Borderlands 2 is a MASSIVE potato

[aris]

Maybe a little bit inappropriate to start a seperate thread on this, but doing a search, I could not find a dedicated thread for this game.

http://www.gamespot.com/borderlands...ot;Borderlands2WalkthroughVideos;MayaTheSiren

http://www.gamespot.com/borderlands...rlands2WalkthroughVideos;SalvadorTheGunzerker

Looks pretty fun!

-minus for apparent HP-bloat, I hope they make that HP lower, and the monsters more challenging. Right now, it seems like they are mainly just standing around, being damage-sponges.
-plus for very nice and varied gun design. Not often you see this kind of variety in an FPS.

 

[Metro]

Unless they did something to make the skill trees meaningful/interesting this will be relegated to a $10 or less buy for me.

 

[Quetzacoatl]

Boderlands 1 felt like a repetitive diablo clone. I see no reason to expect anything else from the sequel.

 

[Metro]

I thought it was okay (better in co-op obviously) but the ARPG elements were far too shallow for me to look forward to a sequel. The skills/talents were bland and superfluous, itemization was lacking (just gun, grenade, shield, and mod), and there was just way too much crappy loot to sort through. Also when you'd stumble on an upgrade every ten minutes it took away the fun in finding cool items. As an FPS alone it's mediocre to poor.

 

[Mangoose]

Mm for me it was the repetitive environment and enemy variety that bored me.

 

[GreyViper]

Boderlands 1 felt like a repetitive diablo clone. I see no reason to expect anything else from the sequel.

This, tough I did have more fun with the DLCs and gun editor.

 

[aris]

Mm for me it was the repetitive environment and enemy variety that bored me.

I'm getting the impression that they are making the environments more varied this time.

As for the skill tree, the developers a knowledge that the skill tree in the original was not very good, and said that they would have skills that are more meaningful than 1% plus to weapon damage. It remains to be seen if they follow up on that though.

 

[JrK]

There's more than plenty of looks at the skills. You can catch glimpses of them in the two posted vids and there are other vids floating about. So far it seems better, but mostly in the way that useless skills (Roland had so many useless ones!) are gone, and the percentages are bigger.

Here you go.

 

[aris]

Thanks Jrk! Also here, one can see many of the abilities of the gunzerker and maya

http://borderlands.wikia.com/wiki/Salvador
http://borderlands.wikia.com/wiki/Maya

 

[Metro]

Thanks for the links.

 

[Gregz]

Borderlands was so much fun, I just hope they implement some kind of sprint action this time. I kept to the Siren mainly because of her run speed ability, would have liked to have tried the other classes more but can't into slow-running big maps.

 

[aris]

I too had fun with borderlands. Though the game browser was absolutely horrendous, which made finding good games a major pain in the ass. I think they are going with a steam-integrated browser this time around though, which, fingers crossed, will be better.

 

[sea]

UI still looks like shit, hooray for prioritizing looks over readability and functionality. I think over 60% of that screen space in the inventory/trade menu/etc. is wasted.

That said, gameplay looks improved. Fights are more chaotic, there's more abilities going off and it looks more competent as a shooter. Still, I don't think these videos give a good sense of overall gameplay (with the exploration and open world stuff, questing, etc.) so it's hard to say whether the bigger issues (monotony, especially in single-player, crappy loot balance, etc.) are still a problem.

Probably won't touch this until it goes on sale, though, I've had enough of goddamn shooters already, and I think I had enough of Borderlands for one lifetime already.

 

[aris]

I would really like to see a lot more constrained and disciplined loot system. Borderlands along with torchlight had this problem of constantly throwing a stream of magical weapons at you, where 90% was vendor trash and the other 10% was marginally better than what you already had. That's not fun. When I find a magic weapon with purple or green color coding, or whatever, I want it to happen relatively rarely, and I want that weapon to kick ass, not do 0.1% more damage than the previous normal boring weapon I had. I fear they won't change that though.

As for the monotony, I think that is something that they are really addressing, at least in terms of environment and visual style. As they have stated, the game is more colorful and less brownish, which is obviously true. That helps. They also seem to mix up the type of environments more, like snowy mountain areas, industrial complexes, grassland areas, and as seen in this demo, some kind of highly acidic wasteland area. If you were referring to monotony in quests, I doubt they will be anymore engaging than they were in borderlands 1.

 

[Gregz]

UI still looks like shit, hooray for prioritizing looks over readability and functionality. I think over 60% of that screen space in the inventory/trade menu/etc. is wasted.

Yeah, the UI in Borderlands was a real pain, took a lot of getting used to, but after tweaking it I managed to look past it. Sadly it looks like they didn't replace the stupid SOB who designed the UI on the first one.

I would really like to see a lot more constrained and disciplined loot system. Borderlands along with torchlight had this problem of constantly throwing a stream of magical weapons at you, where 90% was vendor trash and the other 10% was marginally better than what you already had. That's not fun. When I find a magic weapon with purple or green color coding, or whatever, I want it to happen relatively rarely, and I want that weapon to kick ass, not do 0.1% more damage than the previous normal boring weapon I had. I fear they won't change that though.

I never had a problem with this. I love shooting at walking slot machines where there's always a slight chance that any mob can drop an epic, this was a great aspect of the Diablo(s) as well.

 

[JrK]

UI still looks like shit, hooray for prioritizing looks over readability and functionality. I think over 60% of that screen space in the inventory/trade menu/etc. is wasted.

Yeah, the UI in Borderlands was a real pain, took a lot of getting used to, but after tweaking it I managed to look past it. Sadly it looks like they didn't replace the stupid SOB who designed the UI on the first one.

Actually they've already announced here that the PC will have a different UI this time. Here's hoping they are not just doing PR speak and we will just get the thing but with mouse functionality.

 

[aris]

I never had a problem with this. I love shooting at walking slot machines where there's always a slight chance that any mob can drop an epic, this was a great aspect of the Diablo(s) as well.

Yes, but I think diablo (also the second installment) handled the loot in a much more restrained way. Diablo did not constantly throw unique or set items at you, but when they did you were almost sure to get something very solid (after the patches anyway, in the early days of diablo 2 unique and set items were actually useless compared to the rare ones). That made it fun to find unique and set items, not a hassle of inventory management. They did throw some rares at you and even more magic items, but it was nothing even close to the fountain of color-coded weapons that spring out of nearly every monster in borderlands and torchlight.

Actually they've already announced here that the PC will have a different UI this time. Here's hoping they are not just doing PR speak and we will just get the thing but with mouse functionality.

Judging from the feature set, it looks pretty nice. A FOV-slider is not common in this day and age. Hope they follow up on it though!

 

[Gregz]

Actually they've already announced here that the PC will have a different UI this time

Thank God. *crosses fingers*

 

[Gragt]

What killed the first one was Monocause not showing up despite promising he'd be there on time.

 

[sea]

Actually they've already announced here that the PC will have a different UI this time. Here's hoping they are not just doing PR speak and we will just get the thing but with mouse functionality.

I'm pretty sure they said similar things about the original game, how it would be optimized for PC and "not a port" and all that usual bullshit. FOV options are nice, but they're the sort of thing that could have easily been patched in the original as well. Probably would have taken five or ten minutes at most to do. So they can't do that, but they can add in all these Steamworks additions, achievements, matchmaking etc. after the fact, even though that probably took far more effort?

 

[aris]

What killed the first one was Monocause not showing up despite promising he'd be there on time.

wait what?

 

[Mangoose]

Best thing about Borderlands was that all you needed was a Gamespy ID

 

[Damned Registrations]

the other 10% was marginally better than what you already had.

This is the crux of the issue with loot. Playing ToME 2.XX and various mods of it, the game throws so many god damned drops at you at high levels they have area of effect identification spells (which you'll need to cast multiple times after a fight, despite items stacking on tiles) and an in game system that automatically destroys items based on settings you define. You get 15 items guaranteed off a mature dragon, and can run into a dozen of them or an equivalent every other level in the mid-late game.

But even with that retarded amount of loot dropping, I still got excited when artifacts dropped because when you did find an item that wasn't trash, there was a decent chance it was a big fucking upgrade. Early on you get shit like +10 speed rings or boots that literally double your movement and attack speed. At complete fucking random. Later on you're swimming in most stats but you can still get insanely awesome things like vampiric or sentient weapons, or a ring that grants +8 extra attacks or other insane shit.

The joy of loot whoring stems almost entirely from the upgrades being substantial. Even if you only got 1 drop every hour, it'd still be boring as fuck if it only meant a 2% increase in damage.

 

[aris]

In essence we absolutely agree. I prefer it, when few magical items drop, but that is also bad if those few weapons that drop never provide a substantial upgrade compared to what you had before. Now I kind of want to try ToME, it's open source and compilable on linux

 

[Metro]

Also the game comes complete with Day 0 DLC as seen in the Premiere Club: "receive a free download of the all-new Mechromancer character class as soon as she's available. Best to wait for the 75% off GOTY version, methinks.