Tuesday, 18 September 2012

Borderlands - A look back

It was fall of 2009, and at that time, I wasn’t actively keeping up with gaming news outside of the few games that I was still playing.  Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 was about a month away, and I had heard from some friends that Borderlands has lots potential.  With some time left till MW2 released, I got the game and started playing.  The controls were nice and familiar for people who’ve played first person shooter games, and the button layout was pretty much the same as Call of Duty.  So it was very easy to adjust to.  

I played solo for maybe the first few missions and things were ok to me.  I later then get an invite to join a couple friends in their game, and the nice thing about Borderlands is, as long as the quest is available to you, completing it in co-op would complete it for the single player side of your game.  Great! Now I can get help with the missions, and have someone to talk to so I’m not bored.   

 A few nights in a row of playing co-op made it quite clear to me that this game is a winner.  We finished the first playthrough, but I was only at around level 32-34.  At that point, I was able to find my first combustion hellfire SMG.  This is probably the best gun in the game, at its respective levels.  This gun is what got me hooked on the loot hunt of Borderlands.  It made me wonder, what else is out there?  How crazy can some of these items be?

So we decided to start the new playthrough, since the only way to get the better guns is to play the higher difficulty playthrough.  In that one month, I was able to get my Siren to level 50.  Unfortunately for Borderlands at the time, Call of Duty came out, and a hardware failure on my old xbox lead me to purchase the MW2 edition console, and unable to recover my save file, I didn’t turn back to Borderlands for quite some time.

About a year goes by, and I hear about the expansions that have been released for Borderlands, and the increase in level cap, but I was too hooked on Call of Duty at that point.  It was not until a few months before the release of the last DLC that I picked the game back up.  We were starting to get a bit bored of Call of Duty Black Ops, and one of the guys just picked up the game for the first time.  So I got back into it.  I downloaded the DLC that was available, and was surprised at how well the extra content was made.  They weren’t just small additions to the game.  They could almost be standalone games with the amount of content added.  News of another DLC also kept us coming back to Pandora some more.

Since I had to start a new character again, I once again picked the Siren, because I enjoyed having a stronger elemental focus.  But also, I ended up playing three of the four characters this time around, and reached max level for each one.  Doing countless knoxx runs to try to find the best guns, and eventually “finding” enough gear to beat Crawermax on a consistent basis.  Tons of fun was had with this game, and lots of epic lols.

The game is great, and although we wish we could have more than four players together in a single game at once, I understand that it would really mess up the loot hunt.  Given that the loot is shared, it technically would kill the loot hunt if only 1 of the players could get it, although let’s not mention the not so legit way to share gear.  The characters, the script of the game is fantastic, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, which is a nice change in pace in gaming.  I look forward to getting back to Pandora in Borderlands 2.  If you haven’t got it already, go out and buy it.

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