So… Borderlands is a game. People think of it as an RPG, a shooter & action game, and it received(s) a whole lot of praise. But…. it’s not very good, and here’s why.

RPGs are games that include both roleplaying, and some sort of persistently developing character that is meaningful in some way. If you can RP a character seriously in borderlands without being broken by the lack of immersion, I salute you. As for the development of your character – you certainly level up, but what does that really get you? You can assign stat points into a couple of different skill trees, but all of those assigned points merely result in an incremental number increase in damage dealt, damage taken, and a modification of things you can already do (i.e. shoot people in the face, but now with .7% more accuracy!). Austin, I think you mentioned in the podcast that it’s a FPS diablo? How could you possibly make that comparison? Diablo, even the third game which removes some of the choices in character development has a litany of different, interesting, and cool skills to use in a variety of circumstances. Borderlands has one skill. ONE skill per class. Any other game you throw down between Dungeon Siege, Torchlight and other typical dungeon delver game comes with a lot of cool stuff every character can do, but Borderlands could not have been more vanilla coming to character development, and I don’t see how that helps it succeed as an RPG.

Sure, I guess you get a lot of loot in the form of randomized weapons, but here’s where the game starts to fail as a shooter. None of the weapons are particularly satisfying to fire, the sound design for the weapon effects is.. tame, and pedestrian. It makes a big difference if you take a gun like the shotgun in Doom 3 & how dissatisfying it is, and take something like say, the MG3 from Battlefield Bad Company 2 – it makes a real impact on how enjoyable the game is. Also, since the game is largely mired in statistics, you find yourself sometimes with an underpowered gun, railing off what seems like a mountain of ammunition to kill something that looks the same as something you killed very easily 20 minutes before. Woohoo, it has the most guns in a game ever made – The 2nd & third Matrix movies had lots of guns too, but I guess they were pretty good….

The art style & music are more subjective, so I don’t really have much to say about it. Personally I disliked them.

As for funny, maybe I’m used to thinking of funny games like the Monkey Island series of games or “Sam & Max Hit the Road”. It’s possible I was in poor humour because of the rest of the features that fell flat, but it definitely didn’t strike me as a well written, funny & entertaining game.

When you play a game that is essentially a giant grind (most MMOs, Diablo, Torchlight, etc.) the success of the game banks on keeping the player under the illusion that they’re doing something different. A fedex quest at the beginning of the game is the same as one in the middle or at the end, but you need to implement features that allow the player to *feel* like something is different. If you start out simply bashing monsters’ skulls in with a hand axe, then you’re jumping about the battlefield, using shouts, transitioning to whirlwinds or unleashing arcane power in waves of untold destruction – it helps you forget that you’re doing more or less the exact same thing you were doing at the very beginning of the game. Borderlands couldn’t deliver that with its ho-hum shooter mechanics, poor development trees, and lackluster story.

Borderlands sucked. Hard.