7 ms·

The Borderlands Gun Collector's Club

112 points by abyx 15y ago

bane 15y ago
I actually never finished playing Borderlands. And by God I tried. I had reached a point in the game where I had ended up with very powerful weapons, more powerful than anything I could buy and 99.999% of those that I found. Gun collecting became boring. Going on fetch quests and fighting the same few enemies? Boring. Driving around in a weirdly physic'd car that didn't have at least proper driving sound effects and damage models fighting enemies that weren't even a token match? Boring. Slaying skags by the thousands? Boring. etc. etc. etc. Eventually I just gave up. I had "beaten" the game only insomuch as having leveled up a character to the point that he had achieved virtual godhood in the game. Nigh-impervious to damage, wielding weapons Zeus would have feared, there was no progression anymore, I had beaten the difficulty curve simply by grinding my way ahead of it.
- Random_Person 15y ago
  That's where it goes until around New Haven on the second playthrough. THEN it starts getting crazy again. You start feeling vulnerable and excitement picks up. I'm not saying it's a good thing that you have to trudge through the game 2+ times for it to really shine, but I absolutely HATE grinding and gave up MMO's because of it... and I can't even begin to guess how many hours I have spent grinding this game because it's so damn fun.
  - bane 15y ago
    That's what I've heard, but I just couldn't see putting the hours into it to find fun days or weeks later...when I could just play something else that was fun now.
- Sumaso 15y ago
  Out of curiosity, did you find Diablo especially fun? I mean I enjoyed Diablo, but not quite as much as some people did. I think whole system of grinding for better gear definitely appeals to a certain audience of gamers. I also noticed that in the article he nags on Mass Effect 3, stating that the writing was juvenile, yet I really didn't think this article was written with maturity in mind :P.
  - bane 15y ago
    It's an interesting problem in game design I think. If one of a game's principle mechanics is weapon progression, it's fun only so long as the weapons continue to progress. It's exciting to see what new powers you've just been granted. It reminds me of tech trees in 4x strategy games. They're fun until you've maxed out the tree. Some games make you choose a particular path that you have to commit to, making you replay the game to see different parts of the progression tree, but I've always hated those. A big problem, and this is where Borderlands lost me, was that the enemies simply became too easy/boring. I ended up just driving across the world ignoring the enemies as they weren't challenging to fight and I had no need for loot. Some games make the opposite mistake, like Oblivion. You level up, but so do your enemies. So there really doesn't "feel" like a reason to level up. You don't really get anything for it. So the hard part is finding the right balance where your weapons and stats improve, but so do your enemies. But at just the right ratio to make you want to grind for stuff, but to keep it from getting boring. It's a problem as old a the first Dragon Warrior (which incidentally solved it by having the player enter new parts of the world with harder enemies, leaving the easier enemies in already explored areas). To answer your question, I thought Diablo's environment and atmospherics were fun. I got bored with it eventually about halfway through the game. I think I found a gold cheat someplace and just loaded up with gear and finished the game off.
- jawngee 15y ago
  You have to play Borderlands with others. It's boring by yourself.
cturner 15y ago
Interesting article, but the constant juvenile sexual references count against it. I wanted to send this to a girl I know for the addiction topic, except you can't send junk like this to girls. Grow up. If you like jumping have a look at Cobalt. Quake had rocket jumps and good grenades and you could hack the physics and was way more fun than quake2, which dumbed them down.
- wbobeirne 15y ago
  Totally agree on the jumping front. Rocket jumps have gone out of style unfortunately, but they're still my favorite damn thing. Team Fortress 2 scratches that itch, but I always love me some good explosives assisted jumping. As for the maturity of the article, it's an article about Borderlands. It's kind of to be expected. And expecting someone to read through that who doesn't care for that style of humor is a lot to ask. Cherry pick the info if you want to get straight to the message, but the bulk of the article's entertainment value is not the message, but the delivery.
- recursive 15y ago
  What did you find lacking from q2? I particularly enjoyed it.
- rcfox 15y ago
  > I wanted to send this to a girl I know for the addiction topic, except you can't send junk like this to girls. If she's 12 years old, I agree. Otherwise, she's a big girl and doesn't need your paternalistic coddling.
klausa 15y ago
I played Borderlands and enjoyed it, but I had to stop playing after first act (when you leave first town to go to desert, I don't know whether it's really first act) - because of my severe case of arachnophobia (and worm-and-bug-looking-thins-phobia) - I literally panicked and mashed escape key to pause game, had talk myself to calming down, shoot six bullets and then panic again when this bug suddenly changed direction or second one appeared. After half hour of that I was so mentally exhausted, I quit and never looked back. I wonder if I'm the only one with such problems.
- Argorak 15y ago
  Considering that there is a special mod for Skyrim patching out spiders, i guess: no. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/11/14/arachnophobes-rejoice-no-skyrim-spiders/ http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/11/14/arachnophobes-rej... I also have two friends that have more or less severe problems with spiders, digital or not.
- vibrunazo 15y ago
  Interesting, I have a friend who also have arachnophobia, but he loves Borderlands. I'll ask him about that. Have you thought of maybe using the game as a therapeutic means for trying to alleviate the problem? I've heard of treatment where they try to get the patients used to their phobia, until it goes away. So I'd suppose the game would be a good opportunity to do that virtually. Would that even make sense?
  - klausa 15y ago
    I actually tried that - maybe you remember Doom 3 - they had this little heads with spiderlegs - I had similar reactions to those, but I managed to overcome this (not completely, as I still paused when it jumped out of nowhere, but for most part I could just play along). It's weird, because it's different for pretty much every game, and I can't put my finger on what makes me impossible to finish the game, and what in appearance of monsters makes it bearable. I think it might be that in Doom, those were (more or less) human heads with spiderlegs, and I was able to convince my brain that it's ok, those are just deformed humans I'm fighting. What might made Borderlands worse, was that those worms and spiders came out of nowhere. Five minutes earlier, I was shooting bandits and wolves (skags, or whatever they were called), then I go to new location, and BANG!, completely different enemies. And they looked totally different than what I fought before, whereas Doom spiders felt like they belong in the same world.
smacktoward 15y ago
Oh, man. I played Borderlands all the way through (once, anyway), and my reaction to all the things Steve praises was exactly the opposite. * I had no idea that there was a special benefit to playing the game through a second or third time. That's because the game doesn't tell you that. So the only people who will ever discover this are the hardest of hard-core OCD types. * Even if it did tell you that, it's ridiculous that it would push the "good stuff" out to the second or third playthrough. Old Man Murray said it best, more than a decade ago (http://www.oldmanmurray.com/longreviews/63.html http://www.oldmanmurray.com/longreviews/63.html): > Here's a note to developers regarding what we hope will become an industry-wide policy: if your game has some good parts, try to put them at the fucking beginning. It takes us ten hours of dismal labor to earn enough money to buy your game, so please commence the entertainment early on. If possible, pack something fun right into the box, for instance a balloon... > Developers have one goddamn job: entertain us. And we mean now, goddamnit, not in six hours. * The huge number of randomly generated guns may create a token economy, but it also forces the player to spend way too much time trying to figure out whether Gun # 712,924 is better than Gun # 712,925. Sid Meier is supposed to have said that "a game is a series of interesting choices," and the problem with Borderlands' guns is that choosing between them is usually not interesting, because the differences between most weapons you encounter contemporaneously are so tiny. This wouldn't be so bad if you could carry an unlimited number of weapons, but you can't, so you're constantly having to compare weapons to decide which ones to discard and which to keep; which means you're constantly being forced to make uninteresting choices. It's the opposite of fun. And on and on. Don't get me wrong, I liked Borderlands; as a shooter it was OK, and its unique aesthetic was fun. But all the things that Steve is raving about here are things that I experienced as reasons not to like it.
- Argorak 15y ago
  Basically, all the points you mentioned also apply to Diablo and its a widely successful franchise. I don't see the fun in playing Diablo 2 to level 99 as well, but there seems to be a huge group of players that do. There is a lesson for us developers in that :).
  - smacktoward 15y ago
jpdoctor 15y ago
> All this is just another way of saying that rarity creates desirability. Hmmm. I notice that the iPad3 pre-orders are sold out. Hmmm.
DanBC 15y ago
Holy crap he needs an editor. "Gamification works - give people things to find / build / collect / modify; then count those things; then allow them to display those things; and display your counts too."
hef19898 15y ago
How he's right! I have one soldier with outmaxed stats (only 2 skillpoints missing), and how was it fun! Then day job and family demanded their share... but still farming, YEAHHH! And yes, all the rest about addcition, token economies etc... he' right, too! ^ What a read! P.S.: Nicely written, completely in line with the game, I almost pissed myself Chaz... mina!! :-))))) And typing errors, well who cares!
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
illumin8 15y ago
I never finished Borderlands... Killing tons of skags with an automatic weapon is only fun for about the first 30 minutes for me, but reading this article makes me want to play to the end-game. Then again, the time investment getting to playthrough 2.5 is probably not worth it.
koko775 15y ago
Oof. Hard to let that Fallout 3 comment slide. New Vegas was a spiritual successor to Fallouts 1 and 2, and was an amazing sequel. I'd like to know more about how she believes Fallout 3 exceeded New Vegas, as New Vegas was arguably closer to the original vision for Van Buren, and a heck of a lot of fun (and funny) to boot. That aside, I've beaten Crawmerax probably nearly fifty times by now, so everything she says about addiction, I'll agree with. Multiple pearlescents and armory abuses for the win! :D
CPlatypus 15y ago
Anybody who enjoys Steve's thoughts about gaming addiction will probably enjoy this "hidden gem" too. http://www.nickyee.com/hub/addiction/addiction.pdf http://www.nickyee.com/hub/addiction/addiction.pdf It's a decade old now, but IMO it does an even better job explaining the dynamics of game addiction.
rdl 15y ago
I don't really understand this. I'd rather have a 10h of actual fun game vs. hundreds (or thousands) of hours of meaningless grinding for tokens. I think I am exactly the opposite of what she thinks is the motivation of a game player. I do like games with "completion mechanics", but not open ended token counters. But the only reason I'd play Borderlands is for the story -- it looks like a horrible game from a mechanics standpoint.
kveykva 15y ago
I'd agree that Borderlands was a "more fun" game than Rage, but I think Rage actually entered development before Borderlands?

112 points by abyx 15y ago

bane 15y ago

I actually never finished playing Borderlands. And by God I tried. I had reached a point in the game where I had ended up with very powerful weapons, more powerful than anything I could buy and 99.999% of those that I found. Gun collecting became boring. Going on fetch quests and fighting the same few enemies? Boring. Driving around in a weirdly physic'd car that didn't have at least proper driving sound effects and damage models fighting enemies that weren't even a token match? Boring. Slaying skags by the thousands? Boring. etc. etc. etc. Eventually I just gave up. I had "beaten" the game only insomuch as having leveled up a character to the point that he had achieved virtual godhood in the game. Nigh-impervious to damage, wielding weapons Zeus would have feared, there was no progression anymore, I had beaten the difficulty curve simply by grinding my way ahead of it.

Random_Person 15y ago
That's where it goes until around New Haven on the second playthrough. THEN it starts getting crazy again. You start feeling vulnerable and excitement picks up. I'm not saying it's a good thing that you have to trudge through the game 2+ times for it to really shine, but I absolutely HATE grinding and gave up MMO's because of it... and I can't even begin to guess how many hours I have spent grinding this game because it's so damn fun.
- bane 15y ago
  That's what I've heard, but I just couldn't see putting the hours into it to find fun days or weeks later...when I could just play something else that was fun now.
Sumaso 15y ago
Out of curiosity, did you find Diablo especially fun? I mean I enjoyed Diablo, but not quite as much as some people did. I think whole system of grinding for better gear definitely appeals to a certain audience of gamers. I also noticed that in the article he nags on Mass Effect 3, stating that the writing was juvenile, yet I really didn't think this article was written with maturity in mind :P.
- bane 15y ago
  It's an interesting problem in game design I think. If one of a game's principle mechanics is weapon progression, it's fun only so long as the weapons continue to progress. It's exciting to see what new powers you've just been granted. It reminds me of tech trees in 4x strategy games. They're fun until you've maxed out the tree. Some games make you choose a particular path that you have to commit to, making you replay the game to see different parts of the progression tree, but I've always hated those. A big problem, and this is where Borderlands lost me, was that the enemies simply became too easy/boring. I ended up just driving across the world ignoring the enemies as they weren't challenging to fight and I had no need for loot. Some games make the opposite mistake, like Oblivion. You level up, but so do your enemies. So there really doesn't "feel" like a reason to level up. You don't really get anything for it. So the hard part is finding the right balance where your weapons and stats improve, but so do your enemies. But at just the right ratio to make you want to grind for stuff, but to keep it from getting boring. It's a problem as old a the first Dragon Warrior (which incidentally solved it by having the player enter new parts of the world with harder enemies, leaving the easier enemies in already explored areas). To answer your question, I thought Diablo's environment and atmospherics were fun. I got bored with it eventually about halfway through the game. I think I found a gold cheat someplace and just loaded up with gear and finished the game off.
jawngee 15y ago
You have to play Borderlands with others. It's boring by yourself.

cturner 15y ago

Interesting article, but the constant juvenile sexual references count against it. I wanted to send this to a girl I know for the addiction topic, except you can't send junk like this to girls. Grow up. If you like jumping have a look at Cobalt. Quake had rocket jumps and good grenades and you could hack the physics and was way more fun than quake2, which dumbed them down.

wbobeirne 15y ago
Totally agree on the jumping front. Rocket jumps have gone out of style unfortunately, but they're still my favorite damn thing. Team Fortress 2 scratches that itch, but I always love me some good explosives assisted jumping. As for the maturity of the article, it's an article about Borderlands. It's kind of to be expected. And expecting someone to read through that who doesn't care for that style of humor is a lot to ask. Cherry pick the info if you want to get straight to the message, but the bulk of the article's entertainment value is not the message, but the delivery.
recursive 15y ago
What did you find lacking from q2? I particularly enjoyed it.
rcfox 15y ago
> I wanted to send this to a girl I know for the addiction topic, except you can't send junk like this to girls. If she's 12 years old, I agree. Otherwise, she's a big girl and doesn't need your paternalistic coddling.

klausa 15y ago

I played Borderlands and enjoyed it, but I had to stop playing after first act (when you leave first town to go to desert, I don't know whether it's really first act) - because of my severe case of arachnophobia (and worm-and-bug-looking-thins-phobia) - I literally panicked and mashed escape key to pause game, had talk myself to calming down, shoot six bullets and then panic again when this bug suddenly changed direction or second one appeared. After half hour of that I was so mentally exhausted, I quit and never looked back. I wonder if I'm the only one with such problems.

Argorak 15y ago
Considering that there is a special mod for Skyrim patching out spiders, i guess: no. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/11/14/arachnophobes-rejoice-no-skyrim-spiders/ http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/11/14/arachnophobes-rej... I also have two friends that have more or less severe problems with spiders, digital or not.
vibrunazo 15y ago
Interesting, I have a friend who also have arachnophobia, but he loves Borderlands. I'll ask him about that. Have you thought of maybe using the game as a therapeutic means for trying to alleviate the problem? I've heard of treatment where they try to get the patients used to their phobia, until it goes away. So I'd suppose the game would be a good opportunity to do that virtually. Would that even make sense?
- klausa 15y ago
  I actually tried that - maybe you remember Doom 3 - they had this little heads with spiderlegs - I had similar reactions to those, but I managed to overcome this (not completely, as I still paused when it jumped out of nowhere, but for most part I could just play along). It's weird, because it's different for pretty much every game, and I can't put my finger on what makes me impossible to finish the game, and what in appearance of monsters makes it bearable. I think it might be that in Doom, those were (more or less) human heads with spiderlegs, and I was able to convince my brain that it's ok, those are just deformed humans I'm fighting. What might made Borderlands worse, was that those worms and spiders came out of nowhere. Five minutes earlier, I was shooting bandits and wolves (skags, or whatever they were called), then I go to new location, and BANG!, completely different enemies. And they looked totally different than what I fought before, whereas Doom spiders felt like they belong in the same world.

smacktoward 15y ago

Oh, man. I played Borderlands all the way through (once, anyway), and my reaction to all the things Steve praises was exactly the opposite. * I had no idea that there was a special benefit to playing the game through a second or third time. That's because the game doesn't tell you that. So the only people who will ever discover this are the hardest of hard-core OCD types. * Even if it did tell you that, it's ridiculous that it would push the "good stuff" out to the second or third playthrough. Old Man Murray said it best, more than a decade ago (http://www.oldmanmurray.com/longreviews/63.html http://www.oldmanmurray.com/longreviews/63.html): > Here's a note to developers regarding what we hope will become an industry-wide policy: if your game has some good parts, try to put them at the fucking beginning. It takes us ten hours of dismal labor to earn enough money to buy your game, so please commence the entertainment early on. If possible, pack something fun right into the box, for instance a balloon... > Developers have one goddamn job: entertain us. And we mean now, goddamnit, not in six hours. * The huge number of randomly generated guns may create a token economy, but it also forces the player to spend way too much time trying to figure out whether Gun # 712,924 is better than Gun # 712,925. Sid Meier is supposed to have said that "a game is a series of interesting choices," and the problem with Borderlands' guns is that choosing between them is usually not interesting, because the differences between most weapons you encounter contemporaneously are so tiny. This wouldn't be so bad if you could carry an unlimited number of weapons, but you can't, so you're constantly having to compare weapons to decide which ones to discard and which to keep; which means you're constantly being forced to make uninteresting choices. It's the opposite of fun. And on and on. Don't get me wrong, I liked Borderlands; as a shooter it was OK, and its unique aesthetic was fun. But all the things that Steve is raving about here are things that I experienced as reasons not to like it.

Argorak 15y ago
Basically, all the points you mentioned also apply to Diablo and its a widely successful franchise. I don't see the fun in playing Diablo 2 to level 99 as well, but there seems to be a huge group of players that do. There is a lesson for us developers in that :).
- smacktoward 15y ago

jpdoctor 15y ago

> All this is just another way of saying that rarity creates desirability. Hmmm. I notice that the iPad3 pre-orders are sold out. Hmmm.

DanBC 15y ago

Holy crap he needs an editor. "Gamification works - give people things to find / build / collect / modify; then count those things; then allow them to display those things; and display your counts too."

hef19898 15y ago

How he's right! I have one soldier with outmaxed stats (only 2 skillpoints missing), and how was it fun! Then day job and family demanded their share... but still farming, YEAHHH! And yes, all the rest about addcition, token economies etc... he' right, too! ^ What a read! P.S.: Nicely written, completely in line with the game, I almost pissed myself Chaz... mina!! :-))))) And typing errors, well who cares!

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

illumin8 15y ago

I never finished Borderlands... Killing tons of skags with an automatic weapon is only fun for about the first 30 minutes for me, but reading this article makes me want to play to the end-game. Then again, the time investment getting to playthrough 2.5 is probably not worth it.

koko775 15y ago

Oof. Hard to let that Fallout 3 comment slide. New Vegas was a spiritual successor to Fallouts 1 and 2, and was an amazing sequel. I'd like to know more about how she believes Fallout 3 exceeded New Vegas, as New Vegas was arguably closer to the original vision for Van Buren, and a heck of a lot of fun (and funny) to boot. That aside, I've beaten Crawmerax probably nearly fifty times by now, so everything she says about addiction, I'll agree with. Multiple pearlescents and armory abuses for the win! :D

CPlatypus 15y ago

Anybody who enjoys Steve's thoughts about gaming addiction will probably enjoy this "hidden gem" too. http://www.nickyee.com/hub/addiction/addiction.pdf http://www.nickyee.com/hub/addiction/addiction.pdf It's a decade old now, but IMO it does an even better job explaining the dynamics of game addiction.

rdl 15y ago

I don't really understand this. I'd rather have a 10h of actual fun game vs. hundreds (or thousands) of hours of meaningless grinding for tokens. I think I am exactly the opposite of what she thinks is the motivation of a game player. I do like games with "completion mechanics", but not open ended token counters. But the only reason I'd play Borderlands is for the story -- it looks like a horrible game from a mechanics standpoint.

kveykva 15y ago

I'd agree that Borderlands was a "more fun" game than Rage, but I think Rage actually entered development before Borderlands?