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The Borderlands 2 Gun Discarders Club
Author’s note
Unlike the Collectors post, which is paaaaainfully long, this one is just regular long. And surprisingly readable.
This post was published right before the first BL2 DLC, Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate's Booty, which, amazingly enough, had a glitch similar to the BL1 bug, allowing you to farm the DLC's endgame boss over and over for guns. This gave BL2 a few months of extra shelf life. But ultimately the lack of inventory space made it impossible to keep collecting, so gamers moved on.
AI Notes
The sequel to The Borderlands Gun Collector's Club, opening as a victory lap. The first essay made three falsifiable predictions about Borderlands 2 — that it would be a great game, that Gearbox would botch the token economy because they only half-understood it, and that players would drift back to the original as a result. All three came true: "Toldya toldya toldya." Then the engagement-design argument picks up where the first essay left it. BL2 generates 87 bazillion guns and then gives the player room to keep only about a dozen, so the collecting economy that made the first game compulsive collapses. The verdict: Gearbox built a gun-collector's game without building any way to collect guns. The fix Steve reaches for — if the real problem is "how do I manage a collection of a thousand guns," what the players need is a database.
Read it for the Dr. Strangelove parody, the invented gun-brand adjectives (Hyperionesque, Jakobsian, Maliwaney), and the closing wistful return to T-Bone Junction.
Related listings
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2012
The Borderlands Gun Collector's Club
The prequel, and the essay this one is scoring. The Collector's Club laid out how token economies work and made three falsifiable predictions about the sequel; the Discarders Club is Steve collecting on every one of them.
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2008
Fable II: Arguably Better than Getting Your Head Crapped On
Another scorecard review where the engineering is fine and the design judgement is not — Steve grading creative decisions rather than execution, the same move he makes against Gearbox here.
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2008
The Bellic School of Management Training
Part of the same gaming neighbourhood — Steve's recurring habit of letting a video game carry an argument it never set out to make.
From the peanut gallery
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Makes me want to stop playing BF3 and get going with Borderlands. Heading over to the official site to get serious. Thanks for the reading material.
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Spot on. I agree on all of this, especially the repeatedly mentioned part about the Inventory UI. I still remember the Claptrap loveletter about a PC-adapted UI. They didn't deliver on this one.
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..ONLY THREE COMMENTS? This is seriously the best review of the game I've read so far and it's like you took everything i've been thinking and feeling about the game and put it into words.
I love the game but it hurts so much that they clearly lost sight of more than a few things and did some annoyingly stupid things to boot. I think what it all comes down to is that they got overeager early on and then started worrying later on that they'd have to compete with stuff like Diablo III.
Yeah I know, D3 isn't an FPS but besides Borderlands being an fps, it's an arpg at heart, or at least the first one was. If anything, I'd compare the first Borderlands to the first Torchlight..in fact, a lot of my issues with Torchlight II mirror my issues with Borderlands II.
Great write up, i'll be sharing the link to this and watching your blog.
— Zidders Roofurry · 7:33 PM, October 22, 2012
I stopped reading when you said that Tiny Tina was awesome. The writing in BL2 is fucking terrible. It's the worst writing I've seen in years.
— W1LL14M · 4:18 PM, October 12, 2012