Borderlands 2

[Lord Relvenous]

So, anyone else pick this game up? I've played enough to get to around level twenty, and I'm hooked. It's like Borderlands in the best ways, while adding small tweaks and new features that really enhance play. Stuff like automatically collecting loot from dead bodies, new and crazy weapon effects, overhauled weapon designs, profile-wide benefits, and so on. The writing is even better than the first. Handsome Jack cracks me up every single conversation, and he's just one out of dozens of hilarious characters.

So yeah, I'm enjoying the hell out of it. What about you guys? So far I've only tried the Commando, but I'm planning on starting a Siren game for solo play soonish.

[Stark]

The game is better while still having problems, but the writing, retcons and energy is inferior. Luckily, nobody cared about the story anyway so it's easy to just ignore all the bad jokes and endlessly repeated bullshit.

Not only is Handsome Jack not funny (0% success on six players) but almost none of the ZANY LAFFS work and the game constantly misses the comedy beats. We can just be thankful the terrible opening quickly gives way to midgame.

If only they hadn't changed or sedated all their voice actors. At least they included such fixes as 'make rockets not suck by giving them better base damage' and 'more than one gun in whole game with bayonet'.

[Aaron MkII]

Are there lots of bayonets? That's a missed opportunity in games for some awful and hilarious shit.

[Stark]

There are heaps, and they're awesome. The combat flow has changed from grinding through hit points to rewarding correct critical hits or elements, so it flows better and stabbing guys is always fun. It appears that non-elemental guns are still pretty much useless, though.

[Vendetta]

Ehrmahgerd Behrdehrlerhnds.

It does feel like they've tightened up the core experience of the game for this one. The basic shooting mans gameplay is more satisfying and varied, melee is better now too. I'm playing Zero and he can be Mister Choppy with a few of the right skills. Hell, I don't even have some of the really good chopping skills, and he's still pretty chopsome.

[CaptHawkeye]

I wonder if Lilith still enjoys lots of wholesale murder this time around.

So you two recommending it? If so i'll have to pick up next week instead of next year.

[Stark]

I dunno; I know heaps of guys playing it, so that probably makes it better than it is. It's refined Blands: it adds some neat stuff and solves some problems, but it's still Blands. Some lategame balance problems are suggested already, and it's Gearbox who aren't very smart, so who knows what the l50 game will look like.

Still very few direct coop skills, but the skills themselves help out in more combat-oriented ways than before. Vendetta has also discovered targeted chops are much better than many guns DPS wise and thus we use turrets to pull aggro so he can ninja them all.

[CaptHawkeye]

One of the bigger irks I had in the last game was how rigid the level balance was. A guy even three or two levels above you was basically going to rule you no matter what. This was also tied in that AWFUL gun-level restriction thing. It's funny when even Pokemon handles over-level stuff better than a game from 15 years in the future.

It's sounding like since things are less DPS reliant that might be not a huge problem anymore.

[Stark]

Sadly it doesn't do level balance dynamically the way Dead Island did, so a guy 6-7 levels either side is still useless/impossible. It's avoidable since combat isn't about huge piles of HP anymore, but they by no means fixed it.

[Executor32]

I wonder if Lilith still enjoys lots of wholesale murder this time around.

Even more so, thanks to Eridium, though she's an NPC in this game. Maya, her replacement as playable Siren, has the Phaselock ability instead of Phasewalk. It basically lets you freeze an opponent in the air for a few seconds, which I find I don't use anywhere near as often as I did Phasewalk with Lilith. Then again, Phasewalk was so cheap, I was able to solo kill Crawmerax at level 52.

[Stark]

You mean that horribly broken boss everyone sploited broken powers or map glitches to farm?

Aside from not being stupid invincible/healing/AOE, lift is probably more useful, especially in coop. It does good damage, has unlimited range and some auto-aim, and recharges super fast. Phasewalk is just the ninja power. :v

[CaptHawkeye]

I wonder if Lilith still enjoys lots of wholesale murder this time around.

Even more so, thanks to Eridium, though she's an NPC in this game. Maya, her replacement as playable Siren, has the Phaselock ability instead of Phasewalk. It basically lets you freeze an opponent in the air for a few seconds, which I find I don't use anywhere near as often as I did Phasewalk with Lilith. Then again, Phasewalk was so cheap, I was able to solo kill Crawmerax at level 52.

Lilith's comments in play were frequently along the line of *maniacal laughter at skag on fire* and "Is there no limit to my power?" I almost felt bad playing her. I thought she was deranged with a hint of megalomania. Like if she got the treasure the universe was fucking doomed.

Not that the story mattered that much to me. In fact all I can remember was her apparent villainy and the treasure being a big monster.

[Havok]

Still first person?

[Vendetta]

Still first person, still predominantly focused on shooting.

Although there is also chopping, for Zero.

I hear that Zero develops into the weakest character, but it's possibly because most of his trees are focused on really killing the shit out of one thing at a time, rather than killing lots and lots of shit at once. Though I've not been having a lot of problems playing him as an up close and personal face beater character switching between pistols and melee.

[Losonti Tokash]

Still first person?

Inexplicably, yes. No idea why it doesn't have a third person mode considering the customization stuff it let's you do.

[Vendetta]

First and third person games work and move differently.

They may seem similar but just implementing a dumb camera switch really doesn't work. Go and try it in Fallout, the third person mode feels janky and weird because it is just the character model plonked in the middle and the FOV fiddled out a bit, with none of the other changes in animation etc that a third person game requires and a first person game can get away without.

Given that the original blands was first person, making the sequel also first person not third person makes sense.

(Besides, there's a bit of customisation now, but there's still no real dressup, just different colours and heads.

[Stark]

Zero would be more coops-y if his decoy was effective enough to reliably pull agro. The turret (even with just the base gun which quickly becomes useless) is a giant magnet for agro, so it's useful even without considering its damage. Lift is similar, because its a great way to mark targets even if its not doing anything else.

[Alyeska]

Phaselock works wonders when you start to improve it. Right now I have maxed the lock time and given it max elemental burn. It also damages anything near the targeted unit.

Next I turn Phaselock into a gravitational singularity.

[Stark]

Everyone can read the skill tree, dude. A least this time the added tier means you can't get to the bottom or two trees; given how poop one of the last stuff is, it might be better to get two to halfway at l27.

[Vendetta]

The fact that there aren't infinity skill points this time also means that there are actual builds. By the end of blands you could have literally every useful skill for your character.

[Losonti Tokash]

Until the expansions come out, anyway.

[Stark]

Surely Gearbox learned from the first game! :v

And man if I'm not right about my scifi plot prediction the main story will have been entirely awful.

[Vendetta]

It sounds like at least the first couple of DLCs are going to be new characters. Which means that Gearbox must be pretty confident in the content in the base game, if they're not going to be adding more for a while.

[Stark]

Just tweak old classes and bring back plz. Brick would rule now both melee and launchers are actually useful. :v

[Stark]

Vendetta and I were chatting this morning about the class feedback; people are saying the ninja is the weakest class, but Vendetta is literally running around one-shotting everyone with melee. He intentionally dies near powerful enemies to get free chops while downed, and if the target is slagged and his shield is down he can do upwards of six thousand damage. By comparison, the turret's gun becomes nearly useless around l20 and the rockets are currently doing less damage than my basic rifle.