Actual balance.
I’ve been playing through the game again and I’ve just realised that most of the time I’m simply not having fun. I’m stuck in a Skinner Box with a good story and that’s why I’m playing. I want to follow through with the characters and I want to know more about the setting, but every time I find myself maybe having some actual fun, the gameplay takes a dump on my face.
Stuff like throwing endless piles of Buzzards at me with little to no cover isn’t fun, it’s frustrating. Fighting Dukino’s Mom and her utterly crushing DPS and oh my now she’s breaking all the cover isn’t fun, it’s frustrating. Fighting through hordes of Loaders in Hero’s Pass so a Hyperion Hawk can appear out of nowhere and effortlessly two shot me with a rapid firing, triple shot RPG launcher at sniping rifle range isn’t fun. It’s frustrating. Because how am I supposed to respond to that?
It wouldn’t matter so much if you didn’t have a death penalty, but you do. The result is that the game will basically just rob you and laugh about it because far, far too often someone is operating on a broken mental loop that challenge equals fun, right? So suddenly going from full everything to double digit health in literally half a second because you’re not an omniscient savant will be fun, right? Right?
No. No it isn’t. The game has two modes: Really Easy and Killed Immediately. That’s…not how a game like this should play. Throw in completely random loot so you potentially also don’t even have a tool in your box that you want and need, leaving you feeling like you’re being screwed by the game mechanics again, and you’ve got a recipe for frustrating challenge instead of fun challenge.
If you want to make a game where players can die practically instantly, then you need to actually design your game around that conceit. You need to slow down the pace, encourage tactical options, use of cover and movement with effective level design, and have fewer enemies with an actual, functioning AI. You make F.E.A.R. Borderlands and Borderlands 2 don’t do any of this.
What it actually sets itself up as is basically Serious Sam The Single Player MMO. You get hordes of dumb AI that are hurled at you from every direction in ridiculous set pieces. The entire thrust of Borderlands level design, let alone the rest of the game design, looks entirely like that of a big, dumb action game where you massacre billions of idiotic healthsacks and generally go around being a total badass in a universe where you have regenerating health and headbutt your way through clouds of bullets because reality is boring and power fantasies are awesooooooooooooome! There’s a God damn ‘Gunzerker’. A massive, screaming Psycho.
And then it kills you instantly like Solid Snake caught outside a box because herp derp what the hell is gameplay consistency. You get piss poor gameplay whiplash where you’re being told to be awesome and have fun and the world is crazy and silly and not serious and I’m shooting bandits in the head with a gun called the Lady Fist and now I’m instantly dead and down a huge pile of money. Great. Thanks.
A game like this should be killing you relatively slowly. It should be attritional, and a lot of the abilities even exemplify that with regenerative kill skills and the like. It should give you time to actually react, time to throw out those crazy powers, time to switch weapons because it’s loot based and built around different weapons types…but it doesn’t. It’s all or nothing.
