#3

My wife and I are sticking with it until the servers are shut down or we get tired of it.

3 Likes
#4

I am sticking with it to the end. I don’t know how many times I’ve said that already but I’ll keep repeating it.

3 Likes
#5

In 2080, they have “Battleborn Day” in the Google corporate enclave.
It’s so much fun, everyone forgets participation is mandatory.

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#6

“Truly you are misery’s poet.” -Nova

There’s supposedly a good body of scholarly research out there already that treats video games as another medium for artistic expression, etc. Put it alongside literature, theater, cinema, etc. It’s not a big leap.

The big props go to developer/publisher teams that start an original story from scratch, rather than just A.) building on a pre-existing idea (Mechwarrior, Robotech, Pokemon, etc.), or B.) avoiding story-telling altogether and going for the mindless thing (though I adored BF2, it did this).

Man, that’s a HUGE risk to take. Let’s say that BB had the perfect gameplay thing nailed down. Smooth, crisp, reliable connections, and JUST the right mix of various elements, that everyone and their brother would want to play. But say the story sucked. That could tank the game right out of the gate. Did GBX decide to forego the story and just build a mindless shoot-em-up? NOPE. They made a game that tells a story, a whole new story. They started a new franchise (not doing NEARLY as well as Borderlands, etc., but still).

That takes a set of nuts the size of church bells, hanging your payroll and expenses for a couple years of development work and voice acting on a brand new story.

I mean, make another Star Wars movie, and people will flock to it. It bears the name; it will make a half-billion dollars worldwide, EASY. It could be complete trash (eps. 1-3), and it’ll still rake in ridiculous amounts of money. And you can beat that dead horse back to life (Star Trek has HOW many motion pictures so far, including now THREE since reboot?!), and still sell copy on the franchise name alone. You could probably get away with it with Borderlands now (isn’t there a BL film in the works?). But Battleborn is a whole new, fresh, risky story.

Well done, Gearbox. Well done…

1 Like
#7

I’ve said it in a few other places, but the polish on Battleborn is amazing. Listen to what the characters say to themselves, to each other. Listen to the dialog - I have NEVER seen a game with multiple sets of dialog for the same mission - this one has like 5-6 per mission, easy, and when you catch some of the genius - let’s say the Loader Arm Fist Bump in the second mission - you can’t help but smile.

I’m on PC and disappointed about matchmaking and the amount of players I have to play with, just like everyone else. I believe there are a few player/skill imbalances, just like everyone else. In fact - no game will EVER please even most people when it comes to balance, unfortunately. The most balanced competitive game of all time is probably Starcraft and Protoss are always whining about Zerg and such - it’s just the way it is. But I believe Battleborn has done really well in that department.

Are there a few glitches? Sure. The Sentinel boss can get bugged, monsters can load in 5 feet off the ground, monsters can get stuck in boxes (like near the Fist Bump arms in Void), clicking on items in your inventory page is wonky, Ghalt’s gun gets an extra invisibility buff every now and again, but none of these things make the game unplayable. We’ve all played terribly glitchy games.

Everything in perspective. Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill and all that.

Here Comes the Hook!! Kudos, Gearbox.

2 Likes
#8

“What, you egg! Young fry of treachery” (He stabs him)

-First Murderer, in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

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#9

You should look at this company named Bioware. Different dialog based on party composition and even events based upon who is present is sorta their thing. You’d love it if you’ve never seen this type of thing before.

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#10

i think he means outside of party composition. sure, theres one or two lines that are static aside from your party (voids edge again) but i find that the most frail part of the writing in the level because its so broad. the REST of the interchangeable lines in the game may change depending on who’s in your party, but they more or less make your playthrough of the level like an alternate universe. your choice isnt the end all, be all of the dialogue…the characters drive themselves through various scenarios basically ‘of their own free will’ though we know its not, it feels that way.

also, im personally not fond at all of bioware’s writing and dialogue choices. personal preference probably mostly, but their writing also has different aims. what they do is a different beast that has been tackledby many before…what gbx has done is different enough that i also join in in saying ive never seen the likes of it before.

2 Likes
#11

Very much this. In Bioware games the voicelines feel a lot more predetermined and set. If trigger A is reached and condition B is met then you get voiceline C. In BB it feels a lot less static, the conversations flow naturally between the characters and I love how they sometimes outright ignore the player!

I’m a great fan of Bioware games personally, but the random conversations are on a completely different level in BB.

#12

Agree and disagree. Games are art (mostly… this is the company that brought us Duke Nukem Forever though :dukejk:). Battleborn is up there with the best in my own opinion. I like the quirky, stylised graphics, I think there’s a lot of powerful characterisation, the script is superbly written, and the lore (if you can unlock the damn things) offer poignant moments as well as humour. I wouldn’t be surprised if I keep playing it until the varelsi destroy the servers :upside_down:

Better than Shakespeare? There I must disagree, though I don’t scoff at the comparison, and not because I think Battleborn is bad, but because I unironically consider Shakespeare the literary embodiment of God. https://youtu.be/qNDWBWFrpjM

In terms of the way scholarly research treats video games, there is still work to be done on getting their significance fully acknowledged. Video games are still seen as being one-dimensional or existing just for capitalist gratification by some academics. The idea that a work of art can actually be produced by a corporation for profit, not just a starving artist in a garret, is quite hard for some people to believe (and to be honest crap like microtransactions doesn’t help). Both games and their reception are making progress though. Battleborn deserves recognition - a good post, @LinkZeppeloyd! :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#13

Ya Battleborn isn’t the author of the single most significant piece of linguistic creativity in the history of the English language (For those who didn’t know it, Hamlet is the oldest source for literally some 5-600 words in the English language, meaning there is no older document in existence that uses these words. It also contains the first functional shift for another 500 or so words (meaning the first time a word was used say as a verb, not a noun).

So ya, Battleborn isn’t greater than Shakespeare.

#14

You are literally describing Dragon Age: Inquisition right here. But I’m going to let it drop since it seems you feel strongly about this.

#15

ah, i never made it to inqisition. played the first two but not the third yet.

#16

Well. Said. Sir. tips hat

#17

if any of you are looking for artful games allow me to recommend some.

-Kentucky Route Zero (and lucky you! Act IV is coming out in the coming months, its been 2.5 years in the making! If you get the game now you can finish the first three acts just in time for act four to come out!)
-A little rpg game called LISA
-Playdead’s Inside (a newer game, but so perfectlly made and an absolute gem in my opinion. I dont normally platinum games, but I went back through and 100% this one.)
-Primordia (for you point and click lovers)
-Deadbolt (just because it’s F*cking amazing gameplay/nice story)

Then! Just in case you are still interested in amazing works of art I would recommend the following books:
-Goethe’s The Sufferings of a Young Werther (this is a really serious piece about love and human emotion. Very few things like this book exist. It is something that inspires actual emotion, actual FEELING. and it is certainly worth it to read in one sitting. This is, in my opinion, one of the greatest works of all time. Would recomend)
-Goethe’s Faust (just a great thought provoker, if you do buy this make sure you get the Walter Kaufman translation, it is by far the most pristine and flawless translation)
-Description of a struggle (Short story by Kafka, absolute insanity but provides a good base for thoughtful thinking)
-Fontenelle’s Dialogues of the dead (a great read if you read it one section at a time.)

EDIT: THE FOURTH ACT FOR KENTUCKY ROUTE ZERO DROPPED LIKE 20 MINUTES AGO! HOLY SH*T THIS IS NEWS!!!

1 Like
#18

It’s worth saying too that Shakespeare created so much of the writing that would come after him, as well as language, including popular culture, including Battleborn…

I was just playing a match with Kelvin and was delighted to hear him give a line about being a king of infinite space, which is a quote from the Folio edition of Hamlet (waits hopefully for someone to raise the textual differences between the three copies of Hamlet available… ok just me :stuck_out_tongue:):

“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a
king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” (II.2)

One of my favourite Hamlet lines, so I felt a little bubble of delight when Mr K growled it :grin:

@skwizardkid It’s a while since I read Faust - I remember finding Part 1 brilliant but the second part totally lost me. I must read it all again with more guidance and hope I have grown wiser in the meantime…

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#19

Honestly in part two the only parts that are important and meaningful is the first and fifth act. It was Goethe’s attempt at greek prose and form in acts two, three and four (except the very last conversation in four). And i’ll agree the first part is so fantastically writen and just feels amazing to read through. Every line has so much meaning! Kaufman says in the introduction that only fools try to force meaning to Goethe’s words, instead Goethe’s words LEAD one to different thoughts, which is totally true in Faust. I just read through it looking to have fun with it and it gave me so much more lol

1 Like
#20

Heh. I have a Bachelor’s in English Lit, and after years of reading Shakespeare, I find him severely overrated. His writing can be beautiful, but most (not all) of his plays’ plots are the equivalent of modern-day Reality TV and his sonnets are deceptively mediocre. I do realize, however, that I’m in the extreme minority on this one! :wink: I just always half-expect a bunch of zombies or a chainsaw-wielding redneck to pop out right after one of the characters shanks his cousin for walking in on him getting to know his best buddy’s girl.

The topic has now been slain! :innocent:

#21

Battleborn may not be the most significant, but “significant” is subjective. Ultimately, on a basic human level, Shakespeare (Bill or “BS”) did what GBX is now doing. Creating something which other humans can share for entertainment, or for catharsis, or for storytelling. BS had to operate within certain constraints. He had candlelight, a pen, and a stage. And whatever he felt inside himself, he found a way to share it with other people. And we have gotten immense enjoyment out of it ever since. My guess is that would make ol’ BS happy. It’s probably what he set out to do.

Things are different now, and GBX has computers. They have constraints too, just like BS. The constraints are different, they are the constraints of our time. Corporate involvement, the profit motive, government watchfulness, Comcast, and the list goes on. Yet through all of those obstacles, against all CoDs and UBIs… we have Boldur. We have ISIC. We have Kleese. The very basic thing which GBX has done, and which BS did long ago, is communicating a feeling. The ability to do this successfully is, in my opinion, magic. Actual magic. Oral storytelling, writing books, plays, poems… and now games. I love books and plays and movies, but I can’t play them. I can’t hop on a game of Macbeth and REK a Shakespeare Dev in Meltdown. Every time I play BB I learn something new about it.

I suppose art is highly subjective, and I would never object to someone liking BS more than BB. I just wanted to tell GBX that for my purposes, the story they’ve told and the game they’ve made has given myself and some of my friends a great deal of joy. I respect and enjoy scholarly debate on what art is, and what art counts as important. But I know myself, and to me there’s no question that gaming is a new art form. It’s only just begun, and GBX had the creative juice to make this game happen despite those darn constraints. I hope that others see that as well, and that this particular candle doesn’t blow out before it has a chance to light up our lives a little longer.

4 Likes
#22

Glad it’s not just me. (Russian Literature–I actually LOVE Turgenev.)