As I mention in today’s episode, Borderlands 2 is a personal favorite of mine. A couple of friends and I used to play every week for several hours. Overall, we completed the game at least 4 times that I can think of, including the DLC packs, and we got pretty darn far in the end-game raid. I’ve clocked a few hundred hours in Borderlands 2 across all my playthroughs and it’s probably one of my most played games ever.
While I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of Gearbox Software, something about the humor and mechanics of Borderlands has grabbed me since the beginning. I think shooters are fine but I love RPGs. To me, RPG mechanics in a shooter is absolutely perfect. I also love Gearbox’s mentality of “who cares about game balance as long as it’s fun”. Getting to find absolutely broken combos in Borderlands 2 was one of the reasons we kept going back. Each level up felt exciting because we would get crazy new abilities that would change the game. But then the game hit a difficulty spike and we’d have to rework our game yet again. It was the perfect balance of feeling like we were growing without the game becoming too easy.
By the time we started moving away from Borderlands 2, my buddies and I were so in sync, we often didn’t have to say what we were going to do before we did it. We knew our characters and how they played but we also knew each other’s characters and how they played. It’s a synchronicity I’ve rarely experienced in a game before and I loved it. If you haven’t tried Borderlands before, it’s not without its problems. The loot system could learn a thing or two from Diablo 3’s revamp. That said, it’s still a ton of fun and I recommend any game in the series.
Oh, special shout-out to the Tiny Tina DLC which remains my absolute favorite piece of DLC ever made. Honestly, the entire game is worth playing just to experience that DLC pack. You do have to play through the whole story mode first though!
2/8 – Borderlands 2
Hello and welcome. My name is Katosepe and I’ll be your host for today’s video game of the day.
Today’s game is a personal favorite of mine, Borderlands 2 by Gearbox Software. Borderlands 2 was originally released in 2012 for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC. It has since been ported to the Xbox One, Playstation 4, Mac and Linux platforms.
The sequel to Borderlands, Borderlands 2 returns players to the planet of Pandora, five years after the events of the first game. Players choose one of the four new characters, later expanded to six characters, and set out after being betrayed by the game’s antagonist, Handsome Jack. They are quickly recruited by the Crimson Raiders, a group determined to free Pandora from the tyranny of Hyperion, the company owned by Handsome Jack.
Like the first game, Borderlands 2 plays as a hybrid between first person shooters and role playing games. Players play in the first person and must shoot enemies to proceed but must collect guns, manage inventories and level up to become more powerful. Each player character represents a different class of character such as the stealthy assassin, Zero, the strategic commander, Axton or the brutal melee fighter, Krieg. Each character can then be further developed down different skill trees so that players playing the same character may not play the same way.
While it can be fully enjoyed in single-player, Borderlands 2 has a focus on multiplayer co-op, encouraging players to party with up to three friends in order to take down some of the games tougher challenges.
The game received a large amount of downloadable content after release including two additional player characters, a special raid area for max level characters, and nine content packs featuring additional areas, stories and enemies. In 2014, the game received a prequel called Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, a game taking place between the first and second Borderlands. While Borderlands 3 has been confirmed as being in development, at the time of this recording, no concrete information has been released regarding another Borderlands sequel.
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