I’m somewhat sad to say this, but I have decided to cancel my Borderlands pre-order. After learning more about the game, I’m disappointed to discover that it is not going to be a day 1 purchase for me. I thought that this game was going to be Diablo + Fallout 3 with co-op, but it falls very short on the most important end: the Diablo part.
The reasons for its downfall?
1. Millions of randomly generated guns
Marketing and advertising are pushing this as a selling feature, but the biggest drawback that comes out of this is that there is a very minimal amount of unique, non randomly-generated items. For Diablo players, we loved finding Set Items and Unique Items – I did boss runs and planned my characters over specific item drops and loot tables. And the best thing about unique “non-generated” items is that when someone else sees you with it, they know right away you have an awesome weapon. Millions of randomly generated guns means everyone is running around with some random gun so there’s no real sense in a better item – just what you prefer. I couldn’t care less for the yellow items in Diablo with all the random modifiers. Give me something that everyone can respect and actually want!
2. FFA looting
Diablo II was released nearly 10 years ago, and the looting was free-for-all. That meant when a boss died, all the items it dropped just appeared in a pile near its corpse so everyone would inch close as it got close to dying and click whatever they could get like kids going after candy from a broken pinata. It didn’t matter if you couldn’t use the item – you knew someone who could, or you could use it for an alt, or you could trade it for an item you could use, etc. It was barbaric and there was a lot of arguments that ensued over item drops.
Since then, multiplayer action RPGs and even MMORPG’s, have dealt with FFA looting in two ways: rolling for loot in some way or another, or having the item drops from a boss only show up for each particular player. The second option meant that whatever you saw drop was yours – and no one else could see it (Diablo 3 will implement this system). Unfortunately, the developers of Borderlands are still back in the stone-ages and actually take some sadistic delight in seeing Borderlands players fight over loot. Their argument is not to play with loot-stealers, and not to worry about it at all because there are plenty of drops to go around (yeah, right…I’m sure there’s plenty of epic drops to go around -_-). What if you play as the sniper class in Borderlands though? It means you’re further away than anyone else, so the only way you’ll actually be able to get item drops is if the people you play with let you get the items. In any case, this practically closes off public online games since no one needs to really care about anyone other than themself in public matches.
3. No Trading Window
I don’t understand what Gearbox was thinking when they made this game. A number of people considering buying this game are Diablo fans who want to play a FPS-based loot game. Loot is the center of this game! So it boggles my mind why Gearbox decided to not put in a trading window in the game. This means two separate players will have to each drop an item, and then run to the other item to perform a trade. And what happens if one player tries to cheat the other by dropping something stupid? It’s a train wreck all around. In their defense, the developers stated that if it was a heavily requested feature, they would put it into the game via a patch. That’s great, but what does it mean to be heavily requested? Anyone that even is interested in a game like this would want a trade window…
What’s hard to believe that is that while Too Human was critically panned, from a functional standpoint it worked. The actual gameplay could have been better, and there could have been more unique drops instead of randomly generated crap, but at least in Too Human you could set loot distribution rules and there was a trade window. I hate to say it, but Gearbox should have actually taken notes from the way Too Human handled loot. In any case, I’m saying goodbye to my pre-order for Borderlands. Diablo III can’t come soon enough…
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