Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm a Gunzerker. I didn't realise that my character did talk until about three hours when I realised that grunting was me.

It's got a bit boring now I'm running missions for the revolution and Claptrap isn't about. He's been replaced with a host of tired army characters. Shame cause I was really enjoying it, but at least there are some moments which are still funny dotted about between gunning down endless waves of tanks and tanks with shields.

Is it worth playing single player? AE's chat about the game always made it sound really excellent, but I think people had said before that it's designed to be played multi-player and isn't worth playing offline SP.

I played it through single player and had lots of fun with it. I think it's a much better single player game than its predecessor was.

My experience of BL1 tallies fairly well with Saturnmans. But it was at least countered by co-op banter.

I may give BL2 a go tomorrow. (If anyone cares to join...)

It's a better as a single player game, lots better. Hang on I banged on about it earlier in this thread....

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I'd rank it as one my Top Ten Games Ever, play it all pimped out (the PhysX stuff is gorgeous, runs better on an Nvidia GPU), crank up the volume, and when you're in the zone with it - by christ it's amazing.

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Do all the side quests, listen to all the dialogue, try out all the guns, enjoy the humour (this is a FUNNY game), don't just charge straight through the main campaign story missions. There's a lot of good advice earlier in this very thread if you're having trouble and/or getting a bit frustrated.

Personally I'd drop a few quid on the mechromancer class as she's awesome and the anarchy mechanic is fantastic.

what will you be playing it on?

Sorry, should've said. ps3 - free for PSN subscribers.

Each to their own of course but I would honestly advise against playing this game in co-op.

You'll miss dialogue, you'll miss story development, you'll miss quest triggers, you'll miss loot, you'll miss out on a lot of the satisfaction of the gunplay as the game just spawns more enemies and makes them irritating bullet sponges, you'll miss out on strategy because you won't be controlling the enemies and the pulls as you want to - and so on.

In essence it starts to turn into a bit of an uncoordinated mess.

On the other hand I thoroughly enjoyed co op and wouldn't have played the game for nearly as long without it. Don't have a ps3 though

Mmm, feels just like BL1, but single player. Meh.

I'm cracking along but now the city has taken off I've got a bit bored of it.

I knew it'd irritated me when I was forced to run across two maps I've visited before to do a task that involved fighting my way through what can only be described as a shit-load of baddies that I'd battled slowly through about an hour before and who had all mysteriously respawned.

The tasks are well written but executed in typical pooter game fashion which is a shame. For example, you kill some guy who leaves a hilarious note about "if you're reading this message you've just killed me" it directs you, no that was a good one, ok, Tina's tea party: consists of go three places and get three things and bring them back to her, then luring a baddie back, then suffer about 8 waves of enemies. It's funny, twisted, and yet it's only a tedious collectathon and tedious horde-mode. Ah well...

Best quest: 'Shoot this guy in the face'

If you're not getting any joy out of Tiny Tina's chunk of the game then you're probably best off leaving it alone TBH.

I'm not even sure what your complaint is, given that this is an FPS RPG loot-em-up style game which you seem to be saying yourself delivers that formula perfectly well?

It's not a format that's for everyone which is fine, but you almost seem to be criticising it for making a really good job of what it set out to do in the first place?

I'd have joined you, but I was bowling tonight.

Maybe some time in the week, then?

You have my number - let me know when you're around.

Stumbled across this - ace.

It obviously wants me to do the side quests buried can't be arsed. Now I'm nearing the end fighting level 24 robots when I'm only level 21and they've all become bullet sponges which, strangely, has made it even better as I struggle to cope with massively overwhelming odds. Fucked em up though.

The AI who wants you

That psychotic AI is fantastic, even trying to kill Moxxi's patrons with its horrible singing

I can really see myself reinstalling this and playing through the whole thing again as the Psycho class, which I purchased when it was super-cheap in a Steam sale but had pretty much maxed out on the game at that point so didn't make a start.

There's just so much about the game that's ridiculously awesome.

Reinstalled and started all over again as the Psycho class, who's as gloriously good fun as you'd expect him to be, despite being a melee character shoehorned into a gunplay game.

Great (if rather strange) dialogue from him as well.

I'm hard pushed to remember a game I've ever bummed as much as Borderlands 2.

So that Borderlands 2, aye?

I'd say it's good. Very good in fact. Superbly written in the main, lovely lovely graphics in the main, nice shooty pow pow in the main and, er, other stuff.

But y'know what surprised me most about? That it's most like everyone's favourite game of the last generation: Dark Souls.

The following reason explain:
1) It's actually quite difficult. Especially at the start when you find yourself overwhelmed and under powered, then again near the end when you're tooled up but the baddies are badder. It's reet challenging in parts.
2) Under the hood. There are stats. Loads of em. But you need not go poking around too much if you can't be arsed with that shit but it'll draw you in eventually as you go checking weapons stats against one another looking for the right kit. Dragon Sword or Pulzerizing Shotty.
3) It's about the weapons. Take your pick: short range, mid range, snipers, rockets etc. It's about the joy of experimentation and finding what's right for you. Oh course you'll be a tank because that's the Dark Souls way.
4) It's massive. Huge different-ish worlds that require trekking across. And trek you will. Lots.
5) Baddies aren't so bad. It understands that you could fight baddies all day, and you will, but if you are too under powered or just can't be arsed - do a Dark Souls: peg it past them.
6) The bonfires are just the respawn machines. Fortunately there's more of them than bonfires.

But that's where the similarities end, I think. Going back:

1) It's hard but boring in spots. Wash and repeat areas of baddies are an all too familiar occurrence as you churn through identical enemies.
2) Statistically speaking, your characters stats are siphoned down to a long bar at the bottom of the screen. Levelling up is just process of blasting hundreds upon hundreds of baddies and make for a dry experience.
3) The weapons are ace but they tend to only just be out of reach of your character's level. I never, for example, found a level 50 golden sniper rifle whilst I was level 28. I did find, however, shitloads of level 30 weapons. Same with the baddies too - as a level 10 I might stumble across a load of level 11's or 12's but no one ever out of my league. The world changed with me levelling up whereas Dark Souls' world is constant and unflinching. If you go back to an old area everyone has levelled up. It just seems a bit cheap.
4) The world is quite bland actually. And the loading times are an irritant where Dark Souls world pours out in front of you (sometimes to its detriment).
5) Pegging it is a valid Dark Souls tactic. In Borderlands I did it cause I was sick of the same old enemies or the constant barrage of baddies I'd killed before in the same area. Waves and waves and wars of them.
6) I thought I might die from a lack of funds. But you never will. Ever.

So there you go. Like Dark Souls but not Dark Souls. It's still ace though and I might even go back and do some missions I'd missed. If I can be bothered. Which I might, so it did something right.

NEXT WEEK: I compare Dark Souls to Half Life 2. And living with a family of chipmunks.

The game is never a pushover IMO. Once in a while you'll get the 'perfect' weapon which will temporarily shift the odds in your favour (an orange drop tends to have that effect), but of course you'll soon level away from it. Pretty much from start to finish if you drop your guard or get a bit overly bold, the game will hand you your arse on a plate - even more so in True Vault Hunter Mode.

I like this about it, as it's always a challenge.



Yeah you can generally just go off the colour of the arrows, and more than anything the way a gun handles is more important than the raw stats. Some look better on paper but are fucking awful to actually use. It's always worth doing a few test kills with a new gun before discarding an old one in its favour.

I'm currently playing through as the Psycho class and when you spend a few seconds on the stats screen he comes out with comments like:

(Uh-oh. Math. Hope we don't pop a blood vessel.)
Uhh... the choices are pretzeling my inner lobes!
See the numbers, taste the violence....
But who makes the prettiest noise?



It's never a bad idea to have one viable weapon in every class about your person I've found, with the elemental effects suited to the types of enemy in the zone. It also depends on which character class you're playing, the mechromancer played as anarchy for example, can get massive mileage out of shotguns up close and dirty once the anarchy stacks get going, whereas a different class might prefer mid to long range engagement with sniper and assault rifles.



Yep, but with no fall damage and generous fast travel locations along with plentiful vehicles, (plus there are shortcuts through lots of the zones), it pretty much always stays on the right side of acceptable.



Always a fair tactic (worked very well in WoW too if you didn't feel like fighting), IMO it's not accidental that the game gives you the option to basically just run straight through an area if that's what you want to do.



There is an element of that but I'd argue (as per you noted above) that generally speaking you can run/drive through an area if you don't fancy taking them on. I think BL2 is a 'mood' game, if you're not in the mood for it (and sometimes I'm not) it's a case of play something else for a bit.

On more than one occasion I've loaded the game up, got to an area and realised I've got a lot of shooting to do to get to where I want to be, found myself not in the mood, quit out and played Pinball Arcade instead. Then the next evening I'll load BL2 up at exactly the same juncture but totally be ready to get slaughtering.



That comes with the genre IMO, not sure how else they could do it? You do get quite a lot of XP from completing quests, and there are loads of side quests, so it's not all about shooting to level up. In fact you can tip the game either way at your own choosing, max out the quests if you want less of the shooty grinding for XP, or more ruthlessly follow the main storyline if you want more shooty shooty to level up.



If the drops are routinely above your character's level then that suggests you're punching a bit above your weight on the zone that you're in, but yes it will happen fairly regularly anyway. It's very much a standard of the genre TBH, just stick the item in your backpack or safe back in Sanctuary until you can use it.

Most MMOs don't level up areas you've done before as you level up, BL2 follows that convention.



Bland? Which game were you playing?

Loading times are usually 4-5 seconds on PC so that will be a limitation of the platform you're playing on. I did watch a few videos on YouTube for boss tactics and secret areas and suchlike where the person was playing on 360 and I have to say I was like, 'Fucking hell, that's some bastard loading time'.

Once you've got used to an SSD there really is no going back to traditional storage (either spooling from disc or loading from hard drive).



Well that's the whole point I think, the game generally gives you the choice of what you want to do.



The cash system is pretty sneaky, since the cost of everything just scales to how much you have. In short, just spend money any time you see an item you want, and don't worry about dying, because the cost of everything will drop back down as your cash reserves do. I'm not entirely sure why money is even in the game for the most part TBH. It's quite telling that the most important stuff is bought with eridium.



Definitely have a go with a different class, I'm well into my Psycho playthrough now and he's awesome, but getting your head around the fact that his special ability is melee and that melee is always a viable option anyway takes some getting used to, especially if your previous characters were commando and mechromancer as mine were.

I'm effectively on my third playthrough now (normal and TVHM as mechro) and now again as Psycho, and it's still a barrel load of fun.

Just building upon the Dark Souls comparisons for some reason...





Check out how Dark Souls lets you allocate your stats to attributes. They could have let you pile XP to level up skills with a shotty/sniper/assault rifles whatever. It might have made levelling up a bit more fun juggling stats, perhaps?





Again, see Dark Souls, where you might stumble across some kick ass Dragon Axe requiring you to be level 50 in POWAH, but you can't use it. I kept hold of it and completed that game twice so I could pump my XP/Souls into POWAH so I could handle that beast. It's just an incentive to keep you playing whereas, tellingly, I haven't turned on BL2 since I've completed it. I might have, had I come across something awesome that I couldn't use. Maybe?



Dark Souls doesn't have any levelling up of areas. Everything is and shall ever be as it starts (well, until New Game+ that does notch up the difficulty a bit). Same as Xenoblade Chronicles as well. You might stumble across some real badass early on that you've got little chance of beating so you make a mental note and will come back later. Again, it's all about incentivising the player to keep playing and excellent design. BL2's levelling up enemies cheapens return visits to areas (or even just turning on the game) in my eyes.





It's pretty but pretty bland. The difference between icy world, desert world, grassy world and, um, purple world are ... different coloured floors. White, brown, green and, um, purple.

The most interesting and best area, that was totally unlike any of the others, was the acid pit place below Sanctuary. It's a shame there wasn't more of that sort of thing.

Free weekend for this on Steam, and thereafter £4.99 if you want to buy it or £8.74 for the GOTY edition. (Includes all the expansions and the extra classes.)

Even if you've played a console version through to completion it might be worth a look if you've moved to a decent PC since playing it through on the 360, (or have had one all along), as you can turn the extra pretties and PhysX stuff on (and play with keyboard + mouse if you prefer, or stick to a pad if you don't).

The Mechromancer class alone gives the game a whole different vibe IMO.

This remains one of my absolute favourite videogames ever, of all time, needless to say I'm very much looking forward to the pre-sequel....

Movie time!



https://variety.com/2015/film/news/bord ... 201580303/

Wow, I wonder how bad it will be, on a scale of sub-par to monstrously horrible?

Old post but yeah, I must say I agree. My lady and I played about 60% through BL2 before she realised she really liked it. So we decided to stop, and go back to Borderlands. We're around 90% through that with the vault coming up soon, then we're going to switch back to BL2 and finish that.

However the Pre Sequel was fucking awful. I bought it at launch and attempted to play it with a mate of mine (we completed BL and BL2 together) and god, what a dire game. Such a shame really.

Having snagged the BORDERLANDS 2 PRE-SEQUEL PLUS SEASON PASS in the recent Steam sale I'm pleased to report it's very good.

I think it's easy to get a bit down on the whole 'not as good as BL2' thing (which is true), but that doesn't stop it being a great game in its own right.

Also the Pre-Sequel Season Pass is proper crap compared to the wealth of extra content that BL2 got, but again, that doesn't make this Season Pass horrible by default. (Although I'd have been narked if I'd paid full price, as there's only one DLC, one arena thingy, and two extra character classes.)

I got a little way in playing as the Jack's body double class (which was one of the DLC classes), but wasn't really feeling much love for it despite it having clear over-powered tendencies, so I started again as Lady Hammerlock (the other DLC class) and she's great, effectively a sniper class really, and I absolutely love sniping in Borderlands.

So yeah, good game and should be around on all formats for fairly cheap now - if you liked BL2, you'll like this.

I've still got B1 and B2 plus all the related DLC sitting to play, fuck knows when I'll get round to those.

You should definitely try to find the time for BL2 and all the DLCs, they're toweringly awesome.

Would get a place in my 'Top Ten Games Ever' list, without a doubt.

I'm going to play through Borderlands 2 again, it's re-downloading on Steam now.

I was watching the Angry Joe Extended Review of Anthem (which they have torn to shreds) and they were asking each other 'What's the best looter shooter ever?' to which they decided the answer is BL2.

I agree with them, and it's one of my favourite games ever, so I'm going to play through it again.

All the reviews of Anthem I've seen are negative, but I've yet to speak to someone I know who has played it that doesn't rave about it.

Work mate says it's laughably broken. Even after the first wave of patches.

Me and Mrs Hearthly are now doing a co-op playthrough of this. I remember me and the guys tried to do a co-op playthrough many years ago and it was a bombsite, with people turning quests in and setting new quests off all the time, or triggering travel or custcenes and generally just making it impossible to enjoy the game and the dialogue, take our time over loot and so on. Also, one of our number was an absolute fucking loot hoover so after a boss kill or suchlike you'd get a brief glimpse of purple or orange and then they'd be gone as he swooped in to grab everything, then denied all knowledge he had anything nice he might like to share.

However, with just me and Mrs Hearthly playing we can co-operate a lot better, take our time, and enjoy everything the game has to offer, and 'cause we're sat in the same room, it's nice and easy to co-ordinate activities, trade loot, agree on what we're doing, when to turn a quest in, or start one off, and so on.

(If you've ever tried to play this game co-op, I suspect you'll know what I'm talking about.)

Anyway, it's still a peerlessly brilliant game, one of the most well written games I've ever played.

Heh.

http://orcz.com/Borderlands_2:_Golden_Key

BL in co op was what really drew me into co op. I'd played L4D a few times but since playing through all three BL games with my buddy life has never been quite the same.

Hoping the true third installment is this year, that would be ace. Finished FC New Dawn tonight (hence the late post) and it has come to a conclusion so roll on FC6 too.

On the one hand I'm looking forward to BL3, but on the other hand if ever there was a game that was absolutely ripe to be completely fucked up by the 'live service microtransaction game model', it's Borderlands.

As I've been playing through it with Mrs Hearthly I've been struck, time and time again, by how generous the game feels compared to the stripped out experiences we often get foisted upon us today.

BL2 has a complete base game and four generous full expansions, along with the two extra character classes that were very reasonably priced DLC.

Beyond that, everything in the game is provided by the game's systems and for want of a better word, is complete.

You just know that if they want to be dicks about it, they'd be selling stuff like Eridium for real cash, and nerfing the drop rate of it in the game. The golden chest in Sanctuary? Buy some keys with real money!

The game's loot system is really well balanced, giving plenty of opportunities for nice gear rewards, but still making it feel good when you get a solid upgrade. It'd be so easy to tweak the game's gear down a notch or two, and have a convenient loot box vendor in the main city, just for top up purposes in the name of 'player choice'.

And that's before you even get started on all the free cosmetic stuff that BL2 contains, which they could totally monetise the shit out of.

Finally, god help us if they go down the 'live service always online' route. IMO one of the things that's made looter shooters so dull in recent years is the need to balance everything in the game on the expectation you'll be playing with random people online at some point or indeed routinely, so they just can't have insane gear drop potential because you could go into a game with some random folks and be totally overpowered compared to them. (I mean, just look at Anthem, fucking hell that game is BORING.)

With BL2, as it's solo play or co-op with friends, it doesn't matter that you might get lucky and have Bewm & Boom drop a Level 5 grenade that'll still be BIS at Level 12, because it's 'your' game, or just your game with friends. When I throw one of those grenades (I forget the name of it now), I let Mrs Hearthly know, as its blast radius is so insane (one grenade that spawns eight child grenades), we both need to be well out of the area. You simply couldn't have something like that in a game being played with random strangers.

So yeah, I'm excited for BL3, but also worried.

The micro transaction shite had crept into FC New Dawn. We struggled for ages with crap weapons refusing to buy credits. Then we realised toward the end of the game that if we'd done the expeditions we'd have had sick weaponry fast. The thing is? It doesn't tell you that doing them gives you the circuit boards.

A bit crafty that.

BL3 has definitely been in dev long enough to have enough content though, so there's that.

Anthem was in development for six years and look at that...

Also, by all accounts chunks of it have been removed to be 'added' again later, so for example in the campaign a character will turn up you seem to know, but in reality you've never met them before.

Plus in the E3 footage there were loads of extra cosmetics on many of the character screens, which are conspicuous by their absence in the released game. i.e. This is clearly content that had been completed, but was then stripped out of the released game to be sold as 'extras'.

Don't underestimate the ability of publishers to fuck with their games to nickel and dime their players.

Not played Anthem. Next on my list is Division 2. I bought it today, just waiting on my key

Been quite good for gaming so far, this year. New Dawn was good, Metro is lovely (more as a story than a game because there's not that much actual game in there) and I have Division 2 to look forward to, only this time I won't be nerfed by the fact my mate was like level 25 when I started so the co op action was basically me watching and continually dying as there was no point shooting any one as it just made them angry and shoot at me more. Yeah, maybe I should have jumped on that earlier...(ed, The Division. Like, one).

I must say I did quite enjoy Borderlands TPS, once the first crappy boring four hour grind was over. It actually grew on me quite quickly after that.

Looking forward to playing this again once the PSVR version sees a price drop.

Does the VR version have multiplayer?!

No

Also, Claptrap has a different voice.

Not much different though.

(The guy who voiced Claptrap left Gearbox a little while ago.)

Cheeky little trick to farm Eridium, that's quite fun to do and effective. (Saw it in one of the many BL2 videos I've been watching recently.)

Basically, you take a high level character (my highest is Level 52), and open the Golden Chest in Sanctuary with a Golden Key. Take the items from the chest and put them in Claptrap's Super Secret Stash.

Then log on with a low level character you want the Eridium on, and retrieve the items from the stash. These items will vendor for a massive amount of cash relative to your low level character's wealth. (The items my Level 52 was getting out of the chest vendor for around 40-50K, and a Level 15 will generally have 2K on them.)

Once you've vendored the items, go to the slot machines in Sanctuary with your big wedge of cash, and merrily spin away. (The cost of the slot machine spins scale with level, so at Level 15 it's about $250 to spin the machine.)

The slot machine has the following probabilities of spinning an Eridium winning combination.

SINGLE ERIDIUM BARS - 4 Eridium - 2.56%
DOUBLE ERIDIUM BARS - 8 Eridium - 0.77$
TRIPLE ERIDIUM BARS - 12 Eridium - 0.23%

Obviously with the normal bankroll of a low level character, you'd run out of cash long before you could reliably harvest a decent haul of Eridium, but with the high level character twinking down nice purples to vendor, cash is effectively unlimited.

I've done it on my two new low level characters, and I also went the extra step and traded a couple of items with Mrs Hearthly for her to vendor, here she is rinsing the machines in Sanctuary on her Level 17 character. (It costs $333 to spin the machine at Level 17.) She's hit the double bars on the right hand machine for 8 Eridium.

Obviously you're limited in what you can buy with Eridium, but the nice big backpack and plenty of extra ammo capacity of all the different weapon classes is a very pleasant quality of life improvement.

Worth a video? Probably not, but that's never stopped me before.