_This is basically a review of, and a pros/cons rant about, Borderlands 2. If youre not into it, just dont read it! Ill write about stuff you like some other time. Maybe._ So! Im not the kind of person to say "I told you so." Noooo. Never. Well, never, _unless_, of course, I get to say it loudly, within hearing of a biggish stadium full of people. Which I can. So here goes: I TOLD YOU SO. Toldya toldya toldya. My predictions from my previous post, "The Borderlands Gun Collectors Club", all came _completely_ 100% true, with Hyperionesque accuracy, Jakobsian impact, Maliwaney inflammatoryness, Tedioric blasting and surprisingly, even Vladofish speed. I made out like a Bandit. I predicted, as you may recall, that (A) itd be a great game ("duh"), (B) theyd screw up the token economy because they only partly understand it, and (C) as a direct result of B, players would gradually head back to Borderlands. Three weeks after the release, I had my dreaded first "I really dont want to throw this gun away, but I have NO GODDAMN ROOM FOR IT, THANK YOU RANDY PITCHFORK" gun-discarding experience. And my reaction was, predictably, to think seriously about either creating a mule character or going back to play BL1. I mean, I knew Id have this reaction, but I failed to predict how amazingly fast it would happen. A week playing the game, another week on playthrough 2, a final week finishing all the optional side quests, and then boom -- the farming is fundamentally broken, so lets go play something else. But I dont _waaaaant_ to! Why did they have to get this wrong? Why did I have to be so predictively correct? Argh! Let me make this really simple and clear. You remember that famous exchange in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb: DR. STRANGELOVE: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is _LOST_ if you KEEP it a SECRET! Why didnt you tell the world, EH? AMBASSADOR DE SADESKY: It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises. Well, if Dr. Strangelove were alive to play BL2 today, hed have said: DR. STRANGELOVE: Of course, the whole point of 87 Bazillion Guns is _LOST_, if you DONT LET PEOPLE KEEP THEM! Why didnt you add more bank slots, EH? I mean, at least Ambassador de Sadesky had a somewhat plausible excuse. But Gearbox has been thinking over this whole endgame-farming thing for, oh, probably eight years or more. How the hell did they arrive at the conclusion that "We should have 87 bazillion guns, and you personally should be able to keep, like, twelve of them!" Theres only one possible answer: they are clueless. I mean, dont get me wrong: theyre also lovable, brilliant, passionate, technically astounding, and outright _visionary_. But theyre also and bumbling and clueless. Theyre the neighborhood kid who catches a lizard and thinks its really cool, and it *is* cool, except he puts it in a box and it dies. Ill do this as a Good, Bad and Ugly post, just so you know its, like, balanced. If I were just gushing a bunch of fanboy praise, you know as well as I do that it wouldnt be as credible. You have to hear the bad with the good. But ugh, they were so _close_. So close! The game is so amazing! Maybe theyll cut my second prediction in half, and release a DLC or patch within 6 months that gets the folks who drifted back to Borderlands to start collecting in BL2 again. That, or maybe Ill contribute to the BL2 player-file-editor project. Modding is stupid, stupid, stupid; its 12 year olds advertising that they are, in fact, mentally and emotionally really twelve years old. The mindset there is so juvenile that it pains me to admit that sometime in my distant past, decades ago, I probably would have thought that way myself. (That is to say: "Hey, Im going to _mod_, because its _not allowed_ so it must be _cool_, and even though a _fugging gorilla_ could figure out how to do it, and it takes any _hint_ of challenge out of the game and makes me look like I was _severely shaken_ as a baby, but Im going to go ahead and show off my modded guns as if Im some sort of _super_-gorilla." Yeah, that mindset.) But modding will, to a very limited extent, help work around Gearboxs cluelessness by letting legit endgame farmers have _a place to put all their fugging produce_. Very, limited, mind you. Ill tell you how it *should* be in the Ugly section. Ill talk about how to fix this situation, and, well, if Gearbox doesnt understand the fix, you can be sure some other upstart game company _will_ understand it, and itll all be the upstarts limelight soon enough. A few more years of screwing this up, and as far as Gearbox goes well be, like, "hey, remember Diablo?" Lets hope they get the message. Randy, guys, please -- _get the message!_ THE GOOD -- NO, WAIT -- THE GREAT Actually we should do Great first, then Good/Bad/Ugly. Because BL2 is a capital-G Great game. Best game ever? Well, no. Nobodys gonna top RDR for a while. But _dayum_, BL2 is a great game. Its actually a great test of whether youre an idiot, because if you dont like it or it doesnt appeal to you... well, you might not be an _idiot_ per se; theres bound to be _some_ explanation... I guess. In theory. There _could_ be some other reason than you being an idiot, however improbable. Anyhoo, lets get The Big Question out of the way: Is Borderlands II better than Borderlands I? Well, the answer depends on whether you think The Empire Strikes Back was a better movie than Star Wars. Its also the answer to "Should I play BL2 if I havent played BL1?" If you think watching The Empire Strikes Back after Star Wars yields an acceptably awesome cinematic experience -- which it probably does -- then yeah, play BL2 first. Go for it! The Lucasian comparison runs pretty deep. Borderlands is dry and dusty, has dome-like dwellings, introduces cute talking robots, features fully armored imperial bad guys with bad aim, and has a slow (but interesting) story arc up to a really dramatic finish in the last act. Whereas Borderlands 2 is lush and fast-paced and story-thick and incest-ridden and stuff, just like Ep. V. Lets just hope they dont carry the metaphor to the third installment, unless of course they want to have Patricia Tannis dressed like Princess Leia as the kept-plaything of some huge talking Thresher, in which case they have my blessing. BTW, as an aside, and my wife agrees 100% -- all this chatter about Lilith vs. Maya vs. Moxxi is just outright silly. The answer is: Tannis. Followed, we think, by Helena Pierce, eye or no eye. Anyway, where were we. Oh yeah, The GREAT. Where to begin? The story is awesome. Burch was amazing. Tiny Tina is incredibly awesome. Other Burch, also amazing. Handsome Jack is so awesome that I found myself rooting for him most of the time. Threshers are way more awesome than they looked in the previews. The AIs are uniformly great, even when they occasionally make the mobs cower in the corner as if youre the Blair Witch. I dont mind. And the guns, oh the guns, they are beautiful and fascinating and a joy to behold. The voice acting is awesome, with one noteworthy exception: Axton was mis-cast. He looks like Captain America (or Thor, or whoever, take your pick), and he possesses the competent, modest, sexily reserved flawed-hero look of Captain America (or Thor, or whoever, take your pick). But his voice and dialogue are pure Jack Black at his cheesiest. Oops. Oh well. But the rest of them are cool. Cant say much without giving the plot away, but everyones voice acting was great, and Tiny Tina stole the show. Well her, and the Goliaths. The game balance is exquisite. THEre have BEEn some missteps, naturally, and people are now vying to slay the much-vaunted raid boss Terramorphous in the fewest number of milliseconds with 100% legit gear. But on the whole the balance is superb. My only cause for complaint is that the game balance feels far less serendipity-prone than Borderlands often was. They made BL2 so balanced that most of the time the stuff you find is really pretty boring. No one manufacturer shines above all the others, nor is one worse than the others (though I wasnt much of a fan of Jakobs or Pangolin, by and large). All the weapon types are about equally good. It feels as if they tightened the loot-rarity bell curve so they could keep the difficulty progression smooth. The game always felt challenging, albeit without ever descending into Survival Horror territory -- there is always enough ammo around to encourage exploration. And when you do find the occasional legendary item -- I found only four of them during my first two complete playthroughs -- it will last you a good ten levels. Oranges are the new Pearls. They got this right, I think, and only in the difficult-to-balance endgame did they encounter any issues. In short, the game is challenging in a good way. They kept the cel shading. Yay. Cel shading helps them avoid the Uncanny Valley where most other games reside today -- they look more and more realistic without actually looking, you know, realistic. The Borderands franchise embraces the graphic-novel look, and its always stylish and fresh. Plus they dont cel-shade a lot of stuff: water, ice, atmospheric effects, weapon effects, and so on, which makes for some eye-popping moments. And just in case the poetic beauty of their rendering approach is lost on you, they also include some actual eye pops. They kept the humor. Oh, did they ever. Id find myself giggling at 3am until I was snorting and wheezing. The humor runs the whole gamut, from the coarse and obvious to the surprisingly subtle. I love the Dr. Zed vending machines (and the voice acting, and Zeds character in general -- he may be my favorite.) And I almost lost consciousness from laughing when I realized, after my second weapon swap, exactly what The Banes curse was. Oh man, that one almost killed me. That whole mission was extraordinarily well-designed. And of course Claptrap is funny as always. Crazy Earl, too. Not to mention the talking weapons and armor. I _love_ my Hyperion auditing sniper -- havent discarded it even though I cant really justify a precious inventory slot for it. Theres a lot of genuinely funny stuff in this game. But I think the Best Humor award has to go to the bad guys. Handsome Jack has his moments, but its really the bandits that steal the show. Just when you think youve heard them say everything, theyll surprise you. Crazed psycho bandits running at you screaming that Pluto is still a planet, or complaining about how goddamn cold it is outside, or reciting Hamlet... it just never gets old. Bandit humor has quickly become one of the legendary defining hallmarks of the Borderlands experience. No question about it: this game has it all. Its a huge, sprawling open-world game with an engaging story, superb balance, exciting game mechanics, outstanding writing, and absolutely unparalleled replay value. The greatness of the game pretty much dwarfs everything else I say here. Its a worthy successor to Borderlands, and at this point its already become one of the most important franchises in gaming history. I know the folks at Gearbox love this game and they want to keep refining it, though, so Ill weigh in my $0.02 on how it could be even more awesome next time around -- hopefully as soon as the next DLC. THE GOOD The game has some aspects that I feel _bordered_ on greatness without actually achieving it. The biggest issue I have with the overall world design is that its a theme park. No other word for it. Its a _cool_ theme park, and I do love me my theme parks -- Im a Disney Vacation Club member and we go to theme parks several times a year, rain or shine. But there was some sort of dynamic going on, maybe an overreaction to the misguided criticism of the dry dustiness of BL1 (which is about as valid a criticism as saying "Star Wars had too much sand!"), that maybe made them overcompensate a little with the paint gun. So even though the game is often beautiful, the colors are often too saturated. When they get it right, its nothing short of stunning. The Southern Shelf and Sawtooth Cauldron are standout examples. Both juxtapose bandit shantytowns with a rugged natural beauty -- but its a beauty with a relatively subdued palette, dominated by just one or two colors. Some of the man-made places are gorgeous too -- Opportunity City comes to mind, and the Friendship Gulag. But they, too, have dominant primary colors or motifs that shape and define the visual experience into something unique and refined. In several other locations they went a little overboard. Im not sure if its the cel-shading adding visual clutter (as seemed to be the case in Finks Slaughterhouse and in Sanctuary), or if it was actual clutter (Thousand Cuts comes to mind), or if they just went a little overboard with the fully-saturated paint gun (Wildlife Preserve, maybe, or Tundra Express). Whatever the reason, the game winds up looking a tad overdone in places. Still awesome, yes, but with colors that clash rather than harmonizing. They need to follow the basic color-matching advice from, say, Vogue or Cosmopolitan: Any three colors go together, and any more than that looks like a peacock shitting rainbows. Im pretty sure it was Cosmopolitan who said that. The theme-park quality goes beyond the color scheme. A lot of the areas feel bowl-shaped and directly connected to other equally bowl-shaped areas with _completely different_ styling. So it feels a bit like youre walking from Adventureland to Tomorrowland to Fantasyland. And theres a lot of... homage, lets say... to other games. It felt almost like they had other-game and/or other-movie envy, even though Borderlands is a game to be envied all on its own. So theres a dash of Skyrim (The Highlands), some Red Dead Redemption (Lynchwood), some Jurassic Park (Wildlife Preserve), and other maybe-unnecessary tributes. And Sanctuary reminds me way too much, ironically, of the towns in Rage. So the overall world design lacked a certain cohesiveness of vision that was present in Borderlands I. It feels on the one hand like they were trying to elicit a Tolkeinesque or Homeresque journey from humble beginnings, increasing in scope, and ultimately walking into the heart of Mordor. Theres a teeny bit of that going on. But it also feels like whoever had that vision was crushed by the weight of game directors all clamoring for unrelated themed areas to show off their... their what, I dont know. Just to show off. On the whole, though -- coming from a guy who likes theme parks -- they did a really bang-up job of creating a theme park. The individual areas all have their own distinct personality. Some of them even have world-class atmosphere. The Fridge, the Bloodshot Stronghold and Ramparts, Overlook and the Highlands, and several other areas are really memorable. And the Arid Nexus Badlands were... well, thats my favorite area of the game overall, for reasons I cant go into, but wow. My vote for Overall Best Area Design, though, goes to the Caustic Caverns. This area stood head and shoulders above the rest of the game, in the sense of being _new_ -- who the hell has ever seen anything like that before? -- and _creepy_. I can only remember one or two times in my 35-year gaming history where I felt the sinking "I am on the WRONG side of the train tracks" feeling that I had upon entering the Nether Hive. The whole area gave me a new-found respect for -- and dread of -- the Dahl Corporation, whom I hope will be the villains of some upcoming installment. Oh, and the, uh, mission I cant give spoilers about, but it takes you to the top floor in the Caverns -- that was hands-down the best side quest of the game. My third favorite location, after the Badlands and the Caustic Caverns, was Lynchwood. Im a sucker for that sort of thing. It didnt make any sense AT ALL -- it was a gratuitous anachronism in a game that thrives on anachronisms. But I loved it. Robbing the bank and getting out of town before the posse came: that was straight-up inspired writing. I loved the Lynchwood mini-boss and that whole plot line; I loved the Marshalls announcements; I loved the whole thing. Lynchwood may not have made much sense in the larger story, but it was unquestionably awesome. Anyway, lets face it: the game is a theme park. Not that this is bad! Its Good. But Id argue that its not Great. I think true greatness necessitates a uniformity of vision that admits no room for tongues planted too firmly acheek. BL3 is going to have to make some hard choices about whether to be good or great. Good is OK, though. Nothing wrong with Good. THE BAD Ill try to keep this short. Mostly this is stuff that could be addressed in a straightforward way in a patch or DLC. There was no explanation as to why NPCs dont get to use the New-U stations. Just sayin. Theyd better retcon that in next time. No in-game explanation of the Golden Key chest in Sanctuary, so I (like half the rest of the civilized world) used both my golden keys right away without realizing what they were. In retrospect I dont think it matters, since having awesome weapons is probably more useful early in the game than later on. But it should have been a conscious choice, and I, like half the rest of the civilized world, was pretty pissed off to find that Id squandered my keys without so much as a warning dialog. They changed it so you cant open the menu if youre not on the ground -- that is, when youre jumping, or falling, or climbing a ladder, or being flung through the air by external forces (e.g. geyser, grenade), or stuck atop an enemy you had the misfortune to land on. This is hugely screwed up, so I can only imagine they did it as a last-ditch workaround for a no-holds-barred showstopper Christmas-wont-happen bug, and itll get fixed in an upcoming release. That, or they hate their customers and think theyre scum. Time will tell. This change did help me understand that one of the habits Id truly come to enjoy in BL1 was jumping and then opening the menu while in mid-air. Seriously. It was fun. I did it on purpose, all the time. I cant really articulate why, but it was exhilarating. Its as if they took away my childhood with that one simple dick move. I sure hope it was a last-resort thing that they plan to fix. Inventory management has taken a turn for the worse overall. Yeah, it looks slick, but when has Gearbox ever been about "looks slick" over playability? I mean, no cutscenes, right? (Or at least no cheesy prerendered ones -- they do all their cuts right there in-game, and you can usually walk away from them.) In BL2 they put a ton of work into the look-and-feel of inventory management, but they failed to nail the usability. In an RPG, even a quasi-RPG like Borderlands, inventory management is all-important. So maybe its their shooter background at work here. I dunno. But there are a lot of serious wtfs going on. Examples: * When you want to compare item A to other items, and you eventually navigate to item B, then close the lets-compare transaction, it leaves the selection on item B. Last I checked, this is not the way rational thought worked in any product designed by human beings with good intentions. * You can mark items as "favorites", and then... nothing. You cant sort on them or do anything useful with them. But, alas, you CAN sell them, without any warnings or indicators that you just sold an item youd marked as a favorite. So I have accidentally sold some really, really important shit, and only realized a few areas later, when it was too late to go back and buy them back. This has happened at least four or five times in my so-far 2.5 playthroughs of the game. Thats too many for an experienced gamer. It means they have a UI problem. * You can mark stuff as "trash", and sell it all at once. Except thats stupid. Everything should be trash by default. Most of the items you pick up ARE trash -- that is a natural outcome of the tightness of their rarity bell curve. If they had done the whole favorite/trash thing correctly, youd only need to think about it at all when you picked up a blue-or-better weapon, at which point you could mark it as a favorite to prevent accidental sale. This, friends at Gearbox, would be less error prone AND less effort. Argh. * Theres still no way to "buy all" for ammo. Also, like in BL1, there are two concurrent views of your ammunition while youre shopping: the stores selection and your inventory levels. And, like in BL1, the two have unaccountably different sort orders. So as you move the selection cursor down the stores selection, the inventory cursor jumps around unpredictably. I cant believe they did this two games in a row. * Unlike in BL1 (I think), when youre buying ammo by mashing buttons (because theres no bulk-buy function), you can _very easily_ scroll past the grenades and start buying shit you didnt want while youre mashing the buttons. Again, no warnings, no "are you sure?", so its really easy not to notice until a few load levels later. * Like in BL1, they dont sort insta-health at the top of Zeds vending machines, which means if you run up to a machine to buy health in a firefight -- which is much more commmon now that theyve eliminated portable health vials -- or if youre just not paying very close attention because your dog just knocked over your glass of water, then you stand a good chance of buying some expensive class mods and maybe not noticing. Ive done this too. In all seriousness, sorting insta-health at the top is OBVIOUS, so only gross negligence can explain how it was done wrong two games in a row. To be sure, they got a few inventory-management things right that were messed up in BL1. You can now compare items while shopping -- w00t! And the weapon cards show all the data rather than truncating. The item sorting makes a little more sense. The "examine this item" is REALLY cool, and I love just zooming and panning on my items to marvel at the intricate designs. But on the whole it was a step backwards, and it makes me very sad. Other bad stuff... lets see. They still only let you quick-wield 4 weapons even though modern games all give you 8 slots on a wheel. In a game like BL, with elemental resistances and radically different opponent AIs, 4 slots just isnt enough. You need to be able to carry at least two different "weapon builds" with you. I dont care if we have to purchase them or work our way up, but we need more than 4 equipped-weapon slots. As things stand, swapping out weapons interrupts the otherwise smooth game flow and makes it sort of a drag. _Especially_ when they dont let you open the menu mid-air. Jesus. How can the graphics be so beautiful, and the story so awesome, and the combat so smooth, but the inventory management is so screwed up? Is it different teams? Whats going on here? Lets see, what else, what else... oh yeah. On the PS3 version, every time you set your controller down it triggers a nuclear explosion. No, really. Well, it does if youre playing Axton with the middle skill tree. Its a side-effect of having switched the ability/grenade buttons with the zoom/fire buttons. I havent made up my mind on this one; overall I think they probably made the right choice, but it reminds me of the Fable II days when youd try to buy something from a blacksmith, hit the wrong button, destroy his house and send everyone screaming from the village for hours. Its not really ha-ha funny, at least not at the time. Their bulk-vacuum function still sucks, so to speak. Actually the "interact with stuff" button hasnt changed behaviorally since BL1 in any significant ways. It still has all the old problems, and maybe some new ones. For starters, they still have the horrible misfeature that holding the "pick up" button, which is used about 87 bazillion times per game session for bulk vacuuming, has different behavior if you do it on a weapon. What it does in that case is _grab it and wield it_, even though 9999 times out of ten thousand, the weapon in question is a piece of loot-crap that destined for a vending machine. Way to optimize for that 1 in 10,000 case, Gearbox. Moreover, way to keep it around for game 2. The vacuum button still does a piss-poor job of actually vacuuming. And theyve added "auto-vacuum", which does an equally piss-poor job of auto-vacuuming. I cant tell you how many times Ive been standing there with 4 hit points, examining the item-card for a health vial on the ground, obscured only by the "pick up" text because its within reach, thinking "um, why am I able to read this?" They really need to fix it so that every replenishing item in a ten-foot radius from your character automatically zooms to you no matter what. Otherwise it devolves into a guessing-game as to whether their algorithm will be smart enough, and of course when the gameplay is fast and furious, you have to guess conservatively -- which defeats the entire purpose of having the feature. Picking stuff up -- heck, being _near_ anything, degenerates into a button-mashfest. And unless its just my imagination, it feels like the pick-up button is _less_ responsive than it was in BL1. When you open a chest, there is a nontrivial window during which the items _appear_ to be grabbable, but pressing the button has no effect. You have to jab at it for up to half a second, maybe a second before the game says "aw fuck, thats right, I told them Pick Up and theyre pressing the button, so maybe theyre actually trying to, you know, pick that shit up." Is it really that hard to detect that the button is already down, once the items are actually grabbable? And of course the whole cycle gets repeated twice per container, because the game is just as likely to ignore your button-press to _open_ the container. The last "Bad" line-item Ill whinge about is that although the game seems really generous about accuracy, theyre real bitches about who died first, when you and the last nearby enemy expire at the same time. To illustrate how forgiving they are overall: you can be using a sniper from a thousand yards away, and pull the trigger when the cursors kinda pretty far away from the mobs head, and itll explode way more often than probability would dictate that it should. Very gratifying! No complaints here! And theyre also really nice when it comes to landing jumps that you didnt quite hit, unlike in many other games. In general the game is pretty forgiving about controller accuracy. But if you die "at the same time" as an enemy (i.e. it happens within ~100-200 ms before or after), you go into a fight-for-your-life bleedout. Sometimes it seems very, very clear that the enemy died second, but the game didnt actually realize it, and penalizes you. It seems unfair. To avoid any suspicions of stupidity on the part of the detection algorithm, it would be nice if theyd give you a half-second window AFTER the last enemy dies before your own death results in a bleedout. Hell, even 300ms would be nice. There are already plenty of legitimate situations for aggravating bleedouts -- the classic one being when the enemy shoots you and then walks around the corner. So I dont think itll cause a balance problem to add the short grace period Im proposing. I know for a fact that there are some issues with the code that detects whether an enemy is dead. Several of the missions have resulted in me sitting around for a long, long time (several minutes) after the mission was obviously over, except the game couldnt figure out that it was over. Examples include the last round of the Natural Selection Annex, where I just wandered around the arena hoping the game would finally notice Id won, and the plant-the-flag Sawtooth mission, where _twice_ the last enemy disappeared minutes before the Slab King noticed I was victorious. So I suspect theres a race condition here, in which you can legitimately die _before_ the last opponent, but the game doesnt notice, and you bleed out while shaking your first at the unfairness of it all. Why go there? Just put in a short grace period, and make sure its really really clear that you died _after_ the opponent -- often from a long-fused grenade, Ive noticed. Then theres no cause for questioning the game code itself, which undermines player confidence in the fairness and quality of the engine. Thats about it for the Bad. Inventory management woes, no menu while jumping, bulk-vacuum issues, and bleedout race conditions. Thats pretty good, all things considered. Why not just fix them all in a patch, and make it perfect? THE UGLY Theres only one Ugly in BL2, and its a big one. The Ugly is that for no reason whatsoever -- negative reason in fact; its flat-out anti-reason -- they dont give you enough bank slots to make farming fun for more than a few days. They put an _astounding_ amount of effort into the endgame mechanic, folks. This was not some casual design thing for them. They put in hooks for new raid bosses, tons of one-off unique legendary weapons with custom artwork and code, and a plethora of design decisions to prevent any one raid avenue from dominating the endgame. They made it so that every one of the dozens of bosses and mini-bosses has its own legendary that it can drop, so that farming is distributed across most of the locations in the game, which breaks up the monotony. They even added formal item-twinking across characters, amazingly enough. But for all that, its fundamentally broken. And whats more, they have this huge, gaping problem with a substance called Eridium (Im sure theyre sick of hearing about this by now), which lets you buy a limited number of carrying-capacity upgrades, including bank slots. So players are already simultaneously crying out for an Eridium-sink and more bank capacity. I mean, they should have seen this coming months ahead of their code freeze. It would have taken maybe 3 days of engineering and testing effort to make it so that Earl could sell you increased bank capacity at usury rates, even a geometric progression. And it would have been fine. Everyone would have been satisfied. Heres the thing, though. Its not just about capacity. If Gearbox wants to do this Right, by which I mean pull their heads out and do something that nobody in the game industry has ever done before, what they really need to do is give players a database. Thats what we want, really. You make 87 bazillion guns, and let us collect them? Well then were going to want hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of guns in our collections. Not twenty, or whatever stupidly low number youve given us. That just spawns modding and mule characters and leaving the game altogether -- any outlet from the collection pressure; players will use them all. What BL1 needed was a way for you to effectively manage a collection of a thousand guns. What if you want to look at all your Mashers? Or all your weapons by type, or by elemental damage, or by manufacturer? Im not asking for a data warehouse here, or for some fancy text-based console-query UI. I mean, *_I_* would use it, but obviously we want to keep this mainstream. If you start by formulating the basic problem as: "How do I manage a collection of a thousand guns," then your UX guys should be able to come up with something acceptable. No -- you know what? Fuck acceptable. They should be able to come up with something _awesome_, something in keeping with the innovation and forward-looking badassery that weve all come to associate with Gearbox and Borderlands. Ironically, BL1 was better at this -- a LOT better. Of all the inventory "improvements" introduced in BL2, the only one that improves gun collecting as a hobby is the "examine this gun in 3D" feature. I imagine Im going to do exactly what I (and everyone else) did in BL1, which is to figure out how to modify the bank-slots and inventory-slots counters in the player save files, and hope like hell that you guys can actually scale up to something reasonable without crashing or locking us out or triggering some other godawful poison-pill. But just having a lot of slots is only a tiny part of the picture. Gearbox has created a gun-collectors game, but they havent given us a way to collect guns. How messed up is that? I think its pretty messed up. All this talk about BL1 has given me a major case of nostalgia. I love BL2, but I think I need to kill some Drifters to pull me out of this funk. I remember when I finally reached the point with Brick where I could walk around the sand dunes and mow down drifters -- on foot -- and live to tell the tale. BL2 doesnt have any moments like that, not yet. Nothing you had to work for like that, anyway. It took _months_ of gun collecting before I was that badass in BL1. And I remember looking through that sepia-tinted window on entering T-Bone Junction, that window filled with promise of adventure, seeing those rowboats suspended over a forty-foot drop to the salt sand, with the scorching wind blowing the makeshift wind socks tied to the Lucasian architecture. I remember hearing Knoxx give his reports to Admiral Mikey, Mr. Shank asking if I thought I was being _stealthy_, Athena barking her ludicrous military-speak to me -- a merc -- and Thirsty the Midget asking if I could turn the power back on in the Brandywine. I remember. And I think its time to head back. I knew this would happen. I knew Gearbox would screw us on the gun collecting, and I knew sooner or later itd be back to Knoxx and the Armory and Crawmerax. I just didnt realize itd happen so _fast_. Sigh.

_Craw is so damn frustrating!!! He and his sidekicks have killed me so many times that I think I am starting to get sore in real life....arghhh need better weapon!! He will die though, oh yes he will die and I will do the brick dance around his stupid purple corpse. --dedbydwn_ _At the end of it all, Borderlands is well presented, but get under the {incomprehensible mumble} polish, its just a dull, spare, nuts-and-bolts shooter with some unnecessarily good writing bridging the slow process of watching numbers steadily increase. A game for the kind of person who takes pictures of his cars odometer whenever it clocks another thousand miles. _ _--Zero Punctuation_ _DIABLOGENARIAN: Someone who played Diablo as a kid, still waiting for Diablo III on his 80th birthday._ EDITORS NOTE: I totally did not write this post. My friend did. Hi-*her* name is Chaz...mina. So for all you dear people waiting on me for "stuff", whether its Wyvern or js2-mode or Amazon War Stories or Talent42 or PVOTU or the Effective Emacs movie screenplay or whatever: you can rest easy, confident in the knowledge that I am working 24x7 on your personal needs. I would never DREAM of playing Borderlands all day long for months on end. So *please* stop stalking me. Thank you! PREDICTIONS Gearbox gets it. Well, sort of. I mean, its kinda hard to tell. I predict that Borderlands 2 is going to be an awesome game... but thats a pretty lame prediction, isnt it? We already _know_ they "get it" at least that much. Gearbox knows how to make an awesome game. Afterwards, though, I predict that everyone will immediately go back to playing Borderlands 1. Now _that_ is a prediction for you. _ Looking back fondly at Borderlands 2_ And then Gearbox will sit back and scratch their heads for an uncomfortably long time. Long enough to where you start wondering in all seriousness whether its lice or something. But then after about a year, a very scratchy year, theyll release a DLC that _finally_ gets people to stop playing Borderlands 1, over 5 years after its initial release. Even then it will be a slow transition, because they were too damned successful with the first game. People are living there now. But Im not convinced that Gearbox understands why. The evidence is mixed. Todays topic: the Magic Recipe for creating addiction. Hell, it doesnt even matter if its a game or not. If you want your website or product to be addictive, the recipe is really simple. Ill even share it with you. Gearbox somehow stumbled or fumbled into the recipe. But nothing theyve said publicly since then indicates that they understand all the ingredients that went into creating it -- including a few all-important rats and cockroaches that fell in while they werent looking. Another prediction: theres going to be an MMO version of Borderlands someday. And when it happens, you will be able to find me there. I will renounce every last shred of my real-world identity and go live there until Im finally whacked by one of my helpful stalkers. WAIT, DUDE, HANG ON -- I PLAYED BORDERLANDS. IT WAS OK, BUT NOTHING TO GO CRYIN TO MOM ABOUT Well, no. No, you didnt really play Borderlands. What you played was more like a teaser demo. If you made it through the main storyline and killed the huge vaginalien (complete with Japanese-style tentacles) in the comically misnamed "Vault", but _then you put the game away_ -- well, my friend, Im sad to tell you that you missed out. All you got was the merest sniff of what the game had in store. And it smelled like... well, the ending was a little fishy, if you catch my drift.

See, you have to play the whole thing all the way through _twice_. Not with different characters, either. You have to play the _same exact character_, with all the loot and skills you built up on the first run-through. The second time around, the enemies will sort-of kind-of be leveled to you except not really. Not yet anyway. OK then, what about after you finish it the second time? Ha! Still not done. Yes, its true that you now have more than a sniff -- youre up to a taste. MMmmmm. But THEN you have to purchase at least two of the DLCs -- Knoxx for sure, and arguably Moxxi just for the bank -- and play those too. Now youre getting close to, uh, penetrating the secrets of Borderlands. (This appalling metaphor is 100% Gearboxs fault. I accept no responsibility.)

Finally, after all that -- in order to _truly_ appreciate the greatness of Borderlands -- you have to stumble across not one, but TWO bugs in the game. Bugs without which everyone on earth would have basically forgotten the game by now, and itd be a lovely historical footnote like BioShock or Fallout 3. A game to be played, sure, maybe a couple of times even, but shelved in the end. As opposed to the situation we have today, which is thousands of people playing it on- and offline around the clock, almost 4 years after the release. If you didnt experience the end-game, then you didnt really play Borderlands. Paraphrasing Marcus Kincaid, _"A Borderlands player without a lobster grudge is just a guy with a game." _ SO WHATS BORDERLANDS, YOU ASK? Oh, man. My sincere apologies to the six million or so of you whove played the game (according to Gearbox). But I guess some people didnt get the memo.

Borderlands is a multi-platform 3D shooter/RPG released in 2009 by Gearbox, published by 2K. It was a surprise hit, since it had no prior franchise titles. It featured an open game world developed apparently from scratch using a modded Unreal 3 engine. The game won numerous awards and garnered solid (though not earth-shattering) reviews. Following its release, over the next 18-odd months, Gearbox released four purchasable Downloadable Content (DLC) add-on packs. Together the four DLCs add up to an experience approximately the same size and scope as the original game. Which was decently big. Borderlands is not MMO. Its 4-player co-op ("PvE" or players-vs-enemies). Which makes it a bit like the old Diablo games, except that in Diablo "co-op" meant "You log in and shout Hi Everybody! and someone kills you instantly and takes every last goddamned shred of a possession you ever owned while mocking your ancestry." In Borderlands the online co-op play is far more civil. At worst, abusers might violate polite social convention, whereas in Diablo it was more like the Geneva Convention. Fortunately these days that kind of behavior tends to be confined to XBox Live, where its so similar to Microsofts internal culture that they havent noticed anything unusual about it.

Borderlands plays a little like an Old West cowboy adventure, complete with massively overpowered six-shooters. Except its in a sci-fi-ish scenario set on some backwater planet at the edge of nowhere -- a planet that a dozen or so arms manufacturers have exploited fully and are now using as a big trash heap, now largely overrun by bandits and hungry local fauna. The game is distinguished by its use of a 3D rendering technique called cel shading, which imparts a cartoonish and often timeless look. Cel shading is somewhat controversial, but in Borderlands Gearbox somehow managed to make it gritty and ultimately appealing to the hardcore gaming crowd sending out their totally hardcore reviews from Moms Basement Central.

Borderlands is also distinguished by its superb production values. It has solid voice acting (verging on greatness in the DLCs), outstanding character design, intriguing area design, memorable visuals, satisfying sound and music, clever writing, a generally smooth frame rate, and an acceptably low bugscape -- well, at least in single-player mode. Well get to the Borderlands multiplayer connectivity shit sandwich in a little bit. But even then its one of the tastiest poop meals you can spend your hard-earned money on. Oh, and Borderlands has Claptraps. Claptraps alone give Borderlands enough character to make it franchise-worthy. To be fair, the game is pretty light on story and character development -- even for a shooter, where the bar cant get much lower. But theyve set up just enough tantalizing back-story to give them plenty of space to develop these things properly in sequels. And in the meantime, Borderlands really delivers in the Claptrap department.

WRITING: GOOD. CUT SCENES: ARGHHH. Another standout feature of Borderlands is its heavy bias towards fun, and towards actual, you know, _gameplay_. Which makes it unlike a lot of other titles today, which lamely try to buy you off with a bunch of nonplayable prerendered cutscenes, sometimes made even worse by embarrassingly juvenile dialog and character designs (hello BioWare, Lionhead, EA). Folks: Its OK for the subject matter to be juvenile. Its OK for the characters to be juvenile. Its OK for the target audience to be juvenile. BUT ITS A FUCKING TRAIN WRECK WHEN THE _WRITERS_ ARE JUVENILE, because theyll alienate everyone above their own level of sophistication -- a demographic that just so happens to have the most disposable income to spend on games. I could rant about this for hours, but I can already tell this post is going to be huge. "Ass Effect 2" Ah, me. Anyway, Borderlands has good writing. Or as the internationally celebrated and occasionally intelligible game critic Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of "Zero Enunciation" fame put it, "unnecessarily good writing". Ben evidently didnt care for Borderlands, but then again he didnt make it to the endgame. Which is good for the rest of us, because now he can find time to shit all over Mass Effect 3. At least I hope he does. _ Ben and his friends playing Borderlands_ So where were we -- oh yeah, cutscenes. Gearbox knew they had a damn good game right out of the starting gate, so they didnt need to try to bluff up an artificial sense of moneys-worthiness by padding it out with massive cutscenes. So the few cutscenes they DO have are all (a) short and (b) full of awesome. As it should be. Dont get me wrong. Borderlands isnt perfect. There are precious few games in history that can make that claim. And heck, theres nothing wrong with a few imperfections. They can sometimes give a game more character! In fact it is in precisely that fun-loving spirit of character-inducing imperfection that Borderlands features several truly colossal vaginas. Im not just talking about the guy who implemented their driving physics, either. Good guess though.

But whatever. NONE of the awesome qualities or quirks of Borderlands really matters in the long run. In the end, above all else, Borderlands will be remembered as the ONLY single-player title since the Diablo games to capture the fun of a Diabloesque loot system. For almost ten years people tried and failed, and then Gearbox finally came along out of nowhere and got it more or less right. IS BORDERLANDS AN RPG? Borderlands claims to be part shooter, part RPG. The RPG claim was IMO a minor marketing mistake, since people have preconceived notions about what it means, and Borderlands isnt an exact match. In fact I didnt play the game when it came out because I couldnt figure out what kind of game it was. It was only when Id completely run out of stuff to play -- I, Chazmina, that is, and totally not that Stevey guy whos busy doing stuff for you -- that I started playing through old "Game of the Year" titles looking desperately for something that didnt suck. And it took me a while to see why they felt they could get away with calling it an RPG. It turns out that Borderlands has classes and skill trees and skill points and experience points and levels and specializations and support for parties of adventurers ("vault hunters") with mixed and complementary skillsets. With that in mind, its easy to see why 2K marketed it as part-RPG, knowing the game like they did.

But it might have been better to let the critics and players arrive at that conclusion, because its missing many of the other elements people have come to expect of RPGs -- elements such as "the decisions I make affect the plot outcome", "I have meaningful, stateful, persistent interactions with individual NPCs", "I put on my robe and wizard hat", "People mock me in real life", and all the other things weve come to expect from role-playing games and gamers. I think they might have done better initially by just marketing how fun it was. Instead it took a slow-burning word-of-mouth campaign before the sales really took off. YOU MENTIONED "FUN"? I LIKE "FUN". Borderlands is huge on the fun factor. You hardly realize it as you play it the first or even the second time, but the team at Gearbox put a lot of stock in FUN. For comparison, just look over at Rage, an Id Software title that came out last year. Rage is named for the emotion that new players feel when, after an hour of gameplay, they die for the first time and discover the game has no auto-save system. Rage (lets be honest here) copied a lot from the Borderlands crib sheet. Or they tried. But unfortunately all Id knows how to do well is graphics. So of course Rage has startlingly high frame rates and graphics that are more realistic than looking outside your basement window. As you play it youre all "wow man this is... uh, very _real_" as you play it. But it winds up being a disappointing (though gorgeous) slogfest. _ Almost as pretty as Red Dead Redemption_ Which is no surprise, since Id lost their divining rod for "fun" many, many years ago. You wind up playing through the game as a chore, out of nostalgia or professional respect. And today, just a few months after its release, nobodys playing Rage anymore. The fun it offers is ephemeral: typical fire-and-forget mediocre-shooter fun. Its really sad to watch Id sinking into irrelevance. Maybe they should just focus on selling their engine. Rage offers nothing at all in the addiction department, so if they were trying to mimic the success of Borderlands they did a piss-poor job of it.

Then you have your RPGs. A lot of RPG-ish games these days like to focus on "realistic immersion", but its hard to get right. RPG developers are always falling into this trap of trying to add "just enough" realism. But its a slippery slope, and they add Weapon Repair and Realistic Ammo Limits and Bizarre Inventory Restrictions (_"you can carry 60kg of usable stuff, and 20 metric shit-tons of components"_) and Walking for Hours and all this other un-fun stuff. Its like theyre trying to add a touch of Survival Horror to the game, but it just winds up making the gameplay irritating. RPG developers: let fun take precedence over realism, for cryin out loud. _ Realism doesnt matter if the game is FUN_ One developer who got the mix right for exactly one title: Bethesdas Fallout 3 was a perfect blend of gritty survival realism, shooter/looter joy and fiddly RPG mechanics. Their crowning achievement was the Dunwich Building, although probably only if youre a Lovecraft fan. But even if you missed that frightening little side mission, or didnt get to it until you were insanely overpowered (the downfall of every Bethesda game in history, and they still dont fucking get it right in "Im so grossly overpowered now that I now let my horse deal with any pesky dragons" Skyrim), Fallout 3 is still an amazing game. (And New Vegas was an amazingly good _attempt_ at being a great game, so it gets partial credit.) Its no wonder everyone wishes for a cross between Borderlands and Fallout. Think of it: all the cerebral fun and horror of Fallout 3 combined with the visceral fun and humor of Borderlands. It can be done! Someone will do it. We might all be Diablogenarians by then, but itll happen someday. Anyhoo... FUN ISNT ENOUGH If you spend enough time in Borderlands you start to develop a picture of their design meetings: _"Hey, wouldnt it be cool if we had, like, angry midgets?" _ _"Uh, dont they prefer to be called Little Dudes?" _ _"Not on Pandora. On Pandora they prefer to be called aaaaAAarguhgh as they shoot your ass with a shotgun so big that it throws them onto their backs." _ _"Woah! Theres no *possible* way Legal will let it through, but it does sound fun! Lets go with it for now." _

Its like Gearbox decided to take the FUN knob and turn that thing hard right until it breaks off, and ship whatever the hell emerges from that decision. And it works. The game is _unrelentingly_ unrealistic from a typical RPG viewpoint, but you wind up forgiving and forgetting almost everything because the fun factor is through the roof. Heres the problem, though: FUN ISNT ENOUGH TO CREATE ADDICTION. Hell, if you want the latest proof, go play Bulletstorm. It is without question the highest fun-density ever packed into any game, EVER. Bulletstorm makes Borderlands look like a season-length National Geographic documentary series about kittens. But Bulletstorm blows your entire fun wad in one 10-hour sitting, and then its over. Youll probably play it one more time, because youll be thinking "Did I _seriously_ just do all that shit? Must... do... again!" But after the second playthrough, which is 100% identical to the first playthrough, you realize thats it. Its over. You wish there were more, but it basically kicks you out. Youre done. Move on to the next game.

Fun alone wont keep people playing your game -- both offline and online -- _four years later_. Nope. In fact Fun has very little to do with the Magic Recipe for Addiction. All Fun can do for you is get people in the door. We all know that MMOs keep players coming back day after day, long after the players have ceased to have any semblance of "fun" (at least in the usual sense of the word) while theyre playing. Lets review how they do it. By incorporating these simple rules into your boring game, or your shitty website that everyone is calling a "ghost town", Ill show you how youll be able to salvage something halfway decent out of the mess youve made. THE MECHANICS OF ADDICTION I could write a big full-featured post on this topic, but that would be realistic and totally not fun. So Ill just dump the highlights on you. A _Token Economy_ is any system in which you are awarded meaningless but highly visible "tokens" for Good Behavior -- that is, for the behavior the creator of the system is trying to provoke in you. TRUE BUT APPARENTLY LITTLE-KNOWN FACT: Token economies are among the most powerful drivers of human behavior. Theyre used in grade schools, prisons, mental institutions and the military to incent people to act in certain ways. And it works, boy howdy does it ever work. Once they start handing out those gold stars, youd shoot your own grandmother to get one. Some companies think they have the whole Token Economy thing figured out, so they create a Badge system or (equivalently) a Trophy system. Badge systems are what stupid people do when they think theyve figured out Token Economies. Hey, dont shoot the messenger here. Im just reporting facts. Its what Im known for. TOKEN ECONOMIES NEED *SCORED* TOKENS. Thats why badge systems are lame. They can never generate the addictive pull because theres no high-score list possible, other than the overall badge count. The count itself can be reasonably addictive if there are enough players -- think "number of Facebook friends". But thats Weaksauce Flavored Sauce Substitute _(Note: contains no actual Weaksauce)_ compared to the addiction levels achievable by having multiple token categories, multiple high-score lists, and a tight bell curve for token rarity.

Some token economies let you purchase the tokens at a high cost. Some token economies even have physical tokens. Disney understands this. So does Luis Vuitton. Scroll through a few pages and try to figure out where those prices are coming from. Token economies are fragile. If Billy breaks into the teachers desk after hours and starts handing everyone fistfuls of gold stars, they become worthless and the economy collapses, irrecoverably. In high-end fashion handbag terms, counterfeit products threaten to destroy the token value. In game terms: game balance is hard, and getting it wrong can tank the economy. All this is just another way of saying that RARITY CREATES DESIRABILITY. Its hardwired into the human brain. There are multiple complementary parallelizable exploitable ways of creating rarity. Most people dont get this, though, and consequently they create nifty products and systems that ultimately fail to achieve any kind of stickiness: creations destined to be nothing but flashes in the pan.

If you dont already know all this stuff better than I do, then you know fuck-all about creating addiction, and its no wonder your products badge system isnt generating adoption or stickiness or 7-day actives or any of that other shit youre measuring. It irritates me to the point of boiling rage that I have to explain this stuff -- that the people most companies put in charge of mission-critical initiatives are so completely fucking clueless, to the detriment of their companies _and_ all the rest of us. So Ill stop here before I have a heart attack. You either get it, or you dont. Gearbox gets it. Well, sort of. I mean, its kinda hard to tell. They definitely get _part_ of it. DISALLOWING JUMPING IS WHAT STUPID DESIGNERS DO I need to relax a bit, so Im going to time-out here for an utterly incongruous digression. This section has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the post. But it has to be said. _Jumping is fun_. Period. End of story. If playing your game involves manipulating a humanoid ragdoll in three dimensions, and it doesnt support jumping, then you suck. No, dont go pointing at Zelda. Zelda gets a bye because its *Zelda* for christs sake. But Zelda is un-fun exactly to the extent that it fails to support jumping, except off ledges which is kinda OK but not really true jumping. Practically the first thing everyone tries in a game is jumping. If the game doesnt let you jump, then people enter a Fuck You mode that can be hard (possible, but hard) to overcome.

You kinda dont want your players to enter Fuck You mode. Just sayin. Yeah, Im going out on a limb here, but Ill contend that its probably a good idea _not_ to make a game that puts people in Fuck Everything About This mode. If youre not exactly sure what that mode looks like, well, it looks like the Acornfilms Dead Rising 2 review. Which I _heartily_ recommend watching in its entirety, but for the impatient the most relevant section is from 6:20-6:45. If a game doesnt let you jump over a foot-high obstacle, then -- thats right, youve got the idea now -- Fuck This Game. It might be possible to recover and get people to enjoy it anyway, but youre working against a bad first impression. How fucking hard can it really be, game developers? Borderlands (of course) lets you jump pretty high, on account of low gravity. In contrast with Rage, which lets you do this pathetic little fart-jump that accomplishes nothing except making you feel even more sorry for Id than you already felt -- and lets face it, you do feel pretty sorry for them. Metroid -- now THAT was a game that let you *jump*. Metroid got a whole lot of things right. But right off the bat they got jumping right. You can jump _really high_ in Metroid. And thats before you find the mods that make your jumping really start to kick ass. Like Borderlands, the Metroid franchise focuses on FUN over REALISM, and on gameplay over lame cut scenes. In fact Metroid is even better than Borderlands in some aspects, such as the important aspect of not springing a Surprise Vagina on you at the end of the game. (_No_, Samus doesnt count. Jeez people!)

And of course lets not forget Super Mario Galaxy, critically acclaimed as one of the greatest games ever created, and it was basically a feature-length exercise in fancy new jumping physics and camerawork. Make no mistake: jumping *_puzzles*_ arent for everyone. Especially when the camera management fucking blows so hard that it singlehandedly sinks the game at review-time, before its even launched (hello and goodbye, Epic Mickey). Jumping puzzles are definitely not guaranteed to be slam-dunk in the Fun department. It comes down partly to personal taste and partly to execution quality in the games design and mechanics. But _everyone_ likes jumping. Im not saying games where you cant jump cant be cool. Im just saying jumping is fun. In case you care. THE GUN COLLECTORS CLUB Were back on topic! w00t! Most of the people playing Borderlands today are COLLECTING GUNS. Theres no other good explanation for whats going on. The game isnt particularly social -- communication is highly limited without mics, which most players dont use. The mission replay value is modestly high, but theres only so much any game can do before familiarity and boredom set in. The only tried-and-true way to keep people coming back is with a token economy.

Even supposedly pure-social, non-gaming environments are based on token economies. This is true of every successful ecosystem -- even Facebook -- because people crave status and recognition, and those needs generally derive from actions and events that are countable and rankable. Most sites that have succeeded in becoming addictive have an obvious token economy: karma, or star ratings, or anything along those lines to encourage users to keep contributing content. Sites that dont weave at least one token economy into their fabric are left wondering why nobodys showing up to their party. Or more accurately, people show up but they dont see any reason to stick around. In the gaming world, traditional RPG-style experience points (XP) are countable, so a lot of games have global high-score lists for experience. But the smarter designers divide up their lists by in-game demographics, geography and other differentiators so that even if you have no hope of climbing the global high score lists, you can be one of the best in your area or specialization. The more subdivisions the merrier. Unfortunately Borderlands caps XP -- you stop earning it when you hit max level. So no XP addiction for YOU. Instead, the primary addictive tokens in Borderlands are the guns. There are some other, weaker kinds of tokens in the game -- for instance there are collectable items dropped by Claptraps in the last DLC, and some of them are ultra-rare. So theres a small group of collectors off hunting those. But its not as addictive as hunting for guns for a number of important reasons. Lets look a little closer. INGREDIENTS FOR ADDICTION Any game can _overlay_ any number of token economies. There doesnt have to be just one. You can create token economies targeted at every kind of player, in the simplistic Bartle Test sense of "kind". If you want to hook in EXPLORERS, just keep track of visited areas, missions completed and other countable explore-ish actions taken. If you want to hook in the PVPERS, make a bunch of arenas, then keep track of a bunch of statistics about kills. (Um, or not, if youre Diablo III.) If you want to catch SOCIALIZERS in your web, keep stats on followers, likes/dislikes and all that happy social shit. For BUILDERS, keep stats on what areas theyve built and how popular they are. Etc. You rope people in by counting stuff that they like to do and reporting it somehow -- preferably to everyone. Token economies also can be created from (or emerge naturally from) big, complicated rules systems that are heavy on memorization and light on deductive reasoning. Obvious examples include the National Football League, the Linux operating system, the underground music scene, the comic book scene, your neighborhood Bible-study group and other paper-and-dice RPGs. Whenever a community framework of _any kind_ -- gaming, sporting, social, technical, whatever -- is based on a huge system of fiddly rules and trivia to memorize, it attracts MAVENS who derive satisfaction and status from their knowledge of the system.

Mavens create the pulse of a community. They set the beat. Some mavens generate new content. Others specialize in documentation. Some become critics and provide valuable reviews. Some become entrepreneurs within the economy and act as vendors, facilitators, go-betweens, fences or even thieves, depending on whats possible in the framework. Some mavens become hipsters and try to make the community seem more exclusive and prestigious by virtue of being insufferable (but ultimately valuable) dickheads. A community only needs a small percentage of its members to be mavens in order to grow and thrive. If you count and score peoples actions, and then stack-rank them in a set of high score lists, it sends the addictive pull soaring. Sometimes the stack ranking is even built right into the system. If youre a Freemason, then being a Master Mason is way better than being a lowly Apprentice. Oh sure, go ahead and laugh it up over their silly ranking system. Then go back to your day job and worry some more about your next promotion.

Explicit stack-ranking is such a critical ingredient that without it the addiction dish pretty much fails. Its a catalyst. Its yeast for the tasty Token Loaf. But in token economies with _physical_ tokens -- not just counts of actions or connections, but distinct physical or virtual items that you can collect and accumulate -- stack ranking isnt enough by itself. You also need _DISPLAY CASES_. Because -- follow my reasoning carefully here -- what the fuck good is collecting things if you cant show off your collection?

Actually even without display cases collecting can still be fun, because it scatches that collectors itch, which has its roots in the fundamental pattern recognition activity our brains engage in to survive. People can always work around the social issue by talking about their collections in forums or whatever.

But letting people show off their collections makes it a whole different ball game. Communities will _always_ find a venue for showing off their collections, even if youre too stupid to provide one for them. But if you feature it directly in the system, it concentrates everyones focus within the system, making it inherently stickier. (In the sense of "measurable consecutive hours spent on the site.") If, on the other hand, you force people to wander off to eBay or a random forum to share and trade their collectibles, then youre letting your revenue stream walk out the door. A display case in a game can be as simple as allowing you to look at someone elses inventory. Seriously, how hard is that, Gearbox? Players want this feature so badly that every day they risk losing their best items by dropping them and picking them up again just so others can see them flash by, you lovable dumb fuckers! How can you not know this by now? A token display case can be _anything_ and _anywhere_, as long as it has the players name and hopefully pic attached to it somewhere. Oh yeah. Pics. Fuck me, now theres a side-rant for you. TL;DR: PERSONALIZATION IS ANOTHER _HIGHLY_ KEY INGREDIENT FOR ADDICTION. Everyone wants to make their avatar stand out as a unique reflection of their own personal bad taste. And everyone wants a fucking profile page. Christ, now were getting into shit thats so painfully obvious that it makes my eyes twitch, but most companies _still_ dont seem to get it. In any case I wont talk too much about it today, except to observe that no matter how well you support custom avatars, you could be doing more, and it _will_ make people happier. Doesnt even matter what you do, as long as its more personalizable.

And even a little bit of personalization is infinitely better than nothing. Even the cookie-cutter new Kingdoms of Amatrope is roughly a 1.5 on a 1-10 scale here -- but at least its not a zero. Game designers have been offering personalization for at least _a thousand years_, but Borderlands is like a 0.2, god dammit. They let you change your shirt and hair color. Whoop. But lets just move on; weve got bigger fish to fry. THE BORDERLANDS RECIPE OK, were finally ready to look at whats driving people to play Borderlands four years after the launch, and three and a half years after almost any other game would have disappeared into the annals. Well take a look at what Gearbox did right, and then Ill bag in a mean but friendly way on Gearbox for being total jackasses, and then well have cake. The Borderlands token economy is based on _items_, 90% of which are guns. Weapons in games are an especially powerful kind of token because theyre self-reinforcing: the better your weapons, the easier it becomes to collect more of them.

Borderlands has really clever system for generating randomized guns. The guns -- made by around a dozen manufacturers -- have a whole bunch of variable parameters: damage, range, accuracy, rate of fire, magazine size, reload speed, zoom, sway, recoil, bullet speed and "elemental" effects. Some rarer guns also have fancy custom effects -- stuff like increased critical-hit damage, ricocheting bullets, increased blast radius, multiple projectile effects, unusual bullet trajectories, you name it. Even disallowing a bunch of overpowered or nonsense combinations, when you multiply out all these dimensions you have between 8 and 17 million possible guns, depending on whos counting. Thats a pretty good spread. If all you want to do is finish the game and move on, then you dont need to think much about guns. You only need a handful at most -- one each for short-range, medium-range and long-range, and maybe a couple of elemental effects for enemies that require them. Guns are leveled, so every once in a while youll want to hit a BioShock-style vending machine and upgrade. But you can get through the game with nothing but a good submachine gun, a combat rifle and maybe a sniper rifle.

To avoid running out of ammo in the final vaginal assault, I suppose its a good idea to have one weapon in each of the games seven ammunition categories. But even thats not strictly necessary, because there are guns and class mods that regenerate ammo for you, plus a fair amount of ammo just lying around in most places. Borderlands is definitely not Survival Horror. Theres _plenty_ of ammo. So a lot of people (including me, the first time around) just notice in a vague way that their guns seem to be getter better as the enemies are getting stronger, and thats about it. During my second playthrough a year later, I was surprised to learn online that each gun has half a dozen distinguished components. A guns abilities derive from the assembly of its grip, body, barrel, scope and so on -- each of which has its own rarity and special effects. You can actually look at a gun from afar and figure out a ton about it.

Borderlands guns follow a normal distribution, with most guns being roughly average, but with occasional outliers that can be very powerful. Following Diablos convention, the guns are color-coded by rarity: white, green, blue, purple, yellow, orange and dark orange, the latter being the most powerful. You dont start encountering random orange weapons until late in the game, and you quickly learn to stop and examine them closely whenever you find one.

Aaaaaand... thats pretty much it. Thats the Borderlands recipe. At any rate, thats what they designed and set out to build. And its not too bad. Id say their recipe was blue, maybe bluish purple in the first release. Pretty potent. But then, through a series of deliberate improvements and happy accidents, their token-economy recipe ripened into a deep, lush orange. POWER-UP #1: PLAYTHROUGH 2.5 A little-advertised and little-understood feature of the initial release is that there are THREE very different playthroughs of the game, each with its own signature characteristics. The first playthough is the one everyones familiar with. You start off level 1 without so much as a gun to your name, and by the time you wax the big beaver youre around level 35. Your best weapons are blue and purple, youve worked your way through about half the skill tree, and youre just starting to get comfortable with the system. And then -- boom, its over. They dont even give you any money or anything. Just a mercifully brief verbal thank-you from the most gratuitously annoying "Guardian Angel" in history -- not just gaming history, but _all_ history, period. All she ever fucking says is lame variations of: "Now is the time for you to go do whatever it is you were planning to do next. Ta!" The real prize you get for finishing Borderlands is that she _finally_ shuts the hell up. _ "Now is the time for you to mute the fucking game for a while."_ After that you can still go back and do all the side-quests you skipped, but its pointless because youre now vastly overpowered. Not only is there no challenge, but the loot enemies drop is the same level they are, so theres no benefit. So at that point most people call it a day and move on. But Borderlands gives you the unusual option of playing the whole story again in what they call "Playthrough 2". You keep your loot, your experience, your skills, everything. All that resets are the quests and areas-unlocked. In Playthrough 2, the enemies are higher-level, and they get a little more creative with the enemy names. But the balance is still a little dodgy, so initially you blaze through the missions, and enemy levels dont catch up with you for a while. When they do, it gets tough in a hurry. I should note that in Borderlands, even though there are 69 possible player levels, there is a HUGE difference in power between any two levels. If youre level 37 fighting a level 38 bad guy, expect it to be a tough fight. If the bad guy is 2 levels up, expect pain. 3 levels up: expect death. 4 levels up: you, Sir, are on the wrong fucking side of the train tracks. It winds up being self-balancing, because you breeze through the easy parts and then spend most of your time butted right up against the edge of what you personally can handle. If the main quest starts getting too hairy, you can detour to some side quests until you level up. You can even pretend youre doing it for the exploration value. But the sudden sharp drop in enemy difficulty at the beginning of Playthough 2 is a bit weird, and probably causes a lot of people to abandon it. Its only if you persist that enemies eventually catch up with you. HERES THE WEIRD (AND IMPORTANT) PART: once you finish the main storyline quest the second time, the game enters a magical and totally undocumented mode that players call "PLAYTHROUGH 2.5". In P2.5, all enemies are automatically advanced to level 48-52, with 50 being the max player level unless you buy the DLCs. In P2.5, the enemies are all by definition around as tough as you are, which means the loot they drop is as good as youll find. So the game becomes both challenging _and_ rewarding.

Um. But. OK... I know what youre thinking here. Why the ever-loving _fuck_ wouldnt they make it challenging and rewarding _to begin with_? Why make you play through the whole game _twice_? Well, thats a complicated question. Players like to feel a sense of increasing power as they progress through the game. If enemies always level up with you (which they do, in many games), then the question becomes _"Why the fuck am I leveling up in the first place?"_ There are a gajillion ways to tackle this problem, all of them slightly unsatisfying. Its sort of the core design problem of RPGs. Gearbox decided to let you have it both ways. The first time through, you power up slightly faster than your enemies, although never really in an unbalanced way. Later, once the loot-hunting end-game starts, enemies level up so you can feel challenged again and find better loot. Why they make you play the game _twice_ before it kicks into end-game mode is anyones guess. Maybe its because they wanted you to exhaust the skill tree first, and theyd already balanced it to get you halfway there on the first playthrough.

Whatever the reason, you have to play the Borderlands main storyline _twice_ before it kicks into the P2.5 endgame. But at least its there. THE GAME SIMPLY COULD NOT BE ADDICTIVE WITHOUT IT. You have to have a good loot story for the looting to be any fun. And you cant just hand it out -- players have to work for it. All in all, the Borderlands initial release had a pretty decent story for the endgame. But "pretty decent" doesnt explain why four years later, at 3am on a random weekday, I can log into PSN -- well, assuming theyre up, which is iffy, and assuming I still have enough money in the bank to pay my electricity bill after Sony gave my credit card info away, equally iffy -- and find unlimited players to adventure with. Their system needed a few more power-ups before it would become the fully-matured beast that everyone will go back to playing the instant they finish Borderlands 2. POWER-UP #2: THE BANK After a while, players started complaining loudly that they didnt have enough inventory slots. And thats a valid complaint. Borderlands inventory slots have essentially no effect on game balance, particularly later in the game. Items have no size or weight, so it really is just a slot system. Towards the end of the game, youre only using the slots for hauling crap to vending machines to sell it. Fewer slots just forces players to do more trips. And in the endgame, inventory is _only_ used for storing collectible guns that youll never use, but you need a place to stash them. So the endgamers were right -- Gearbox didnt give them enough slots. _ "Honey, Ill uh, go get us a shopping cart."_ Thats kind of weird, when you think about it. Recall that Gearbox is focused on fun, not "realistic immersion", so arbitrarily limiting your inventory slots is kind of a boneheaded overture to the world of "grown-up" (and hence not-so-fun) RPGs. If your inventory contents actually affected the game balance in any meaningful way, then slot limiting would make sense. But the games money-economy is laughably unbalanced, with high-level characters able to max out at 2 billion dollars legitimately in a few hours, blow it all by jumping off cliffs (more on that later), and make it all back again in another few hours. So the number of inventory slots doesnt matter. Moreover their usefulness is seriously limited by the UI, which as Ben Croshaw rightly pointed out, forces you to spend inordinate amounts of time just scrolling around. More inventory items just makes it worse. I suspect the folks at Gearbox were saddled with their preconceived RPG baggage, and they didnt think the issue through very well. It *is* satisfying (and balancing) to increase your carrying capacity as you progress through the main game. But lack of capacity is crippling in the endgame -- which is where everyone winds up in pretty short order, no matter how rich and detailed the regular game might be.

So people bitched about it. Gearbox listened, and responded by (A) giving you a bank with not enough slots (max 42), and (B) adding a few new Claptrap rescue missions, each with a _random_ chance of increasing your inventory slots. Thats right, random. Hellooo, farming. And were talking the absolute worst kind of shit-slog farming, where if the random chance doesnt trigger, you have to physically shut down the game before it saves your progress, then start the mission all over again after logging back in. Gearbox got so carried away with setting up farming for their primary tokens that they started making people farm non-tokens too: absolutely essential shit that you need in order to participate in the token economy at all. FARMING NON-TOKENS IS HELLA NOT FUN. _Forcing_ people to do it is flat-out fucking retarded. So the very first thing everyone does when they figure out the endgame is download WillowTree -- a nifty open-source unsanctioned warranty-voiding player-file editor -- and bump up their inventory slots. Some people bump it to 72, the maximum value obtainable in legitimate (albeit heavily farmed) gameplay. Others shrug and say Fuck It, Gearbox is being fucking stupid here, gimme 999 slots and let me deal with the gray hairs as I scroll around painfully. Its shit like this that makes me think that Gearbox only _kind_ of gets it. But whatever; inventory and bank slots are fixable out of band with WillowTree, so its not the end of the world. POWER-UP #3: PEARLESCENTS Remember the Borderlands weapon color-coding scheme, where white means _shit_ and orange means _the shit_? Well, your inventory sorts them by color, with better colors being higher up and thus more easily accessible. Check this out: in the original Borderlands release there was a bug where some weapons were generated with off-scale rarity, so the game didnt know what color to assign them and they defaulted to white. Nobody at the time knew they they werent orange. But there they were, right up at the top, leering at you with their big white grin like they knew somethin you didnt.

These weapons were the subject of intense debate on the forums, and in the information vacuum they soon became shrouded in mystique. Players began calling them "Pearlescents". They of course became highly collectible. Gearbox paid attention, and hit on the absolutely brilliant and game-changing idea of FORMALLY SUPPORTING PEARLESCENTS IN THEIR THIRD DLC RELEASE. They fixed the glitch and simultaneously introduced a tiny category of cyan-colored super-legendary weapons, one per manufacturer, with fancy names and fancy effects. And yes, they were actually called Pearlescents.

These cyan weapons are ultra-rare. Insanely rare. Stupidly rare. _Irritatingly_ rare. Taaaaaantalizingly rare. A lot of players never get close enough to sniff one of them. They go to all the potential drop points, and they shoot all the right bad guys, again and again, and after weeks on end they still may not have spotted one. If you believe the Big Dogs at the fashion houses, the art houses, the back-rooms at Harry Winstons, the auction blocks at Sothebys -- if you believe that rarity creates desire, then with this move Gearbox gave their player base a cyan-veined fucking priapism. Borderlands gun collectors arent dicking around with purples and oranges, noooooes. Rare as some of them are, it would never have been enough to keep the game thriving for four-plus years. Borderlands gun collectors are after the Pearlescents (or "Pearls" for short). Funny thing is, as weapons theyre not even that great, for the most part. The power ranges of the different colors have significant overlap, so only the top 15% or so oranges are better than the top purples. And only around the top 10% of all Pearlescents are better than the top oranges. So even when you find a Pearl you probably wont use it. Doesnt matter. Theyre rare, and special, so people go looking for them. POWER-UP #4: THE ARMORY BUG Gearbox admits (again and again) that they fucked up the ending of the main game. Right from the opening scene they start promising you a treasure-filled Vault, and you chase it the entire game, only to find that "Vault" was just a euphemism for Hentai Boss Monster, or maybe some twisted metaphor for realizing you were abused as a child, or some shit like that. They get it now. Theyre sorry. And they made up for it. After putting out the obligatory and awesome zombie expansion pack ("The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned"), they released an epic DLC titled The Secret Armory of General Knoxx.

This DLC has a _very_ different style and feel from the main game: an open road through the middle of a dusty sunken sea, with off-ramps to dunes infested with towering spiders, windbitten bandit camps, thriving midget colonies, junkyard strip clubs, corporate military installations, and the most hilariously awesome gay prison in gaming history.

The plotline involves overthrowing a surprisingly well-written general named Knoxx whos been consigned to the planet and -- to his lasting chagrin -- reports directly to a five-year-old named Admiral Mikey. Knoxx is charming and funny and deadly, and the DLC taken as a whole is one of the best-realized and most memorable mini-worlds ever produced in a video game.

The *entire* Borderlands endgame takes place in this DLC. It is the grand finale, the steady-state home base of operations for gun collectors everywhere. Even though there was one more DLC afterwards ("Claptraps New Robot Revolution"), with a setting and story every bit as brilliant and distinctive as the previous two, it has ultimately failed to capture much long-term attention from endgamers because it has no Pearlescents. It _does_ have its own new token economies, such as collecting rare robot parts, but its missing power-ups 4 and 5, so its just not as much fun. Looking again at the "Secret Armory" part of the Knoxx title, we see that Gearbox has once again promised a big vault full of loot -- but this time, they deliver. In a big way. The storyline winds up giving you three separate runs through Knoxxs armory, timed at two and a half minutes each, during which you can grab all the loot you can carry. _ The Marcus Kindcaid "Super Sweep" looting spree_ Thats cool and all; its blatant penance for the first game, and with it all is forgiven. But lets face it: 150 seconds isnt a very long shopping spree, even if you get three of them. Knoxxs Armory is _huge_. Its a four-story warehouse with elevators and ramps and movable platforms and crate-mazes, with the loot-chests scattered everywhere. Its got around 120 chests in all, with 20 being the super-rare kind that have a zillion-to-one chance of generating Pearls, but its so vast that on any given run youll only get to a small fraction of the loot. Which means the Armory, as nice as it is story-wise, isnt such a great bargain for collectors. Or it _wouldnt_ have been, except for the infamous "Armory Glitch". It turns out -- and Im one of the people who stumbled on this bug completely by accident -- that its possible to fall through the floor at a particular spot on the way in, landing directly in the armory without arming the 2-minute timer, and then you can loot every single chest at your leisure. _ After falling through the crack, its a 40-foot drop into the Armory_ Its the guiltiest gaming pleasure ever. Youre transformed into a kid who can sneak into the Chocolate Factory while the oompa loompas are sleeping. And you can do it again the next night, every night, forever. The bug is actually present throughout the game. At pretty much any edge joining elevated flat surfaces in Borderlands you can wiggle around and fall through the crack. Most of the time its an incredible annoyance -- for instance youll fall into an elevator shaft whose sole purpose is spawning bad guys, and the only way out is to kill yourself with grenades or exit the game. But the bug turns the Armory into a Farmery, and that, friends, is the super-MSG that makes the Borderlands end-game recipe the most successful of its kind since Ye Olde Diabloe back before you were born. Strictly speaking I suppose "farming" is the wrong word for it. Its not really farming if the vegetables can kill you. I think when you have to slug your way into a vault through a bunch of bad guys, and each time you run a genuine risk of dying, they call it "grinding". So fine, its the Secret Grindery. The "Armory glitch", as they call it on the forums, is the gateway drug that hooks you in and leads you inevitably to the Lobster Safari, up up up to the high mountaintop arena where youll spend the rest of your free time forever and ever. Youll need to make a hundred or so runs on the armory before youre well-equipped enough to face the Lobster. But during that few weeks youll be as happy as a heavily armed kid in a four-story military candy store. POWER-UP #5: CRAWMERAX THE INVINCIBLE AND THE "LEDGE GLITCH" So here we are at the climax. We made it! There should be a popcorn vendor here.

Crawmerax the Invincible is a whale-sized one-eyed purple people eater that Gearbox introduced in DLC3 _specifically_ for advanced multi-player co-op. Hes introduced in a late side-mission accurately titled "YOU. WILL. DIE." Youre not supposed to be able to kill him by yourself. Hes intended as a challenge for groups of heavily-armed, experienced Vault Hunters whove grown weary of existence and want to die like theyre playing Demons Souls. Crawmeraxs location is heavily advertised with big road signs reading "Secret Final Boss Monster: 20 km", "Secret Final Boss Monster: exit now". When you arrive the earth shakes. Inside his lair is a cavernous "staging area" with some ammo/health vending machines, a few mutilated corpses, miscellaneous hastily dumped construction equipment, and an elevator ascending directly into the solid rock overhead. It looks as if the military has built just enough infrastructure to let all comers try to slay the beast, and so far no luck.

The second critical Borderlands bug is the "ledge glitch". Like the Armory falling-through-the-floor glitch, its a bug that makes it possible to farm Crawmerax... sort of. Its success rate is low enough that it can seem like hes farming YOU. The glitch involves running like mad to a sheer drop on the left, diving into a small nook just below the arena floor, squatting down, facing the corner like hes the Blair Witch, and hoping you survive the acid barf until he decides whether youre unreachable or youre his next ledge meal. It can go either way.

_ "Ill have the bisque."_ *IF* all goes as planned, and thats a pretty big if, then he starts roaring and displaying, but he wont attack you as long as you stay put. At that point its _still_ nontrival to kill him, because one of his total six vulnerable spots is on his back, facing away from you. There are whole strategy guides devoted to hitting that spot. I can tell you its no picnic. But the payoff. Oh, the payoff. Players call Craw the "Lobster Piñata" on account of the vast amount of high-quality loot he drops when he dies. Except he doesnt really "drop" the loot so much as _explode_ multicolored items in all directions, and for several loooong seconds, tokens simply rain from the sky.

If raiding the Armory is like refined highbrow shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue, then Crawmeraxs death is like a bomb going off in a Toys R Us. Its like Santas Sleigh plowing into the Hindenberg. Its absolutely spectacular to watch. In multiplayer mode after the piñata explodes, everyone scrambles around like cockroaches in three distinct waves: first a mad dash to try to spot a Pearlescent, which _might_ happen every forty or fifty kills, then a light circular sprint to check out the orange weapons, and finally a smooth comb through every item to look for upgrades and rare finds. If theres nothing good, many players start dropping their Pearlescents and then "pretending" to find them by picking them up again. This is incredibly risky, as the co-op mode is _extremely_ buggy when it comes to inventory manipulation, but people do it anyway because Gearbox didnt give them any other way to show off their prizes. Then its back to the cave entrance, out-and-back to make him respawn (thank you Gearbox for that, btw), and the hunt starts all over again. Ive seen multiplayer runs on Crawmerax take anywhere from 20 seconds to over an _hour_ of nonstop chaos, depending on luck and everyones equipment. Heck, last night four of us tried six or eight times and just gave up. Hes that tough. The "ledge glitch", which allows single players to have a chance of killing him, is a CRITICALLY IMPORTANT part of the addictive cycle. Many players are reluctant to jump into online co-op play because they feel underequipped and under-experienced. Killing Crawmerax over and over can gradually improve your gear and confidence to the point where youre ready to try the co-op version. THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE Game developers always worry about players getting stuck in endgame ruts, going after the same boss monsters again and again for months or years. Players will eventually discover the easiest way to advance in the token economy, at which point all other routes become wasted effort. The Diablo III team at Blizzard claims in interviews that theyre all angsty about this, that it keeps them up at night. Theyre thinking waaaay too fucking hard about it. They need to man up and launch. People seem to like grinding OK, and the alternative of making all paths equally difficult is an impossible problem. Even if you made the game self-tuning via dynamic feedback loops, people would be pissed because its nondeterministic, with stuff getting randomly nerfed or powered up without warning. So just launch already. Gearbox waited until DLC3 to introduce a grinder path, and its interesting that they have _two_ of them -- the Armory and Crawmerax. Whats even more interesting is that theyre approximately equal in terms of payoff over time. A legit player with decent equipment can raid the armory two, maybe three times an hour, and probably see an average of 8 oranges per run. The same player could ledge-glitch Crawmerax maybe 4 or 5 times an hour, and see maybe 4 oranges per run. In terms of legendary weapons per hour, the two grinds are surprisingly close (~20/hour), so it comes down to a matter of personal preference. Crawmerax will get you killed more often, but he seems to have a higher drop-rate for Pearlescents. Most player probably graduate from Armory runs to Crawmerax runs to multiplayer Crawmerax runs, and are eventually (after months of upgrades) able to "solo" him alone without using the ledge glitch. _ This dude had way too much free time. Im jealous._ Regardless of which path you prefer, the whole treadmill exists to try to collect rare guns. And were talking guns that you cant really show anyone else, except indirectly via screenshots, videos, or using the desperate gamble of dropping them in a live game. Players can usually tell which weapon youre wielding by its looks and firing pattern, but they cant see its stats. In the end, the underground collection scene is a little surprising for existing at all. It was half intentional and half accidental. I dont hear Gearbox talking about this stuff in interviews. Well see. EPILOGUE Yeah, well, none of it prolly matters, since rumor has it theyre finally going to announce the Diablo III release date. Borderlands 2, we hardly knew ye. APPENDIX: DONT DO THIS Hi-ho, since were on the subject of Dos and Donts for creating an optimal gaming experience, I feel obligated to highlight some of the bigger fuck-ups present in Borderlands. I do this in the sincere hope that theres still time to fix them in the sequel. Its probably still a year away from launch, as I write this, so theres hope. "ITS LIKE WHITE CHRISTMAS": The Borderlands game world is a rich, thriving, multiculural melting-pot with thousands of white settlers and exactly one black guy. _One_. And hes from offworld. Jesus H. Teddy Fucking Roosevelt Christ on a sidecar, Gearbox -- thats *not* what we meant when we asked for a "token" economy. We were all horribly embarrassed to be members of the human race when Josh Whedons Firefly series pulled this stunt, featuring a fully Asianized future without any actual Asians in it. And we thought: "Gosh, well, at least _now_ nobodys ever gonna make _that_ particular douchewit mistake again." What. The. Fuck. _ Firefly cast. Sigh._ HOT BUTTONS: Having only four equipped-weapon slots in a world where EVERYONE ELSE has figured out that you can squeeze in eight on a wheel -- thats pretty fucking disappointing.

NETWORKING: After spending years developing and polishing the single-player game, they apparently outsourced the multiplayer lobby and connectivity code directly to Sonys network-security team. Whats wrong with Borderlands networking? Well, um, lets see... how about "everything". Yes, that sounds accurate. It crashes all the fucking time, randomly eats your precious inventory items, fails to give you even the slightest insight into what any given party is doing until you actually join their game, randomly goes full amnesiac about which character you were using and logs you in as a level-1 unequipped n00b... the list goes on. Once youre actually connected to a game and your party is firing on all cylinders, the experience is usually pretty smooth, as long as you _never_ change anything in your equipped inventory slots. But finding and connecting to a reasonable group of players is just a miserable shit sandwich.

MONEY S(T)INKS: Next time around they need a money sink. I know I ranted against too much immersive realism, but if youre going to make money THAT readily available, why bother with it at all? People have so much money in the endgame that its customary to leave the Crawmerax arena after hes dead by _killing yourself_, since it respawns you about a hundred feet closer to the exit than if you take the elevator teleporter. When players are choosing to pay a hundred million dollars to save ten seconds of running, its a good bet your game has a money problem. INVISIBLE WALLET: Oh, and speaking of money, you cant tell how much you have, nor how much anything costs, because they only have seven digit cash displays. By the end of the game every price over $10M is displayed as 9999999 dollars, and your wallet has 9999999 dollars. You can only see how much money you have when you die, and it tells you you lost 150323855 dollars (the max you can lose at once, 7% of 2^31-1). _ "So how much?"_ MIDGETS: You should be able to play as one. It would be utterly bad-ass. Havent you guys read _Game of Thrones?_ FAQ _Q: Arent you being a little hard on Gearboxs vagina?_ Hey, its not _that_ little. Nobodys ever complained bef... oh, I misread that. _Q: Doesnt modding ruin the economy?_ I mentioned that if Billy breaks into the teachers drawer and distributes all the Gold Stars then they become valueless. And I also mentioned that theres a player-file editor called WillowTree, one that happens to be capable of creating any weapon the game can generate -- and many combinations that the game does NOT generate because they are overpowered and/or nonsensical. _So of course there are modders. And they show up with their modded weapons, and they throw them around in big piles, daring people to come on over to the Dark Side, to grow up and git yerself a reeeeeal_ gun. Surprisingly, it doesnt seem to hurt anything. In fact in co-op Crawmerax missions its common for someone to throw out a pile of modded shields of invincibility, and for at least one player to wear one. Otherwise its too easy for everyone to die simultaneously, causing Craw to return to full strength. Even with a super-shield, you can easily be blasted off a cliff and die anyway, so its not a _total_ cheat. A high percentage of players have apparently decided that overpowered shields are part of the acceptable core infrastructure for otherwise legit gun-collecting. I _think_ this implies that Gearbox didnt make their top-end legit shields powerful enough. _ Kroms Canyon. Just cuz._ Im pretty sure if Borderlands were MMO, with persistent highly-visible score lists and real money on the line (because for MMOs there is _always_ an exchange rate between game currency and real-world currency, whether the publisher likes it or not), then yeah: the modding would fuck everything up. BUT THE BORDERLANDS TOKEN ECONOMY IS ONLY JUST BARELY ALIVE. Gearbox hasnt done a damn thing to increase its addictive pull since releasing The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, the DLC that introduced all three of the critical enhancements that cemented the economy. So its all basically honor-system. And the players are surprisingly honorable. You can tell immediately if -- and to what extent -- people are abusing the mods system. There are a lot of players out there who stay on the legit side to keep it sustainably challenging. Hell, some of them dont even use the ledge glitch. At least not when people are watching. You can also tell that the modders are no longer having fun, because their behavior becomes bizarre -- the kind of shit you normally only see at the end of a Bethesda game, where once youve leveled up high enough you get completely bored and start jumping off cliffs naked to try to air-kill boss monsters with a single swing of a broomstick. _Q: Are you going to bring Wyvern back?_ Patience. Im working on it. _Special thanks to Andrew Wilson for proofreading this post and making me take out stuff Id regret._ _Oh, and I almost forgot -- Thank You, everyone at Gearbox, for creating such an incredible game!_