Lately my brother has been replaying Borderlands 2 again in preparation for the proper third installment in the franchise, using this new mod setup that changes up how the item spawns operate and the quirks and loadouts one can achieve. He's also been hinting that I should give it a go as well, but I have a hard time expressing how long ago that train left the station.
At some point in my gaming hobby, I started to drift away from games where the core meat of the enjoyment was unloading insane amounts of ordinance upon mentally and morally questionable degenerate psychopaths and fine tuning a character loadout to achieve something akin to a ballistic lovecraftian monstrosity, leaving nothing but Armageddon in my wake. Couple this with a story narrative so grim and edgy, and mixed with a dark sense of humor messed up enough to make the writers for late night Cartoon Network wonder what they were on, I bottom line do not find it to be a 100% satisfactory experience. I played through it once, I played through the DLC once, many many years ago. I've had my fill.
With Borderlands 3 looming on the horizon, Borderlands 2 has become a hot topic in streaming circles for content creators cashing in on the hype. They are playing through it multiple times, to get that higher difficulty and play it "as it was meant to be played". I never understood this mindset, submitting myself to repeating the same trodden path again and again to achieve some altered state for maximum enjoyment.
I say this, and as I was typing it, I called myself out as a hypocrite. I play MMO's dominantly these days due to my love of open world exploration and roleplaying. Essentially every character you make, with simply different combat abilities, you are retreading the same steps, the same zones and encounters again and again, to achieve some altered state for maximum enjoyment.
This said, what is the difference? Is it the setting? The story? Am I just so sick and tired of Handsome Jack having been hashed and rehashed as this tragic villain twice now (the Tell Tale game and the Pre-Sequel), that his very name makes me convulse? Maybe it's because I find the characters so grossly unlikable. Most of them are criminals who've done things that make Handsome Jack really seem like the valiant hero and savior he makes himself out to be ad nauseum throughout the game.
Ah yes, that's it. I never found a character I could honestly connect with. All of the characters are strange parodies of tropes, coupled with an almost forced attempt by the games writers to make them repugnant, but also endearing.
Borderlands, the original, kept it simple. These characters you played as were blank slates, with a character in the beginning giving a brief blurb to their background and motivations. But also, I could embody them mentally as I saw fit, that Roleplayer inside me kicking in, much in the same way why Link and Gordon Freeman are strictly silent protagonists; It makes it easier and more enjoyable for the player to inflect themselves upon them, become them, in a sense.
Borderlands 2 throws this concept out the window. Now everyone has a backstory to explore and a voice. It's less intimate, less personal. And I honestly wish Lilith would shut the hell up. They took characters I moderately liked in the original, and turned them all into renegade bullshit munching robin-hood wannabes.
But no one plays these games for the character dynamics and chemistry, or the narrative. That's all secondary and serves as a reason to explore more dangerous environments and obtain bigger and more volatile weaponry. It's not about saving Pandora, or seeking the secrets of the Vaults. It's about the sound a gun makes when you pull the trigger and watching your enemies whittle away to nothing in a hailstorm of bullets and explosions. Everything else, like Moxxie's provocative appearance (of which I am a fan, by the way), is simply decoration.
At least that's how I feel about it.
