Borderlands forum to figure out which ports need forwarding, and you fuck with your router for a while. It doesn't work. You remember how much you hated forwarding ports years ago, and think how nice it is that modern games don't need that shit done. Oh, wait. After you get pissed off and tired of fucking with your router, your buddy says he fixed his own router and he can host; just join his game. Alright, well the quests aren't synched but whatever, it'll be fun to play multiplayer at least. You join and it's kinda laggy. You wonder what ping you're getting in this game, but sadly there's no command I know of to check that basic function. You wonder why you hear what sounds like clicking and keyboard sounds over your speakers. It turns out that the voice chat in this game a.) is sound activated b.) cannot be disabled unless you want to edit .ini files.

Whatever. Two more friends join the game and you play for a few hours. The gameplay is fun, and so is blowing shit up, really! There's a lot of loot. The 'collect loot' button (E by default) seems to flat out not work a lot of times, but whatever. That guy's head just exploded! Neat. You play for a few hours and get some nice gun upgrades as well as a few levels. Your buddy who is hosting the game needs to head out, so he leaves and ends the game. You want to finish up this last quest and then resume tomorrow, so you make your own game.

This is when you realize you hate Borderlands. Everything you just did has been rolled back. Why? Because the host left first. The host fucking left first so it rolled back your hours of experience, quests, and loot. Seriously.



Let's talk about something else. Vehicles. Yes, there's vehicular combat in Borderlands. You get a vehicle. They're actually free from any vehicle spawn station, which are fairly plentiful throughout the world. You can spawn yours with either a secondary rocket launcher or machine gun, depending on your preference. I used the rocket launcher pretty much exclusively because I'm not a pussy. Controlling the vehicle is somewhat unorthodox. Yes, W and S are start and stop, but steering is through the mouse. I personally find this incredibly awkward and frustrating, but you probably have to experience it to know just how bad it is. Also, expect your vehicle to get stuck. A lot. See that tiny rock in the road? That will make your car go from 100-0 in a heartbeat. There are a *lot* of rocks in the world of Borderlands. I guess inertia was pretty hard to code, so they just said "fuck it" and let you get stuck all the time. In some cases, if it's not too badly stuck, you can get out and punch the vehicle. This will, in some cases, make the vehicle fly off the ground, doing several midair flips and landing a good 50 yards away. This same punch will likely not hurt an enemy too badly, but vehicles face certain death from your fists.

Speaking of fists, I made a Brick character. Why? Because he specializes in rockets and punching things. Both are very near and dear to me. Every minute (can be reduced with talents), Brick gets to use his special ability, Berserk. At this point the edges of the screen go red and he starts screaming unintelligibly. You can sometimes make out a few words like "BLOOOD!" and '"MOOOORE!", but most of the time it's incoherent shrieking. It's really awesome. In one of the few successful multiplayer games I got going, a friend commented the following:

"You know, I thought watching and listening to a Brick berserking was the best thing ever. That was until you joined and I witnessed *two* Bricks berserking."

Brick's berserk punches do a lot of damage, and you can power them up with elemental effects later. But, of course, since this is Borderlands, even this marvelous punching system has large flaws:

- You can't see shit while berserking. Edges of the screen are red, elemental effects flying, you're pretty much blind. You run around hoping you're hitting something because you really can't see a damn thing. If they'd made you go to the third person during this it would have *greatly* alleviated the problem.
-Enemies constantly knock you back. Constantly I find myself running into packs of mobs, wanting to punch them to death, only to get tossed back a good 40 yards by some sort of stomp skill. I charge back in and immediately get tossed out again. Charge back in again and, fuck, berserk wore off.
-There is comical stupidity involving Bricks and duel requests. By default, the way to request a duel with someone is to melee them. They accept by hitting you back. You can set an option to automatically deny duel requests, but by default it's on. You get two berserking Bricks fighting enemies and they're likely to accidentally punch each other. This will spark a duel often in the middle of a giant pack of enemies. Like I said, comical stupidity.

There are many, many more unique and interesting examples of bad coding and overall stupidity in the game design, but you'll get to experience them all yourself if you pick up the game. Hey, you could go in on a 4-pack over Steam with 3 other people you'll never actually get to play with! If anyone needs me I'll be playing HoN.