I found myself with a copy of Borderlands this week, thanks in no small part to one of the RR regular L4D loveable folks and a Steam sale. Both things I’m obviously incredibly grateful for.
I’ve sort of had one of those mildly curious things about it since the actually surprisingly funny for a game trailer trailers started doing the rounds. From what little I’d seen of the game, I was pretty impressed with the visual style, it seemed a fun enough proposition and so, y’know, thought I’d give it a fair crack of the whip.
Had I known that Gearbox clearly fucking hate me, perhaps I’d have not bothered.
Alright, fess up time – I don’t really get on well with RPG mechanics. My tolerance for things like inventory management is rather slim. I just don’t see the point of tedious menial tasks in games, they seem like utterly wasteful things to include. If you ignore my love for S.T.A.L.K.E.R., a game I could forgive almost anything of for the dense and oppressive world it places you in, I’ve never gotten on with this sort of thing.
Stalker. Weirdly not shit.
Oh sure, once upon a time I tried to play Oblivion but after 5 minutes when the tears were streaming down my face laughing at how utterly pathetic it all was (you, the hero, rat killer extraordinaire!) and the rather heated discussion that followed on the RR forums post gasket blow-out, I figured that perhaps these things weren’t quite for me. And that’s cool, I can respect that. A bit. Perhaps.
And yes, I’ll admit that I did have a pause for thought given that Borderlands was very much marketed as an FPS meets RPG hybrid. I’ll try anything once though, yeah? It can’t really do anything that shit can it?
Yes, yes, it can. Borderlands hates me. It hates you, the player. I cannot possibly wrap my head around some of the design decisions that found their way into the game.
Not just because they’re rubbish (and they are so very rubbish) but also because I can’t imagine what possesses anyone not making a Masocore game to put these things into something you want people to play.
Now this picture might look lovely, detailed and really rather neat in a comic book sort of way. Unfortunately, what you’ll see most of the time in the game is this:
Fucking rocks.. In the 4 or 5 hours I’ve spent with the game so far, I am quite fucking sick of seeing fucking rocks. More so when I keep getting lost due to the fact that everything looks the bloody same.
Oh look, some more sand with a few rocks. Have I been here before? I don’t know, it’s just some sand and some rocks – I could be anywhere.
I check the rubbish map and drop back out and lose my bearings quickly because, well, it’s all fucking rocks. I try and follow the compass but that all seems a bit wonky or maybe it’s just because I’ve got some sort of rock related illness by now.
I’ve been playing games for years now though. I grew up with games where variety in environment was a luxury. As annoying as it is to find yourself confronted with this many rocks, I can just about live with that.
It’s what’s inbetween the fucking rocks that really grates.
Skags. There’s about 40 million varieties of these buggers and every last one of them are irritating beyond words. Ankle biting little fuckers, the lot of them.
What’s really, really, really irritating about them though is that they spawn constantly inbetween areas so any time you might want to take a short hike from place A to across the road B you end up having to endure a firefight with them. The more you level up, the more skags the game spawns and the larger variety of them.
So a short walk across the road turns into a tedious fight as you’re left being punished for doing something you’re supposed to be doing simply because the developers hate you. And don’t try and pause for a second to fiddle with your inventory or grab a health kit or something because the game will still spawn them and they’ll still attack you. They’ll spawn and attack you whilst you’re trying to claim your reward or have a chat to one of the incidental characters. For some unknown reason known only to Gearbox, they actually left this utterly, utterly shit thing in the game.
For most of the 4 or 5 hours I’ve spent on Borderlands so far I’ve been doing 3 things.
1. Getting lost.
Because everywhere just looks like another sort of desert thing with fucking rocks about. Even though the area I’m exploring is relatively small, when everything looks the same I still get lost. There’s no landmarks to look out for, just rocks.
2. Fighting Skags.
Because there’s a lot of Skags. There’s fucking Skags everyfucking where and all I want to do is go about 5 paces forward but the game won’t let me unless I fight some more of these bastards. Which is great because y’know, you end up having to do a bit of running about shooting or hitting them and look up from the ankle biting hell and oh, where was I again? Have I been by this rock before?
3. Reloading my gun.
Not because I’ve run out of ammo, although the amount of time I spend fighting Skags means that does happen far more than I’d be comfortable with, oh no, because for some reason that makes no clear sense, the pick up/use key also acts as reload. So if you’re slightly off mark when trying to pick up one of the many thousand billion zillion things on the floor you need to pick up, you get to watch as your character reloads the gun once more.
As if these 3 things weren’t quite bad enough, there’s the difficulty spikes (I’m informed you can get round this by grinding first – or y’know, shooting more skags), there’s the constant stream of searching boxes, searching piles of bones on the floor, searching bins and assorted tedium and constantly picking things up. Well, attempting to pick things up inbetween reloading, obviously.
I thought RARE used to take the piss with pick ups until I discovered Borderlands. Now I’ll never moan about having to pick up an arbitrary amount of bananas again. I must have picked more things up than I shot skags. I shot a lot of skags.
There’s the fact that it docks you money when you die. Not a large amount, admittedly, but still – as if dying because the design is tedious isn’t bad enough, taking something away from the player as well just to respawn them is really rubbing their faces in it.
There was the fun bit where I was told to go somewhere to activate something, got to where I was supposed to be and erm, yeah, couldn’t actually complete the quest because… I don’t know why. I just couldn’t.
So I accepted another quest and just happened to be walking past this place, pressed the use button on this thing and it completed the abandoned quest for me. Perhaps I did something wrong, I don’t know. I was too busy fending off the fucking skags and admiring the rockery to care at this point.
All I know is that when I was doing the quest, the compass pointed to where I stood, clearly as the rando result later on proved, I was in the correct place. Just the game decided to be a bit broken at that point.
I dropped out after around 4/5 hours. I felt like I’d achieved nothing in all that time.
Despite working my way through a number of quests, levelling up a bit to some numerical value that’s utterly meaningless to me and killing an awful lot of ankle biting shitty things and the odd thing that flew down from the sky really fast just to irritate me even further, I didn’t feel like I’d made the slightest bit of enjoyable progress because the game, the bloody game, seemed so intent on ruining any enjoyment I might want to get out of it.
Everything just seemed to be in place to sap the enjoyment away, to block me from feeling like I was getting anywhere, to niggle and irritate me into submission till I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go off and top Gearbox or top myself.
It’s a bit of a shame because there’s moments where the game shows flashes of brilliance. I laughed out loud at one of the boss character introductions. I stopped laughing after the fourth time I died trying to kill him but hey, at least I laughed the first time.
The “second wind”, similar to the Death Brushing in Weapon Of Choice is a smart addition to the usual run of the mill “you get hit, you die” formula and the sort of experimentation I really like to see.
I’m pretty sure that Borderlands could be a really, really great game stripped of this hateful stuff.
I just don’t understand how you can build a game and release a game that’s clearly meant to be fun, to be a bit silly and to cripple it with contemptuous design. Unless you really, really do genuinely have some sort of utter contempt for the player, natch.
I don’t think Gearbox really do hate me (hyperbole is fun though, kids), it’s just yet another in a long line of games where not nearly enough thought has gone into what to leave out as opposed to what to leave in.