Op-Ed - Fixing Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel · 8:37pm Mar 17th, 2017
Sometimes those of you who peruse this site may find it easy to forget that I'm actually quite the gamer.
No no, it's true. I've got a game list longer than my arm (and most other arms for that matter) and a backlog that would give an accountant fits. I like video games. Multiple genres, multiple titles, multiple systems. Right now? I'm playing through The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and loving every minute (yes, it is every bit as fantastic a reinvention of an open-world game as the reviews claim).
Anyhow, being a gamer, I've got some favorite series I adore. And one of these is the titular Borderlands series.
Borderlands is an interesting one. Think Mad Max meets Diablo, in an FPS, in a distant Sci-Fi setting, and now throw in a bunch of kooky, dark humor, and you've kind of got the gist of it. Borderlands takes place on an abandoned mining world where (initially at least, since there are now four games in the series) crazed bandits (the descendants of prison convicts who were turned loose when a mining operation up and left) roam the desert landscape alongside monstrous alien life forms, as "Vault Hunters" battle both to try and track down a legendary alien cache of tech rumored to be somewhere.
It gets complicated fast, surprisingly. And there's more to it, but that's the gist of it. Anyway, the result is a fun universe I happen to enjoy with a lot of kooky humor, memorable characters ... and plenty of shooting.
Anyway, what's that got to do with today's post? Well ... today I want to talk about Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. Yes, you read that right. That kooky humor extends to the titles as well.
In any case, I want to talk about TPS—specifically one of the things it got tragically wrong, and how it could have been fixed.
Hey hey, don't click away yet. This thing that I want to talk about? It's a writing problem. After all, this is a writing site. That's most often what I talk about here. So this is writing related. I'm going to discuss what went wrong ... and how the developers of TPS could have avoided it.
Read the rest of this post at Unusual Things
I actually enjoyed the presequel. Playing right now for like the 30th time. With Claptrap no less lol
4460416
Oh, it's fun, don't get me wrong. It just doesn't live up to the rest of the series, IMO, and the inconsistencies with Jack play a very large part of that.
4460418
Yeah true, but a fun game nonetheless. I'm doing a playthrough with handicap. No action skills, only jakobs weapons (except for the ones not made by jakobs) and using claptrap fragtrap tree. Is fun so far.
The 2nd was solid, the pre-sequel i admit to never playing due to what they did with colonial marines as an aliens fan. So to me, this was more about what was written. And that, i agree with. Something i think that helps a good deal. That moment when you can write from a characters pov and think as that one.
Colonial marines, alas...