PixlBit

Greetings old friends, new friends, and distinguished guests. Today the Guilty Pleasures series returns for your reading pleasure, and this time the topic is the 2009 space-western FPS with RPG elements, Borderlands. As a tradition I usually start out a Guilty Pleasures blog by giving you this tagline:

"We shouldn't be afraid to admit that sometimes we fall in love with games that aren't AAA titles, games that aren't popular, or games that aren't actually very good. Here lies a story of such forbidden love."

I will still be using that tagline in future installments because it's short, simple, and has the phrase "forbidden love" in it. However, that tagline is just a tradition and doesn't mean that every game I highlight is bad, unpopular, or obscure. In reality this series is more about showcasing games that I have a lot of problems with, but still adore. Now that you have proper context, enjoy the blog, kupo!

I used the Siren class during my first playthrough

First I'll cover the problems I have, then before I wrap this up I'll give you the reason why it's dear to me. I've owned this game for a while but only recently finished the story missions. BTW, I use the term "story" loosely and with very low standards. When the game ended and I watched the credits roll, I had a lot of conflicting thoughts. I asked myself, "What the hell was this game suppose to be about again?" The final sequence of the game sees you opening an ancient vault, just to see a giant female reproductive organ come out of nowhere and begin swinging at you with its fallopian tubes, and spitting placenta.

The Destroyer doesn't want to be treated as a second-class citizen

My description of the end-boss may be disgusting, funny, or sexy depending on your disposition I guess, but look at the thing. It comes complete with a vertical mouth akin to the labia, and a nerve center above the labia akin to the clitoris (the place you shoot the monster to get maximum damage). Anyways, the boss takes up one half of a roughly rectangular encounter space and you run around shooting it till you save the universe. You save the universe from a larger-than-life labia and clitoris, aptly named "The Destroyer"? Being a supporter of equalism and civil liberties, how am I suppose to absorb this imagery? If the character artists at Gearbox were trying to make a statement, I'm not sure if I should be offended or supportive. As I watched the credits I sighed and knew this game was fucking dumb and the story was pulled out of a hat. But be that as it may, once I got back to the main menu, all I wanted to do was start a new game with a new character! I'll explain why in a minute.

Not only is the story awful, but the way you interact with non-player-characters is the least creative way you could possibly design into a game. The quests in the game are basically fetch-quests set up like an MMO, and the way you interact with quest-givers isn't unlike an old dungeon crawler from decades past. While games like Mass Effect and Skryim, for better or worse, try to make character interactions a little more organic or cinematic, Borderlands is a modern AAA game willing to give you an old school, voiceless, disconnected text box with a bullet point in it. The developer Gearbox tried to give the NPCs some pizazz by donning comical names and funky outfits on them, but at the end of the day all the characters in the game are lifeless aside from Claptrap.

Obviously, one amazing saving grace of the game is shooting people in the face and setting them on fire. Duh

Anatomical imagery and lifeless world aside, Borderlands ends up being a blast to play because of the gameplay loop that I'm addicted to. Similar to some old RPGs of the past, this game might have a stupid story and inconsequential character interactions, but you don't play those game for story anyways, do you? What keeps me playing for hours is wandering around new expansive areas, opening chests to find loot, shooting enemies and seeing immediate feedback, gaining experience points, and upgrading my character to be stronger in combat. You are always getting stronger even if your just in a field somewhere shooting a random skag or bandit. The game gives you the sandbox, and it's up to you explore it so that you can find enemies to kill, gain the resulting experience, get stronger, and find more enemies to challenge your steadily increasing skill set and attributes.

At the core of the design, Borderlands accomplishes the proverbial and repeatable "30 seconds of fun" by giving you entertaining gunfights. Built onto that first-person-shooter core, is a host of RPG elements that allow you control over your abilities and diversity in combat. This is a game focused on combat gameplay and all the gameplay loops are built to give you experience points and loot to make you a better combatant.

In contrast, a fellow action game with RPG elements like Mass Effect is a character-focused experienced. When I'm on the Normandy and the former Citadel security officer Garrus tells me during an interactive dialogue-wheel cinematic about his hatred of a murderous doctor who escaped on his watch and avoided paying for his crimes, it makes me want to know more about the story between Garrus and the fugitive doctor he seeks. In Mass Effect when I acquire a quest like that, I don't think about experience points and loot, I think about characters. In Borderlands when I come across a bounty board and load 10 new quests into my queue, I don't see them as opportunities to get to know people, I see them as new ways to gain experience points, leading to an awesome level-up. Again, it's like an MMO, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's many different ways to make RPGs, and I love both a character-focused effort like Mass Effect and a loot-focused effort like Borderlands.

There's a lot of inventory management as well as number and percentage comparison in this game, and I love being able to cozy up to comfortable RPG concepts

 If you wanted to sum up Borderlands by saying it's a solid modern shooter with some old RPG tropes built on top of it, I would agree with you, only as long as I'm able to chime in and say, "And it's awesome!" This game became quite popular and was received well, so I have no peer pressure or sociological reason to feel guilty about loving it. The reason why it's a guilty pleasure is because even with all these problems, I'm starting new playthroughs, spending dozens of hours in the game, and it's keeping me from playing much better games like Dark Souls! And with that, I'll bring this to a close. I hope you enjoyed this entry in my Guilty Pleasures series. Relative to when you're reading this, have a good night or day!