I almost never talk about Borderlands, which is kind of weird. It's got a big place on the market, and I still remember the hype around the very original. It released surrounding talk about how awesome it's infinite gun system was, how colorful and humorous the world was to explore, and there was even this funny little video IGN made based around it's hype. I got my hands on the original fairly late, but once I did, I was addicted. I loved it! I lost so much time exploring, looting, trial and error fights, taking up quests, and laughing at so many hilarious bits. However I never finished it, and kind of chalked it up to the fact that it was a huge game and I wasn't finishing plenty of things. 2nd one came around, was funnier, a slight bit improved, but as time has gone on I've found myself losing the gravity of appeal, and never wound up buying the 2nd until just recently. I ignore the pre-sequel and Tales spin-off entirely before. Only just now am I getting the Handsome collection while it was on sale (finally!). Here's the thing though: I know a big part of what went wrong.
Over the course of time, loot & shoot games have become a bigger deal. Destiny happened, Ubisoft stuck their hand in with The Division, Shadow Warrior 2 went that direction, and you could argue Fallout was sort of a grittier slower solo idea of the same vision. So it's clear people love this sort of thing, especially online with pairs, and even Borderlands has catered to them over time. So I feel it might be important for me to disclose that I'm still a solo player, and I wish for the series to return to ensuring gamers of that type are still enjoying things, and to NEVER go the Destiny/Division route of forcing it onto a stupid server system. I also don't know if my main suggestion will involve hurting or helping the multiplayer concept, so keep it all in mind. Now then, let's talk about the bazillion guns...
So what I found really help me back, was all the vocal number-crunching going on. Look, I get it, you're a loot and shooter game based on finding awesome loot, and it's best done through a random and awesome system so you can keep generating dozens of guns. However, I know I'm not the only person who feels the killing factor of this game is shooting up a room full of bad guys, and then having to scrape and turn over every piece of that room and compare numbers just to make sure you get it right. Some people will even go a step further, and say the combat itself takes a hit for it for having these padded out scaled up enemies that soak in bullets. I do not agree with that complaint, but it also exists as an example that maybe the numbers are in a little too much control here. However my main issue is just all the damn time where I have to sit there and compare guns, making double sure I've got my best loot, and that the stuff I sell is good, what to drop in a full inventory, etc. It's all the chore of an RPG busywork, stuck in the middle of a cool and quirky action packed chaotic world. It makes no sense with the thrill, and yet it's the most obvious and plain way to establish the selling mechanics of this game. So let's consider re-evaluating that a bit.
In the most recent game right now, these are the factors going into a weapon:
- Weapon type
- Damage
- Rate of fire
- Reload speed
- Capacity
- Scoped/sights (not actually stated, but a present feature to consider)
- Specials, which can include: Elements, elemental chance, critical hit damage, reload based perk, etc.
Now on a list, it doesn't look like anything to end a game. However keep in mind that this is the next biggest priority to shooting things. Nearly every single one of these is numbered, drops frequently, and it's usually beneficial to keep higher-tier boss loot stuff anyway so a whole bunch of it winds up being crap. When you're slowed down looking at each and every damn number, stat, and test-firing close calls, not to mention the weird lesser-described perks of elemental damage and multi-bullet shots, you've got a crapton of sorting to do with this. Oh and don't point to the green/red arrows as a fix, they just guide the eye a bit. If you've got a gun that gives you 1+ point of damage, but takes away your entire magazine, arrows won't help; You'll still be eyeing those numbers to measure. It's a blatant chore, and anyone trying to argue "it's about finding a reward" is ignoring how poorly done of a reward it is. You can still go and find your rare weapons with super stats, it's just that these stats are stupidly drawn out and a waste of time.
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| Less numbers, more of this |
Now let's talk about simplifying numbers. Rate of fire, and reload speed do not need to be strictly numbers down to some decimal point. You can set these things up to simple pieces: Slow, medium, and fast. Or to be even more player friendly, you can have a gun actually list it's style of shooting. You can break an assault rifle down into: Semi-auto, Burst, automatic, wind-up (minigun style), and custom. Custom would be a great addition where the player can set the pace of the rifle among basic functions, and could be a rare feature. On top of this, you can set functions like making scopes only go with burst and semi-auto functions so they're not riffing off of some crazy number function and slowly making it in. I could even suggest, just so you don't cram the game full of crappy semi-autos at the start again (it defeats the whole purpose of progressing from a pistol to an assault rifle), that you even leave semi-auto out of assault rifles, and instead include it among sniper rifles as a lower scope chance. That way, a guy expecting good assault rifles will always get them, but that niche sniper player will still enjoy a simple and accurate semi-auto rifle for picking off enemies. Besides, for the reload speed, do you really need to measure that by the exact time? Just take your average range of slow and fast speeds, and compress it down into three differences, or have it be an invisible factor that balances with the capacity (bigger mag takes longer).
Finally, just stop making gamers do the math for some of your extra features. Like if an assault rifle fires two bullets close to each other, stop lazily labeling it as 11x2, so that it always compares weirdly with a normal gun firing at 21 damage. If you're going to keep that weird system in place, at least calculate it for the player. Like have it say 11x2 (22 total) in the box. This'd be especially great for shotguns that naturally have multiple shots. Then there's the "consumes two bullets" thing. Why!? No really, just why? Don't tell me it's a counter-balance, because that's what the capacity is there for. To slap that on, and pretend the gun still has 20 shots in the capacity is a blatant lie. Just label it for what it really is, stop slowing the player down with these damn mind-games and set your parameters to balance the shit out right instead of overcomplicating it.
Okay, finally: Learn from Doom and R&C, and simply your pick-ups a bit. You don't 15 crates in every area, shoved into the far corners, filled with nothing but pocket change and ammo that you have to manually grab. Give the player automatic pickups for what they need, compensate more out of enemy kills and how well they killed them (maybe hitting criticals to a certain threshhold within an enemies life reward health or ammo more often?). Then when you're done with all the good loot that you do have, you should be able to just go and sell your junk. Unfortunately, these games only have a favorites, not a junk. That could also help. With that said, let's recap:
- Take the numbers out of RoF, shield recharge, and Reload speeds. We don't need to be measuring them so strictly. Just tell us if it's fast or slow, break it up into simple categories instead of fine numerical mathmatics.
- Stop giving us lame assault rifles that don't function properly, or have horrible inconveniences like a scoped low-accuracy situation. That's just not fun.
- Cut down or re-work the distracting stats, like multi-bullets not showing their real damage output, or how for some stupid reason there's both a "consumes X shots" and it's unaccounted on the capacity.
- Make ammo pick-ups simpler to get, and less cluttered around the map. It's incredibly tedious as of now, and could be simplified down like most games have it where you simply find ammo when you need it, or get it off of kills or special kills.
- Give us a junk/sell category to put things in.
Sound good? Good. I'd like to think this is all reasonable, and still keeps the loot present. I'm also still open to any good addition they can think of, like say an anti-gravity element, or some manual customization like being able to buy your own mods and equip stuff like a scope yourself to a gun. I think things like that can be done well, alongside my changes, and still make for a fun loot and shoot experience. You'll still be playing with your friends, collecting loot, and fighting crazy enemies with crazy weapons. It's just that you won't have to slow down and read a page of stats for each new trinket you find, nor dig through all the rubbish cans lying around and holding down the pickup button on everything to make sure you fill up on what you can. It's time to move on from this OCD trip the game encourages, which is discouraging to the general game, and instead to streamline it so you're more in the moment to moment action. I'd like to think Borderlands could benefit a lot from working on it's general interface and loot system like that a good bit.
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