Zero Punctuation: Borderlands 2

Saulkar

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RJ 17 said:
"It's like the first game, but better" without clearly being able to define what "but better" means.
I formally take up the challenge.

The game is better because it adds onto already existing gameplay mechanics, story elements, and environments. Additionally the original quirks that defined the original game were improved rather than removed.

Time for some depth: The original game had little variation between guns and almost no variation between manufacturers beyond stats. The second one has a tremendous number of variations between how guns function, look, and handle with additional properties to certain weapons that make them one of a kind (a bazooka that spins in the air and fires all of its missiles in random directions after being reloaded when already full). Furthermore the difference between gun manufacturers is unmistakable with both appearance and performance being a dead give away. It does suffer from the issue of there being way to many guns that are completely useless throwaways but that feeling you get when you come across a unique railgun or plasma sniper rifle that fires faster than most assault rifles leaves you ecstatic. Lastly the shooting carries significantly more weight with easily discernible differences governed by their stats and manufacturer.

When it comes to enemies what can I say? There is a tremendous variation between them with many requiring vastly different strategies for dealing with.

The NPC are for the most part completely voiced with unique personalities that balance style and substance. Additionally many are not static and while very bland, they perform actions that imply they are working in some way or just outright shooting everything in sight from a high perch.

The story is always present with character disposition, environmental evolution, mounting challenges, and escalating side quests. This is complemented with solid characters and their respective development. The side quests themselves offer challenge, variation, and optional objectives that sometimes encourage exploration or adopting a different play style. Lastly the story carries weight and in turn the plot twists are all the more effective.

The environments themselves are often open, beautiful, while generating a natural compulsion to explore.

The vehicles are supposedly a challenge to use but I personally found them much more fun to use than the bricks that dominated the first game given their physics overhaul. (minus they cannot flip)

When it comes to the quirks themselves that plagued as well as defined the first game, they improved rather than removed them. There are too many to list but the most glaring issue being the poor vehicles, which are now fun albeit flawed.

Lastly, the art style not only improved but evolved and complemented the game and its atmosphere as well.

Lastly, lastly the pop culture awareness of the game gets and respects its source material given that it encompasses the developers themselves to varying degrees.
 

PunkRex

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Ledan said:
Idk.... I found part 1 of Borderlands 1 great, then it petered out quickly. Borderlands 2 is like that beginning part that had character, extended throughout the game. BL1 felt so... dead after a while. BL2 is still alive, and they've improved on BL1. Not as much as I would like, but quite a bit anyways.
Why fix what wasn't broken? I mean, there are a few broken bits left BUT the overall gameplay mechanics should be and are the same. It is just: go to point A, kill dudes, get guns, get money, kill dudes. But it does it very well.
I really agree with you there, the entire mid game between first leaving the starting area and reaching those alien ruins is a blur of desert, cars and bullets for me with the only real memorable bits being the occasional funny dialouge from Scooter and co across the radio and some of the bosses, especially Rak Hive and Skagzilla, but getting to them took waaaaaaaaay to long. Getting my car blown up by the ump-teenth bandit-mobile was jarring... especially after taking out all his mates... and extended family... and acquaintances...
 

level27smartass

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I whole Hearty disagree with Yahtzee. I love this game I personally thought Borderlands 2 vastly improved on the its predecessor. I cant honestly comprehend a concept such as "too much looting" quite honestly but too each his own. I also disagree with that assertion that classes aren't different from each other this time around for example i found that the siren's phase-lock skill is actually a valuable asset and synergies great with Dps builds.
 

LittleJoeRambler

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Zachary Amaranth said:
UnmotivatedSlacker said:
I expect a guy getting paid to do this to finish the games
And that doesn't seem at all unreasonable, especially with the amount of time a game can last?
My Steam in-game time clocked at 42 hours for my first run-through of the game, start to finish, with plenty of dying (due to my own personal retardation), random exploring and probably 75% of the side-quests completed. If you cut out the non-essentials (like most of the side quests and exploration), you could probably cut that down to 30 hours (if not further). 10 hours to write a review and make a 5 minute video brings it to a normal 40-hour work week.

I understand that Yahtzee is a busy guy (Mana Bar and Extra Punctuation obligations as well as everything else he does), and spending 40 hours on a single game in a week is probably unreasonable. But I don't think you should make comments on a story you haven't finished. It's like reading the first two chapters of a 20-chapter book and making your judgment there. I can also understand saying something like "the gameplay was so bad I just couldn't force myself to finish the story quest," but it doesn't really make critiques on the story any more valid. Besides, if that's the case, there should be plenty of material to come up with for a critique without having to reference the story at all.

I agree with several of his points. After a while, it all started to feel really tedious, many of the guns are only slight upgrades, and hunting through a thousand boxes for ammo and money gets really boring. But while health does the standard regeneration thing as well as there being health drops, Borderlands 2's enemies don't typically drop enough ammo to keep you going. Searching for ammo in this game feels like searching for medkits in other games, it adds a level of urgency to all your actions. The inventory system is still pretty bad, though not as bad as the first one, and going through your stuff to sell it or mark it as trash still feels sticky.

The major difference I can see between Borderlands 2 and most other shooters is what you're rewarded with. With other shooters, clearing an area means moving to the next one, i.e. your reward is advancement towards the resolution. But with Borderlands 1 and 2, you're rewarded with loot to pick up, and advancement towards the resolution. You glut on the little rewards until you don't really even want the big one anymore. That's why I think I started getting bored with looting; towards the end of the game I started ignoring everything that wasn't purple or better. Borderlands 2 throws thousands of green and hundreds of blue items at you, to the point that you start seeing them like you would white items, and digging through that mountain of refuse takes FOREVER. One of the game's selling points ultimately became one of the things I didn't really like about it.

TL;DR, those who comment on stories should probably finish them, and it's not terrible but it probably won't be my game-of-the-year.
 

theultimateend

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He killed everyone until a vault hunter survived, so that he had found someone good enough to be able to do
tehweave said:
Team Widdlebiscuit defeated Shub-who last time?

Anyway, I expected as much from Yahtzee, yes Reddit has basically GUSHED over this game for the past week or so and it's nice to see it finally taken down a notch.

Have I ever played it? No. Will I? Eventually.
Do you need games to be loathed?

Seems like a weird thing to be breathlessly waiting for.

"People are having too much fun with someone, I wish someone would shit on the things they like. someone please...save me."
 

Dead Seerius

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Tippy said:
What the hell was with those super-long pauses after the "sarcastic" attempts at jokes?

For some reason I just keep going back to watching all of Yahtzee's old stuff which was a million times funnier and vastly more entertaining.

In his ~10-20 latest reviews he seems to have slowed down his talking a lot...I had no issues understanding him even when he went at machine-gun rampage speed in his older videos, but now he's so much slower and not as funny.

At first I thought I was just getting desensitized to his jokes, but when I re-watch his old stuff for the 10th time I still find myself laughing my ass off at the joke and/or his delivery. Reviews like Witcher 1 & 2, FF13, Halo Reach, Sonic games, etc etc are nothing short of hilarious.

Yahtzee, atleast speed things up again!
So I'm NOT the only one that thinks he's slowed down his pace.

And I think what's missing from his newer reviews is the sense of enjoyment he seemed to get from critiquing a game - whether he hated the game or not, Yahtzee just seemed more enthusiastic in the older videos.

He still has some pretty good jokes, but the tone seems much less light-hearted.

Dunno, maybe it's just me.
 

Dreadman75

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erttheking said:
I can't be the only one that wants to see Yahtzee do an FTL review. After his DayZ review, I realized that Yahtzee is at his funniest when he's talking about his experiences with a game. Seriously, cant you hear him saying, "unfortunately my voyage was brought to a sudden halt by a random sun turning my ship into a saturday afternoon BBQ," or "then the game got bored and decided to organize an orgy between my crew and four giant mantises, and guess who was on bottom?"

Overall this review was kinda...lackluster though.
Okay that's just fucking hilarious! Have you ever considered being a comedian, or at the very least a comedy writer? I agree with you as well, Yahtzee is perhaps at his best not only when talking about his gaming experiences but when he does so at a speed any normal person would get their tongue tied. He seems to have slowed down his speech a bit lately.

OT: I love Borderlands 2, crappy vehicle controls and all. That's really all I have to say on that.
 

4RT1LL3RY

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I like Borderlands 2 but it has its issues. Splitting up cash and ammo drops into 50 different crates in an area and having to manually open each and click again to loot.m Tiny amount of inventory and bank space considering the amount of guns. The online still has no lag compensation.

I'm currently at 8 million dollars in credits and the only thing it gets spent on is dieing, ammo, and slots. Item of the day just seem to be less good then last game, a common item as item of the day should happen.

But they made plenty of improvements from last game, more enemy variety, colorful environments with less "grit", having a bank available from the start, being able to share items between characters, having a plot that was much more memorable then the last, enemy ai that is much better.
 

-Dragmire-

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Char-Nobyl said:
Elamdri said:
3 things I agree with:

1: The sissification of the original 4 heroes is incredibly contrived.
2: The vehicles handle awful.
3: Not being able to track multiple quests sucks

one thing I think he should have mentioned: The farming aspect, especially red chest farming or farming Sanctuary for Eridum.
Numbers 2 and 3 are valid, but thus far, everyone and their mother has called Yahtzee on number 1.

Anyone who played the game knows which boss he's referring to...and it seems like everyone who played the game until the end of the same quest where you fight that boss knows that being able to beat him where the original four Vault Hunters failed is a very, very, very big plot point.
I thought Yahtzee meant the original characters seemed weaker because they were defeated in this game after beating the big bad of the last game.

I never played the first game so going through Borderlands 2 doesn't give me that problem.
 

AJey

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One word - very accurate! I also wish people stopped thinking that enjoying something and seeing obvious flaws in it are two mutually exclusive things. They re not! I enjoy the game, yet identify most of the flaws in it (and there are many). Blind defense of this game by some people is really unsettling!
 

Therumancer

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I can say I'm ambivilent (did I spell that correctly?) about Borderlands as a series. I tried the second one hoping they would pad out the first one a bit more, and make it a bit more of an RPG, with a greater degree of depth in terms of skills and things you can do... which they really didn't.

I'll also answer Yahtzee's joking question, if nobody else has:

The Planet is not in of itself made up of borderlands, but rather is part of the borderlands of a larger universe. The idea it's on the fringes of a great intersteller civilization, where law and order have fallen apart, making planets like this right on the edge of unknown, unexplored space the new frontier, and hunting for treasure on planets like this the
equivilent of the real world gold rush. A lot of science fiction stories use similar logic. Borderlands explains a bit through it's dialogue and implication, but it's never spelled out directly... probably because it's not really aiming at an audience that cares much about lore or backstory, or how the inherant reality is justified and consistant within itself. Borderlands could thus be considered sort of a half arsed parody of western and campy sci-fi cliques, that never quite approaches the level of sophistication needed to become a full fledged Satire (falling short whenever it seems like it might get to that point).
 

DarkhoIlow

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Ah what a wonderful video to start the day with,thank you for the chuckles yet again Yahtzee.

I thoroughly enjoyed Borderlands 2 even while playing solo since all of my friends were busy playing Guild Wars 2 at that time.I didn't find any point of going back after finishing the game however.
 

Tippy

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SanAndreasSmoke said:
So I'm NOT the only one that thinks he's slowed down his pace.

And I think what's missing from his newer reviews is the sense of enjoyment he seemed to get from critiquing a game - whether he hated the game or not, Yahtzee just seemed more enthusiastic in the older videos.

He still has some pretty good jokes, but the tone seems much less light-hearted.

Dunno, maybe it's just me.
It's not just you, you could feel the genuine passion in his voice (whether it be raw anger or gleeful joy) and kinda get pulled along with it. I could literally FEEL his frustration as he played through some terrible games and FEEL his joy as he played the good ones.

I don't think it's him though, it's more likely what the game industry does to a reviewer. Even the most tank-armored reviewers/critics aren't immune to getting slowly worn down by game after game.

Frankly I used to simply sit there sometimes in AWE at how Yahtzee could spend week after week dragging himself through some of the titles he's reviewed so far. Sure he was getting paid for it, but it still takes a certain kind of person to drag themselves for 10-30+ hours through games, everything cliche endlessly repeated, every plot endlessly predictable, etc etc and still look forward to next week. He may have been throwing jokes of being super-cynical, but looking at what he does it would be hard NOT to become one. Staying positive after so many years would be like a veteran heart surgeon to was still scared of seeing blood splattering everywhere.

It's literally a thousand times harder than say...a movie critic, who just has to sit there for 2 hours eating popcorn once a week (or fortnight).
 

MetalMagpie

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Gorilla Gunk said:
Sounds like he immediately stopped playing after the Wilhelm fight.

SPOILER: There's a REASON Wilhelm goes down so so easily.
I'm fairly certain he did get to the reason, because he makes a point at the beginning of the review about Handsome Jack trying to kill you, then just trying to trick you, so why did he try to kill you at the start... (etc.)

Personally, I absolutely adore the game so far (not finished it yet). But I loved the first one too.
 

Kyrian007

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Abandon4093 said:
tmande2nd said:
UnmotivatedSlacker said:
tmande2nd said:
Good.

Another reason not to buy it.
Stop taking ZP seriously. He's a comedian, not a critic.
Let me guess my comment riled you up because you like Borderlands 2?
I agree with Yahtzee about most games he reviews so yes I do take what he says under lots of consideration.
Zero punctuation isn't a review, it's a piece of entertainment. If you're using these as some sort of yardstick by which to judge the games and not just laughing at the ball and tit jokes. You're doing it wrong.

Watch an actual review, you know. One that goes into detail about how the games actually play.
Uhh... No. I'd rather have someone tell me right out whether or not a game is shit without watching him play it for 15 minutes before he sums it all up in a manner that is just as "subjective" as a ZP review.

It is different for everyone of course, and some people have very different tastes in games. I do use ZP for help in determining what games to buy, Yahtzee and I have very similar tastes in games. If he actually gives something a good review (it does happen...) then the games are gauaranteed to be ones I like. I usually find I'm pretty disapointed in games that he tears apart. On rare occasions I have fun with games that he hates, but I perfer to look at it this way. Every single thing he says is good... I really like and they become my favorite games. Everything else? I'll either have bought it or decided not to by the time his Aussie ass gets ahold of it. Mostly I use ZP as a guage to pick up something if I initally decided to pass on it but Yahtzee says it's OK.

But the habitual Yahtzee naysayers (even the "just for teh lulz, but not a REALZ critic" posers) are in actuallity just butthurt fanboys of a game he panned. See how generalizations work?
 

Darth_Payn

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Calibanbutcher said:
Yathzee did not like Borderlands 2?
Well twist my nipples spank my ass and call me tuesday, what a fiddlybonking surprise.
I think the same thing on all his COD reviews, and it 's still a hoot.
 

Duffeknol

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Dansen said:
Duffeknol said:
Thank God. Yahtzee still seems to be the only sane person left on earth when it comes to these absolutely putrid games.

I know looking to find your opinion validated on the internet is pretty lame, but it can sure as hell feel satisfying sometimes, especially when half the internet tried to kick you to death if you so much as mumble that you don't like Borderlands because it's repetitive and boring, and that comparing numbers to more numbers shouldn't be anyone's idea of fun.
You mad bro?

Beter yet, have you even played it?
I actually enjoy the setting and its satirical take on a variety of game and story genres.
Of course I've played it. With 'it' I mean Borderlands 1. Gave it a full day. Played it for like 10 hours straight. Didn't get interesting, uninstalled. It can be satirical all it wants, but the gameplay makes me want to shoot myself.
 

Duffeknol

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Abandon4093 said:
Kyrian007 said:
Abandon4093 said:
tmande2nd said:
UnmotivatedSlacker said:
tmande2nd said:
Good.

Another reason not to buy it.
Stop taking ZP seriously. He's a comedian, not a critic.
Let me guess my comment riled you up because you like Borderlands 2?
I agree with Yahtzee about most games he reviews so yes I do take what he says under lots of consideration.
Zero punctuation isn't a review, it's a piece of entertainment. If you're using these as some sort of yardstick by which to judge the games and not just laughing at the ball and tit jokes. You're doing it wrong.

Watch an actual review, you know. One that goes into detail about how the games actually play.
Uhh... No. I'd rather have someone tell me right out whether or not a game is shit without watching him play it for 15 minutes before he sums it all up in a manner that is just as "subjective" as a ZP review.
Translation, you want to be told what games you like.

Suppose that's alright if you're really indecisive or something.

Personally I'd rather someone break down how the game plays with some footage so I can make an informed decision on whether or not I'm likely to enjoy it.

Yahtzee doesn't write reviews, he writes humorous critiques. They're meant to entertain, not inform.
That's a pretty dumb thing to say. It's very easy to distinguish between little nitpicks Yahtzee points out for entertainment value and valid criticism he comes up with. Don't forget, the man has a deep love and understanding of the business, being a writer himself. He genuinely hates games like Borderlands, games that are just excuses to keep looting and finding one more gun with a +0.2 stamped on it. Dismissing that as 'just being entertainment' is completely missing the point.