Be Excellent To Each Other

So we played a couple of hours in three player co-op last night and my feelings are mixed.

On the one hand the game itself was terrific, enemies were a hell of a lot tougher and there were more of them, Captain Flynt in particular was a right fucker to take down.

We worked well together - (we're the hardcore of our BF3 team who play every week without fail, so we're used to playing as a tight squad) - covering each other, using each of our particular abilities to help out the party, leading an enemy to a fallen comrade so he could get a kill in Fight For Your Life, sharing items/health/ammo out between us and so on.

What I felt it spoiled a bit however was exploring everything and taking my time a bit. When I was playing solo I was really methodical, clearing everything out and exploring every nook and cranny. With three of us playing it felt a bit more like a charge around objectives to get stuff done, I couldn't help but get the sense I might be missing things. Even stuff like in-game dialogue was harder to follow as the other two guys might have been blowing stuff up or driving around or just talking shit on Teamspeak.

Anyway, we got to Sanctuary and called it a night, so I'll log back in and take a look around today.

I did have a go on the slot machines in the bar in Sanctuary, a nice looking green gun popped out of the side when I got a winning line and one of my 'mates' stole it and refused to give it back, so I took him outside and kicked his fucking thieving ass in a duel.

I have been playing this some more, it's brilliant!

They've really missed a trick though in not marking up some of the quests as being 'ideal for co-op' or suchlike.

A lot of quests are actually best done solo, so you can take your time and have a proper explore around the place, but some of them really do lend themselves to co-op play, an early one that stuck out as such was 'ASSASSINATE THE ASSASSINS' which was practically a WoW instance in all but name, albeit one that tuned itself down to be completable solo.

It was basically a linear 'dungeon' with not much to do except follow the path, kill all the baddies, go for extra XP for killing bosses in certain ways, and collect loot - absolutely perfect group fodder, but not marked up as such at all.

Still, we're all Level 11 and we've all got up to the same point on the story missions, so we'll be picking it up for co-op again on Saturday.

It's a hugely likeable game. Very funny, very playable, very slick, very pretty, loads of fun, it'd make a perfectly good FPS game in its own right, so the RPG/WoW extras are almost like icing on the cake.

As I commented to my chum today, 'It's like WoW but in exciting FPS format and with all the tedious shit stripped out.'

Level 50! During the Bunker fight where I popped the cheevo, I had the "joy" of looking across to Terramorphous Peak and seeing him there, waiting for me.
Blimey, he's big.
Still, I've been obtaining some ridiculous guns lately, including a rocket launcher that does 245,000 damage, so I might as well give it a go.
Tomorrow.

Yeah. Have a stiff drink first.

Did four player co-op this evening, fucking hell it really does scale up the difficulty!

As I commented to the chaps, it's an easier game to play solo - but more fun in co-op, just 'cause it's so fucking mentally hard.

Retro demake!
http://www.wubwub.eu/demake.php

'1989' is pushing it just a little bit for 16-bit console games, especially one that looks that refined.

Is it just me who really likes Claptrap?

Yes.

Oh, and sweet jumping Jesus on a fiery unicycle, but Terramorphous is a bast and a half.

Hmph.

I think he's quite funny, he was showing off his new dubstep material in Sanctuary last night.

Have you done the birthday mission yet? *shudder* I quite liked him up until that point.

Since Far Cry 3 has INCURRED MY WRATH I have decided instead to treat myself to the Mechromancer pack for Borderlands 2.

Plus me and the chaps have decided we're going to level our primary Borderlands 2 characters at the same rate, which basically means we're gonna get one session per week on a Saturday night with them. Even with my far more limited gaming time these days, I can do better than that, so my cute little Mechro is going to be my alt who I can level as fast as I want.

Plus I just love the world of Borderlands 2 far more than I do Far Cry 3, so I'd rather have two characters in the Borderlands 2 world than just one in the Far Cry 3 world.

I've gone back to the original Borderlands to finally try and get the Level 50 achievement.

It's safe to say Borderlands 2 is a massive improvement all round. That's not to say B1 is bad or anything, but virtually all the changes they made for the sequel have made it a much better game all round.

They've rolled out another update for this. Hilariously, among all the other stuff is the short statement "Increased health of Terramorphous".

As if he wasn't difficult enough to beat already.

Where did you get the update/patch notes for this Malc?

I noticed the game updated itself before I could play it this evening, although down at my lowly level I'm sure I won't notice that anything's different

I follow Gearbox on Twitter, so they post the info there whenever there's an update (also worth following Randy Pitchford, as he'll tweet Shift codes from time to time.)
Link to their knowledge base here.

This game is very much flavour of the month with the chaps, to the extent that we have six of us with it on the go now, but of course co-op caps out at four players!

We may be on BF3 tomorrow purely due to the logistics of us all playing together not being possible with BL2.

Heh, Mechromancer kicks ass.

Almost too much ass in all honesty, almost like, 'give us eight quid and we'll give you a cute chick with a ridiculous death-dealing robot as a pal'.

Still, works for me.

I've got my Assassin at L37 and my Mechromancer at L11 and I dread to think how absurdly mental that robot will be once you get to the higher levels. I'm enjoying anarchy as well although not the point where I go to pick something up and reload by accident. That causes major swearage.

Having said that I still have lots of love for my Assassin who can take off huge chunks of health off anyone with a sniper rifle shot to the head or a shotgun blast to idiots trying to smack my hologram. And the Bore perk plus a corrosive sniper rifle plus a load of Hyperion robots nicely lines up leads to so many green numbers littering the screen I'll never get bored of it.

I've played lots of games this year and Borderlands 2 is easily in my top 3.

It basically killed Captain Flynt for me.

After another four player co-op session last night I'm of the opinion that BL2 is actually a better game to play solo.

It's a bit 'scruffy' with four players at once, even though we all do the same quests at the same time, you have the problem of someone getting to the turn-in point before you do and then kicking off the next bit so you miss some of the exposition, or they trigger a travel to the next zone when you're in the middle of a fight, that sort of thing.

The loot system is messy as well, yeah by all means let anyone pick up basic stuff like ammo and shit guns, but for greens and certainly for purples, there needs to be some kind of 'need or greed' system like in WoW. The time we spent going through our inventories saying 'Is this any good for you?' and so on.

Then you've got the fact that the game is SUBSTANTIALLY harder with four players than it is with one, with not much in the way of GREAT LOOTZ to compensate, and your characters end up feeling underpowered. As a commando I'm used to one-shotting most goons with a sniper rifle, with four of us on the go it takes three or four shots to kill some of them, plus my turret becomes a horribly weedy pea-shooter that gets stamped on in about 10 seconds.

At one point last night we managed to get lost so we had four of us scouring the map and of course any enemies we encountered were tuned for four of us, not one of us out on patrol.

I dunno, I prefer it single player, and for us to group up at Level 50 to take on the big boss baddies and suchlike, a bit like WoW is a better game to quest solo, and group up for instances.

I definitely think they've missed a trick with BL2 in not having proper group quests throughout the game, rather than just trying to scale the entire world out to the number of players.

I sometimes just 'twitch reload' even when I don't mean to.

It's practically muscle-memory, ingrained into me over 20 years of playing FPS games.

Low on ammo? Slight pause in the action? Press R to reload! Why wouldn't you?

ARGH FUCKING NOT AGAIN I JUST LOST ALL MY ANARCHY STACKS.

(And it doesn't help of course that the game still flashes up RELOAD NOW prompts when ammo gets low.)

I'm getting better at not doing it, but it's properly a case of unlearning a totally learned behaviour.

A truly glorious game overall though, absolutely love it to pieces.

TECH GEEKERY:

The PhysX stuff is pretty stunning, the videos that are out there mostly do it justice, but there were times during four player co-op last night where the magnificence of it all went off the scale.

One of the guys has an ATI card (no PhysX) as opposed to Nvidia, I was kind of describing the scene to him after a particularly hectic fight (fluids and gloop running all over the place, tattered flags blowing in the wind, zillions of fragments of shite all over the place and so on), and I was like 'You can't see any of that stuff?' and he replied rather glumly 'Nope'.

He's buying a GTX670 once Christmas is out of the way.

Gearbox just tweeted shift codes, good for 5 Golden Keys each...

W3KTJ-FZ9CS-XS6BR-K6JJ3-XCFXT (360)
WTWBJ-HKZ9C-TCCWB-ZT5JJ-6HRZS (PS3)
WT5TB-XC5ZC-CX3T3-BBT3B-B35WB (PC/Mac)

Good for the next couple of days, they say.

Cool, that got me 7 golden keys - cheers Malc!

I completed the Circle of Slaughter last night. I'm glad I went off and did some other things then came back to round 4 having levelled up a few times as those last two rounds are complete ammo black holes.

Trying to do all 5 rounds in one sitting must surely be impossible?

Also is there any flying enemy ever in any FPS game that isn't FUCKING SHIT? Rakks and Surveyors and those flying things in Halo 4 can all kiss my fat one.

Agreed, but I just phaselock them and then they can't move.

I found the Rakk to be much less intrusive this time around, with the exception of the odd and completely random occasions where one will take all my shield and 90% of my health off with one hit, which I'm presuming is a bug of some sort. For the most part they seem to leave you alone, unlike the first game where they'd chase you halfway across the map if you drove past them in a vehicle.

Anyway, when it comes to annoying aeriel enemies, nothing can come close to the fucking Cliff Racers in Morrowind.

Jesus, yes.

If I got Borderlands, do I need chums to play it with?

Not at all but I'm up for starting a new character if you want some company. After 28th that is cos I'm moving house again and as usual forgot to tell bt...

I'd say it's a better game single player when you're levelling, then just group up for the endgame L50 group content.

Multiplayer actually detracts from the main questing and killing and looting experience IMO.

Tags, I will have a think . about it because dark souls and deus ex are on going right now.

Depends on whether you like Chums. If yes, then yes. If no, then No.

With regards Borderlands the first, I'd have found it sufficiently dull to finish without Chums. But it's the kind of grind that I'm just not interested in (See also: Diablo grindy grind loot grind)

Dark Souls.

I'd say not in the slightest. However, if you started playing solo and then decided to team up with people for online fun, it might be best to start a completely new profile solely for the online bit - the main complaint seems to be that hugely levelled up friends pumping you full of XP and killer equipment can totally destroy the balance of the game if you're doing both single and multiplayer on the one savegame.

I just don't think multiplayer adds to the game at all, I've already gone over it here:

viewtopic.php?p=728965#p728965

And if anything I feel that's even more the case than I did when I wrote that post.

I've been levelling my mechro up solo through the stuff that we've grouped up for over the last three weeks (when I was playing my commando), and it's all far more involving, far more tactical, and ultimately far more satisfying to do it by myself.

Do bear in mind I'm talking about the guys I've been playing online with for years and years and years, literally back to the Quake 2 days in one case, and certainly going back to the likes of Battlefield 2 (2005) and ever since then.

We've chatted about it at work and we all feel the same, BL2 is an awesome game and we're gonna group up at L50 to do the proper group content together, but the journey to 50 we're going to solo. Saturday night games will remain the likes of BF3 and DiRT2 and what have you.

Now maybe it's because we've been spoiled by the likes of WoW, with its incredibly tight 5-man instance dynamic, and disciplined 10 and 25 man raids, so that BL2 just feels a bit disjointed and 'vague' by comparison in multiplayer - plus there's the fact it simply spawns more enemies and makes them stupidly powerful, rather than being 'proper' multiplayer content.

It's particularly annoying to land perfect headshots on enemies that are one-shot kills in single player, but take four headshots to kill in four player co-op.

YMMV my vary of course, but I've just done the 'Finding The Firehawk' quest solo on my mechro, and there's loads of dialogue, loads of little nooks and crannies, and loads of secret goodies that we completely missed when we stormed through it in four player co-op.

My personal opinion?

BL2 is not a multiplayer game, the whole thing has been designed to be completely soloable from L1 to L50, and it shows, because the multiplayer just feels clumsy.

It's great that absolutely fuck all was done to address this glaring flaw carried over from the sequel.

Well how do you suggest they address it?

At the end of the day there's no real 'good' way to have high level characters running around with low level characters.

WoW just makes no pretence whatsoever of modifying itself, and such capers are simply referred to as 'boosting' whereby the high level character(s) give the lower level character(s) a run through instances and/or tough zones to give the lower level character(s) a chance at some phat lootz.

What WoW also does is massively reduce the XP that the low level character(s) get during boosting, to reflect the fact they're not having to make much effort.

As a general rule of thumb, either group up with people your own level, or don't group up at all unless you're after a 'boost' scenario.

To be fair though, nobody is forcing players to invite overpowered friends in to help them out. If someone's determined to do it I can see why Gearbox would just kind of shrug and let them get on with it.
I mean, if you're at Level 5 and you invite a friend who's Level 20 into your game, I don't see how you then have a right to moan that it's fucked everything up. You made the decision - if you don't like the result, start over and don't make the same mistake again.
The fact that there's a closed storyline to work through in Borderlands means that artificially boosting your level by using a high-powered team-mate is only spoiling the whole damn game for yourself.
Not that I don't understand why people could succumb to the temptation though, but it my mind it's kind of like buying the Secret of Monkey Island and then playing it while reading a step-by-step walkthrough.

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?

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.

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?

DocG complained that Dimrill ran off into the distance and ruined the story. 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.

'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.



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.



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.



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.



Well yes, that's what happens when you group up with massively higher level and better geared players, as before, it's called boosting.

Oh fucking hell I just fought my way through the entire Bloodshot Stronghold to where I rescue Roland at Bloodshot Ramparts, saw a Fast Travel booth, thought 'Ahhhh that's handy I'll just pop back to Sanctuary to stock up on stuff and sell my shit', I did notice the fast travel thingy was yellow and not blue.....

Turns out it's yellow denotes that it's a one way ticket out of there, the closest I can fast travel back to is the very start of Bloodshot Stronghold.

Bollocks!

Heh. You obviously didn't see my post from a few pages back, where I did the exact same thing!
Yeah, keep an eye out for those one way booths - there are a few more as the game progresses. Would've been nice if they'd mentioned them in the instructions.

I think I did read that post at the time Malc but it was a few months ago now IIRC so I'd forgotten, plus it's one of those things where reading a post in the context of a game you've never played (as I hadn't at that point) doesn't mean much.

The stupid thing is it did actually occur to me before I used it, 'This doesn't look like a normal fast travel booth' but for some reason I just didn't consider such a horrible thing might exist.

I wasn't going to do it all again tonight but I had 200+ stacks of anarchy, and every time you save and quit, you have to build them up from scratch again so I figured I'd better get it done.

As it was it didn't take too long, I was very reckless but just leveraged Deathtrap and Fight For Your Life as best I could, getting a Second Wind is pretty easy with a good assault rifle and so much anarchy.

When I got back to the end again the boss fight itself was fairly trivial, so Roland was saved and THEN I used the bloody fast travel thingy to get back to Sanctuary.

Smashing game, it's not without its faults but on balance it's one of the better games I've played for quite some years.

I now appear to have a gun that talks to me, having done one of the optional quests where I get an AI Core out of a downed robot.

Through a protracted series of events it finally ended up trying to kill everyone in the bar in Sanctuary by renouncing violence and saying instead that it wanted to be a radio.

As soon as it was in the radio it did the worst singing in the world, and goaded everyone in the bar to commit suicide as a result.

Having then blown up the radio it renounced violence again, and said it just wanted to help other people kill.

So I took it to Marcus and he gave it back to me in the form of a talking shotgun.

Splendid game, there's not much that still has me playing at 1am these days.

Given that I've now hit L50 on this, I don't really see the point of playing much more until they raise the level cap. I've started playing Rage instead - it feels disturbingly po-faced, linear and just plain dull so far, after three solid months of Borderlands 2.

Have you got the DLC that's been released up to now? There are two expansions out there with a third due in January.

I'll be lapping them up as soon as I've finished the main game.

Level cap increase is in the next expansion I believe.

Haven't gone near the DLC yet, although I'm seeing rumours that the Season Pass may be one of the daily Christmas Xbox deals, so I'm going to keep an eye out and grab it if it is.

Well surely the DLC is a great place to start if you want more mileage out of the game?

Both the expansions released up to now scored a solid 9/10 at Eurogamer and were described as a textbook example of how to do DLC properly.

I'm half inclined to buy them before I've even got my first character to 50, but I'm not entirely sure if the content is for 50s only or not.

£14.99 on Steam for the next 8 hours.

Absolute and total no-brainer for fifteen quid, anyone who's got a PC/Mac capable of running it and who hasn't yet played it on the 360/PS3 should definitely get it.

Extra points if you've got an Nvidia card then you can pimp out all the awesome PhysX stuff.

As an aside, a mate of mine has got a Mac Mini and apparently it runs OK on that, which seems remarkable since a Mac Mini is about the same size as a tangerine.

The DLC content scales to your level.