Some things I don’t care for in Borderlands:

Backpack Upgrades – why is this an item I have to use? Why can’t it simply give me a message saying your inventory space has been increased as opposed to me having to go into my inventory and use the upgrade? Seems like an unnecessary step. I mean, unlocking weapon slots isn’t an item you use.

Unlocking Weapon Slots – why are half the weapon slots locked at the beginning? This doesn’t make any sense. What’s the purpose in restricting the number of weapons I can quickslot? Imagine if Fallout 3 restricted the number of weps you could assign to the d-pad. Having more weapon slots isn’t about making your character more powerful; it’s about giving the player convenience. Titan Quest had a similar issue, where after completing two quests you’re rewards with extra inventory space; the extra stash space I can forgive because you had to buy it. So essentially, put a price tag on extra space instead of handing it out as a quest reward.

Bruisers – heavy-type characters/units that force you to change the weight you put on your priorities; perhaps you want to unload everything into the heavy first or maybe you prefer to kill off the smaller opponents so you can deal with the tank in isolation. But the Bruisers in Borderlands don’t look like heavies. Well, they do in that they are bigger than everyone else, but all they wear are pants. I tire of games that have bullet sponge baddies, and it aggravates me more when their indication is simply thick bigness. Put some fucking tank plating on these motherfuckers or something. Just because you have more muscle doesn’t mean you’re bulletproof. This is just lazy design.

Untouchable Quest Items – this is just insanity. Send me off on fetch quests, I accept this as a game trope. But send me back to the same area over and over? Gimme a fucking break.

I’ve always wanted to play a Diablo-type game set in a gunpowder world.

The story of Borderlands – does it really matter? I’m sure the quest descriptions are fine, but that’s not engaging me; I see it simply as information, unimportant since it’s not the facts that take me to the objective. If this game had a minimap on the HUD, I wouldn’t know what the game looks like.

The whole bazillion weapons aspect doesn’t bother me. After all this is a randomized item-drop game, and with this kind of play, a large variety is best. That’s the whole point. You want gear that’s different than what your friends have. You go on the same adventures but you want different rewards; maybe to brag, maybe to define your char. I’m not playing this game for the story or well-structured single-player experience. I want progressively better gear to kill mobs.

And while the randomness of the drops is entertaining Pandora is not, mainly because the world is static. I can always count on those three bandits that hop the fence just outside Fyrestone; that locker opposite the skag arena always has weapons with requirements greater than my character level. Sure Diablo 2 had fixtures, but their maps always had a randomized layout and to a lesser degree different monsters; seeing the same tile sets never bothered me, probably because from a technical point it’s more efficient to play with the arrangement of the map than have a giant catalog of cycling tile sets.

Diablo 2 had a flat map, pockets of baddies whose locations were randomized. In Borderlands, though the map is much larger and varied in elevation, you will always find the same pockets in the same areas. Farming consists mostly of opening chests. A baddie can drop anything; a weapons chest will always give you guns and ammo.

Diablo Diablo Diablo.

I’m also not fond of the vehicle. I do appreciate its purpose as a fast travel option – I don’t think a town portal scroll would work well since progression is not a straight line, one area to the next and no reason to look back. I just don’t like having to drive to a destination and then get out to fight. Which is strange since while I also got tired of Far Cry 2’s I didn’t mind the GTAs’. Perhaps it had something to do with the former being an FPS; perhaps it had something to do with the same issue as Borderlands, in that, there were always outposts on the roads that always had baddies, and while you could sometimes drive past them, it was always best to kill them. Nothing in GTA consistently blocked your path to the next mission other than traffic and the law, but nothing ever pulled you over without a reason.

Too bad. As an uncommon occurrence racial profiling could be entertaining.

And because I’ve started a playthrough with coop and everything is shared, I’ve been having to buy ammo from the vendors. When I have 0/1020 SMG rounds and can only buy in quantities of 72, that’s a lot of clicking that could be simplified to “click here to refill entire count.” I mean, come on – have you ever stopped short of buying all the ammo you could carry and say “that’s enough for me, I like being one clip light”?

I had fun the first time around. I just don’t see myself going through another playthrough because even though the loot will get better, killing the same type and number of baddies and navigating the static world are just tiresome.