Borderlands - when you get right down to it - is pretty frikkin great. It doesn't have an incredible cast of voice actors - nor does it contain a plot of particular interest or artistic merit. It is a game where you shoot things. Rather frequently in fact. When you shoot these things you become more proficient... in the shooting of things. As far as game design is concerned this is a pretty fucking radical direction.
Many games these days seem to utilise this "shooting things" paradigm but rarely does there seem a point in doing so. In Modern Warfare 2, why was I shooting things? Well - the basic sensation of shooting a things I suppose but that's hardly a new experience. It certainly wasn't for the story. Christ, when it comes to the First Person Shooter I'm hardly ever doing it to see the story. After so many years of the same basic pattern, the same basic story and the same basic gameplay it is so overwhelmingly refreshing to play something as unpretentious and bare-boned as Borderlands. This is for the same reason that I've sank many more hours into EDF: 2017 than Gears of War 2.
Borderlands is a game that knows its place. It knows it was never likely to create a story worth shooting things for. What it does know is that the shooting of things is what's really important to that staple of the gaming diet - the FPS. By wrapping the simple and instantly gratifying act of gun-play around the frame of a Diablo-esque grind-fest, Gearbox has crafted a game that is constantly exhilarating - even when trudging back and forth between two featureless sheds in a featureless desert to claim your reward in dispatching yet another group of generic, apocalyptic bandits.
Every shot - and I mean every shot - contributes in some small way. Whether it be a kill towards a bounty quest, looting a shiny weapon, experience towards a level up, a minuscule increase in weapon proficiency or even just a couple of bucks and a round of ammo - every single shot you take means it's going to be more satisfying the next time you take a shot. If I can do all that in the company of friends - all the better. Suddenly, I don't care if the game doesn't feature Mindblowing Set Pieces (TM) or Visceral Gameplay (TM). All the Hans Zimmer in the world isn't going to alter the fact that once I've killed that first Insurgent I may as well have killed every Insurgent.
Thar be a lot of mouth-flapping around these 'ere parts concerning pacing in videogames. Usually, it seems that when people refer to pacing in a videogame they're referring to it in the same context as film. While this certainly applies to the more cinematic games out there - the Uncharted's and the Metal Gear's - this comparison seems wholly inappropiate when describing the basic device which distributes fun in most videogames. Pacing for me is about the regular distribution of power and gameplay features during the length of the game.
It's the melee combat in Crackdown - going from a puny mall guard who hits like a fly swatter to a hulking, law keeping behemoth capable of punching cars through the atmosphere. It's going from a Van de Graff generator in inFamous to an electrical demigod who could bitch-slap Raiden himself. It's going from a terrified EDF volunteer scarcely able to survive being sneezed on by an ant to a Homing Missile-armed badass capable of nonchalantly whistling his way out of a mushroom cloud. Likewise - with Borderlands it's all about jumping off the bus with a rusty peashooter gripped in you shaking fist and turning yourself into a cool, calm and thoroughly collected wastelander wielding a luminscient firearm that can melt your fucking soul.
All in all - this whole RPG x FPS things works a treat - but let's not all start doing it, hmm? I might just end up craving something like Modern Warfare 2 if every FPS from here on had an obligatory XP system bolted on.
... what's that about MW2's multiplayer?!
