LavaLampBamboo said:
Uh wut? Borderlands wasn't brown at all. The desert was the brownest bit about it. The rest of the game was as colourful as unicorn vomit. It was a brilliant game. The RPG elements weren't perfect but pretty solid. I don't think it really counts as a guilty pleasure, it's just a pleasure
Hugely colorful the way it went from brown deserts to grey caves to brown and grey buildings, back to brown deserts, back to grey caves. Then there was the brown and grey base that you got to going thru a grey cave that emptied you into a brown desert that you had to go thru to get to brown and grey buildings so you could find the location of a grey cave that led you to the final brown and grey canyon where you admittedly (and for seemingly no reason whatsoever) fight a purple Cthulhu. The weakest and most useless part of the lame story with its maddening unskippable cutscenes did actually provide us with some differing hues, because the boss was a part of the scenery.
Kidding, its not that bad. Actually I enjoyed the "cel shaded" look it had far more than I do most "realistic" shooters. Even if the terrain was bland and the level design linear and predictable (you're never more than 5 or 10 feet from the nearest chest high wall/boulder) it still beats the look of Battlefield or MW. "Brownshooter" is just the generic term for the cranked out samey shooter that ultimately it was. My biggest beef was with the so called "RPG" elements. It's hard for me to classify them as any kind of good, when they were completely ignorable. Weapon levels happened independent of doing anything other than cranking out bullets, and I found that I never had to pay any attention to it to make sure my weapons were doing enough damage. It was like it wasn't even there. The system of "perks" or abilities were useless and I wound up switching to only passive ones to regen ammo so I didn't have to pick anything up. And as long as the quest (and there were only fetch, assassinate, and flipswitch quests) wasn't "impossible," you were at a level enough to easily complete it using the exact same strategy. Shotguns and SMG's for animals. Snipers for humans, because they never snipe and can't hit at any kind of range. So, levels were pretty ignorable as well.
When you can ignore all of the "rpg" aspects and beat the game solely on the skills learned with wolfenstien... it?s just a shooter. But my opinion is skewed by the fact that I am a fan of the turn-based number crunching traditional JRPG style rpg. Borderlands "elements" are far more reminiscent of a more "western" style of action-type rpg. They just forgot to make it necessary to use those elements to beat the game.
Or, tldr... not everyone thought it was brilliant. I should have qualified that post with with "guilty for me because in my opinion it blows but I play it with friends anyway because its hard to find splitscreen anymore." Nothing wrong with liking Borderlands if that's your type of game, I just don't like today's average cranked out shooter.
