metalangel wrote:
The problem is that it's awfully hard to keep characters at the right level to ensure you can play with your friends. For one thing, and same as the first game, the opening sequence is a tedious handholdy slog to have to go through every time you want to make a new character. How much or little do you play with your character outside of multiplayer to keep them 'current' with your friends?
'Awfully hard'? Just agree to have characters that you'll only play online with your friends, and anyone who wants to play in excess of that can just roll an alt or alts.
Back in the WoW heyday I had five characters on the go to my mate's single character, but I still managed to keep one of them pegged to his level right the way through the game.
Characters don't level themselves when you're not looking.
As for 'tedious handholdy slog', you can play from L1 to Sanctuary in an evening when you know what you're doing.
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I made the same comments about the first game, that because it's a fairly linear story you basically all have to agree to only ever use a certain character when you play with the same friends, otherwise you will break the game somehow. This makes the drop-in drop-out multiplayer almost completely pointless, as if someone from your group leaves you'd better start almost immediately before you leave them too far behind XP wise.
Well it was either that or not have the drop-in/drop-out multiplayer dynamic at all.
I don't see it as a big problem, just don't group with higher level characters if you want to game your game pure and on track.
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If building some kind of handicap system into the game to allow you to reduce your level 50's stats down to that of your level 20 friends, why not let us take a snapshot of what our character was (stats and equipment) just before they levelled up at each level? So then if I want to play, you know, for fun, then I can just load my character as they were at level 15 and play with level 15 friends?
That's possible I suppose, although it'd be pretty messy to track quests and suchlike, I can't think of any other game that's ever done that.
WoW has the ability to turn off XP gain so you can freeze a character at a certain level until you want to level it again, they could do that perhaps.
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DocG complained that Dimrill ran off into the distance and ruined the story.
On this I agree with you, which is why me and my mates have all agreed to level to 50 solo, and group up for the endgame stuff.
BL2 is basically a single player RPG FPS, the multiplayer actively detracts from the game experience.
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My friends ran off into the distance and beat the game twice and are now all level 50 with all level 50 orange guns. Now if I play with them they just tag along behind me, one-shotting everything.
Well yes, that's what happens when you group up with massively higher level and better geared players, as before, it's called boosting.