BORDERLANDS - like Fallout 3 but with cars and MAXIMUM PWNAGE OMGWTFLOLNEWB FPS combat

i do not understand how saves work in this game.

That's the thing, there are loads. And if I just die and respawn then fair enough, it always seems to bring me back at the most recent. But if I exit and save then comeback later, I think it's bringing me back at the spawn point nearest to the start of whatever quest I'm on at the time, rather than the spawn point I triggered most recently. And some of the quests cover a lot of ground, geographically. So eg that early mission "best minion ever", I'd played right up to the bit where I was about to fight that Flynt guy, had to shut down, so triggered a save point right before that boss fight. Then when I came back later I got birthed right back at Hammerlock's cabin, which meant it'd undone maybe an hour of play for me.

― JimD, Wednesday, December 5, 2012 2:05 AM (5 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is basically what i'm dealing with and it's frustrating because i don't really have time to sit down and play for an hour and half straight to get to the next real "save" point.

If you're on a story mission, you can't save and quit and pick up your progress later. For other missions, like those where you're killing 10 bullymongs or whatever, your progress will be saved if you save and quit. I think the idea is so that if you're playing multiplayer it increases the likelihood that you're starting from the same place so it's easier to play through the game with randoms. There are checkpoints but they only work within a session.

Also, if you play through a second time on the harder difficulty, the checkpoints are fewer in number and much farther apart.

took me forever to figure out the whole janky saving thing, definitely had some moments of nerd rage when i realized that i'd lost what seemed like hours of my life after making the mistake (several times! w/o figuring it out!) in the middle of Where Angels Fear To Tread.

eventually, though, this just spurred me to play in a more aggressive style. less creeping around trying to snipe, more kamikaze. made it more fun, in a way, though i was bummed to learn that the game doesn't really do a good job of encouraging true thief/assassin style game-play. maybe it does if you max the bloodshed tree, but that only seems feasible as a multiplayer role---it'd be impossible to take down, say, BNK3R as a pure melee character

urgh that's annoying. basically means i can't play it unless i have a big chunk of time available.

You can always play side missions! :-)

i have neglected this game so much because i have it on 360 and my ps3 is too much of a shiny new toy to ignore. this tiny tina dragon quest thing looks appropriately BATSHIT

Yeah I don't have any of the other DLC but I want this one.

Yeah I don't have any of the other DLC but I want this one.

Ditto

I'm up to the Hammerlock DLC on my main character and it's a huge dud so far; it's like a big chunk of the first Borderlands as far as level design is concerned, with incredibly irritating healing enemies. The closest thing to a bright spot is the villain, which is basically some dude doing a James Urbaniak/Dr. Venture impression.

HOWEVER.

I started a second playthrough with the downloadable Psycho character (super cheap as part of the Steam sale), and it is just stupid fun. Everything's geared toward encouraging you to just rush headlong into melee range (I don't think a single one of his skills gives is oriented toward shooting, except for one that give melee and shotgun damage bonuses simultaneously) and soaking up damage. I'm dying constantly, but the very first skill point I got at level six went toward a hilariously dickish Suicide Psycho grenade-drop that almost always gets me back up on my feet immediately. So much fun!

have you done the Dark Souls DLC? Any good?

maybe ask in the dark souls thread?

there's a Dark Souls mission in the Borderlands 2 DLC: http://kotaku.com/borderlands-2-gives-a-pretty-elaborate-shout-out-to-dar-591952962

Waiting for next massive DLC sale on steam to stock up

Oh that's pretty cool! Didn't know that.

that was an xpost

yeah looks good dunnit

so it seems that the tiny tina dlc is hard as balls huh? i think the first dudes you run into are level 30 or some shit

so it seems that the tiny tina dlc is hard as balls huh? i think the first dudes you run into are level 30 or some shit

Yup. And there's def some situations that require (as a single player) total avoidance. Which is alluded to by at least one place name (something like The Village of Quick Passing Through).

It's more fun than the main game imo.

so it seems that the tiny tina dlc is hard as balls huh? i think the first dudes you run into are level 30 or some shit

The 3rd and 4th DLCs (Sir Hammerlock, Tiny Tina) are meant to be played after the main game, I think. I can't say one way or the other about Tiny Tina but Hammerlock certainly takes place after the end of the main game and starts out with enemies in the 30+ range.

yeah tiny tina would make zero sense if you hadn't finished the main story

I just finished Hammerlock and started Tiny Tina over the weekend and the difference in quality is just embarrassing. The first two were nice, Hammerlock was unbelievably half-assed, and Tiny Tina may be the best post-release DLC I've played for anything.

I started Tiny Tina last night. It's pretty cool I guess but I think I'm a little burned out on this game.

i'm having some n00b trouble w/ borderlands 1. when i pick up guns they don't equip. is there something special i have to do to use the guns i pick up?

yeah you have to HOLD the pick up button, tapping it just picks it up. otherwise you can manually equip it in your inventory screen

90% of the time you'll be stashing the guns anyway to sell later

wait, there's an inventory screen?!

i think it's select/back button on the xbox pad? you may have to use the trigger buttons to scroll to the right page

thanking u

So I finally decided to try out the DLC in the original Borderlands on PC. Despite already being having Steam DRM, I have to manually activate the first two DLCs using their separate Securom authorization program... but of course, when Steam tries to contact the key server, I can't actually obtain the DLC keys. Awesome. Thank goodness they dropped this crap for the other DLCs and the sequel.

I remember enjoying the zombie adventure for its deliberate whiplash change of tone

I'm all excited for the Pre-Sequel, but the first trailer for Battleborn is some Dynasty Warriors of Amular bullshit. A first person MOBA RPG? DO NOT WANT.

this game (borderlands 1) is kinda hard!

Surprisingly so. It has weird spikes and then long plateaus of difficulty.

yup, that's what I remember

yeah. like one minute i am just mowing through skags and bandits like crazy, and then i level up, and all of a sudden GLOWING EYES BADASS SKAG or BADASS MUTANT PSYCHO shows up

and then dead, over and over again

So what's the difficulty level of Borderlands compared to, say, Demon's Souls? Because I just started playing this (the first one) and, yeah, it's kinda brutal at points (spent like an hour and change last night plowing about halfway through a cave full of enormous monsters before almost running out of ammo and ultimately having to sprint back past a horde of respawned beasties in an effort to GTFO without dying). A lot of fun but I don't know if I have the fortitude for anything more punishing than this thing. But it's an addictive and benign kind of hard (as opposed to something like Mirror's Edge's "oh so I'm just going to keep falling off of this stupid ledge 300 times in a row, well maybe instead you should go fuck yourself" brand of deeply irritating difficulty).

I've played limited amounts of Borderlands, but Borderlands 2 is insanely fun, at the right difficulty level to challenge me without making me want to quit the game, and I am a person who generally abhors FPSs.

iirc correctly there is some talk itt about the spikiness of difficulty, which i agree with. there are definitely long stretches where you tear through it and then hit sudden roadblocks. i actually thought that worked out as a positive and there was a pretty good balance struck. the important point tho is that it is not a constant hard grind. i don't think most ppl should be put off from the BL games because of difficulty.

Sorry if I was unclear (work wreaks havoc on my writing abilities). I'm playing the first Borderlands currently but wondering if something like Demon's Souls would even be worth wasting my time on if I'm finding this tough. Prrrrobably should've posited the question in the Demon's Souls thread. But, yes, Borderlands has been a ton of fun nonetheless (except on the occasions when, despite full health and shields, I have been quickly and inexplicably killed by something I didn't even see).

I can't speak for Borderlands 1, but Borderlands 2 was really hard for me when I wasn't playing co-op, as someone who doesn't play many shooters. If you can do co-op I recommend it. But also, that game is set up so that if something is difficult you can put it off and do it a little bit later after you level up a bit on side missions. After that you'll probably not have as many issues. Do some side missions and come back.

Demon's Souls is really different in that the difficulty is more about recognizing patterns in a parry/move/thrust/judo-ish sorta way, whereas Borderlands is more about finding the enemy's critical spot and putting a million bullets in it.

Well the whole point of Demon's Souls is that dying is an integral part of the gameplay, so it seems like the games have completely different aims in mind with regards to what "difficulty" and dying mean to the player, so it's hard to compare. I never got far in Demon's Souls but that wasn't because I didn't love the game; I just ran out of free time to play it and never went back to it when I did get time.

Also I found it very helpful when I was playing single-player to be using a class that makes up for my lack of shooting skill. In Borderlands 2 there is the Commando class, which gives you a turret that can help give you some cover (akin to the Soldier class in B1), and the Siren class allowed me to freeze a particularly tough enemy so I could take a breath and focus on whatever side issue was distracting me or whatever. The Assassin and Berzerker classes were much harder for me to make progress with. I think those are better suited for more veteran shooters.

my only problem w/ the borderlands games is that they're clearly so much more fun multiplayer but the lives of myself + my friends are not conducive to regular mp gameplay.

I still haven't gotten around to B2, but I definitely remember B1 having stretches were you had to grind for a bit, killing enemies and doing side missions to get your character up to par with the regular story.

the lives of myself + my friends are not conducive to regular mp gameplay.

80% of the time I was playing with randoms and it wasn't too problematic for me. Sometimes they'd just be in a room or something shooting the shit with each other on mic instead of playing, but usually I was able to find some motivated players at my relative class level.

I think, because my gameplay is usually restricted to an hour or so after work and an hour or so before bed, the actual most frustrating part of the game thus far has been the autosaving. Which has been less than ideal. I sometimes can't get quite far enough to feel like I've made much progress before I have to go do something else. And then I come back and the save point seems almost arbitrary, except that it often entails a respawn of everything I thought I'd killed and the exact same depleted ammo I had previously. I've been playing as the sniper, though, so that's probably made for slower going.

I still have yet to do multiplayer on any PS3 game. Someday. Still a little bitter that the Bulletstorm server shutdown announcement was issued the day I got the game in the mail.

i got bored of this (BL1) right when car driving became a huge part of the story (dahl headlands)

my bud just got BL2 so I'm stoked to actually do multiplayer

I tried like twice and hated playing with randoms