Borderlands 2: The Wishlist
Gearbox Software has announced Borderlands 2 and a bunch of details on the changes going into this loot-happy FPS/RPG will be in the next Game Informer magazine. While the first Borderlands has had far from universal acclaim - after all, even the most amazing games have seemingly well-organized contingencies of haters out there - we at AtomicGamer are coming at it from the perspective of those who absolutely loved the first game. Here's what we're hoping to see in the sequel.
Asynchronous Questing
In Borderlands, jumping into cooperative games with random people was difficult because the game was so hellbent on making your quest progress a major part of your character's progress. That was fine, but if you were behind someone else in the fairly linear line of quests that make up a playthrough, you could not help your own character's progress through the story in any way. And if you were ahead of someone else's, then you had to help them catch up to your own progress before you could work on new content. It's partly the limitation that a 3D, client-side-server game has, where people can't run off into whole other areas of the game to progress separately (yet on the same server) when online, but it was also difficult to keep quest progress together with two players - and doing it with four was a huge hassle.
I'd like to see much more of the game be about free-form "quests" that are more like what other games turn into challenges or achievements, or even how MMO games like Rift and Warhammer Online do "public quests" where your presence in the proper area begins a repeatable quest that you can take on with friends, any of whom may or may not have seen or completed them. Some may disagree with me, but I don't feel like Borderlands really requires a constant thread of main-quest objectives to follow. I'm not talking about a fully open world-type environment like Fallout 3, but it doesn't need to constantly keep your quest log packed with things to do, either.
Full Armor
The only armor you really wore in Borderlands was your shield generator, which could have randomized properties on it. Your character, whether it was Brick, Roland, Lilith, or Mordecai, always looked the same with only a couple of basic color choices. I'd love to see separate armor pieces modeled on to your character, along with all the stats that each bit of armor actually entails. It's likely that female characters would get some stereotypical steel bikinis and the like, and for a game like Borderlands 2 that's probably fine, but either way I'd love to see not only a full range of armor pieces, but also more stats for us to play with.
Gun Measurement
One of Borderlands' best innovations was in how it could randomly generate guns with entirely different looks and stats. What made things difficult, however, was figuring out what gun is better than another; little green and red arrows attached to each stat (comparing guns to each other or to your equipped weapon) tried to give you an idea, but the extra properties on each gun, and how your character made use of those properties, made this information sometimes difficult to interpret or just plain misleading. Sure, you could just equip it and try it out on the noggin of a nearby enemy, but it becomes a timesink once you've got twenty guns in your inventory, none of which you're sure of are better than the ones you have equipped, and four more just dropped.
There's got to be a better way. I don't really know what it is, but there's gotta be something.
Special Abilities
While each character in Borderlands had a Diablo-like talent tree, many of the points you spent in it worked passively; each character only actually had one special ability, which the talent points you spent may or may not have improved. For the sequel, it'd be nice to see that expanded a bit to the point where we've got a choice of several abilities. A quick radial menu to select between them would work nicely on consoles, while the number keys (Function keys and/or mouse wheel for weapon switching?) would do just fine on PC.
Bosses Should Always Drop Nice Loot
Remember when you opened the Vault in Borderlands? Remember when you took out the boss and bunch of white and green loot dropped? Yeah, that should never happen. Bosses need to drop nice loot, and players do really love the idea of running a tough boss repeatedly looking for loot. It worked for the Diablo series, so it should be fine here.
Of course, if the General Knoxx DLC is any indication of what Gearbox is doing for the future, then I think already figured this out...
Create and Modify Items
One of the greatest tragedies about Borderlands is that there's this awesome system for putting guns together piece by piece, adding properties that change the look and feel of the gun - and no way for players to experience that same system. I don't think that any feature for building your own guns in this way should be overused, as the randomness of loot drops makes things really exciting when you do find an amazing piece of gear, but having a graphical version of the game's gun builder to use once in a while would be amazing. Maybe as a reward for killing a chapter boss, maybe as a once-per-playthrough feature, or maybe players can even deconstruct guns into parts (or loot parts from enemies' bodies) and make new ones that way could work. Either way, letting us see how guns are built in-game would be a really cool way to expose what Borderlands does so well under the hood.
Remember the Imbue option in Diablo II? In Act 1, you could take one mundane item and turn it into a "Rare". I'd love to see a feature like this added to Borderlands 2, where a good item could be upgraded - you could have properties either boosted, have new ones added, or just have them overwritten with badass new ones entirely.
Online
Cheating was rampant in the first game, mostly because all characters were stored on client PCs and consoles - cheaters could hack themselves impossibly good guns on both PCs and consoles. Unfortunately, Gearbox didn't have the kind of resources to build a huge server infrastructure for Borderlands and properly secure the savegames and online play, and it's hard to blame them or publisher 2K for this when so many new game properties are failures nowadays. But now that this is an established brand with four million copies sold for the first game, we think it's time for Gearbox to build a system to store characters and possibly host games in a cheat-free environment.
I'm imagining something similar to Diablo II, where you could play single player offline or "open", client-hosted LAN/internet games - all without any requirement to be online and no protection against cheating. But then there'd also be a separate mode where you only played online and character files (along with their gear) was protected against hacks and cheats.
And while I'm just making up things for Gearbox to improve, let's up the player count from four. Make it eight! (Sixteen?! Alright, probably not.)
Vehicles
Vehicles are a difficult thing to talk about, mostly because I'm torn on whether Gearbox should either scale them back or bring them forward. They were useful for getting around and fun to use in a couple of vehicle fights, but at some point in the game you realize your own hand-held guns are better than the ones on any vehicle; maybe having a way to upgrade and "level up" your vehicle is a good idea, but there's also this idea I'm kicking around of a vehicle having a blank turret mount that you slap your own hand-held rifle or rocket launcher into. The car's own powerplant gives it more power, beefing your gun's firepower by a factor of two, five, or even ten, so you're using a gun you're familiar with on foot in a new turret-type setting against big bad enemies. Maybe you can mount your guns in front-mounted... yeah, it's probably too much to ask for.
Thing is, the best thing about Borderlands for many players was playing with and handling guns, so bringing that over to the vehicle system could be a real winner. The other idea would be to simply scrap vehicles entirely, which I'm not a fan of, or put them only into very particular bits of gameplay (kind of like what RAGE is doing, where it's clear when and when not to be in your car). I can't decide, but leaving it the way it is seems like a bad idea.
Oh, and remove the animation for getting into and out of cars. Looks great the first two or three times, gets really annoying after that. Just magically teleport me in to a seat, please!
Better PC Version
Borderlands worked fine on PC, but there were a few issues that kept it from being embraced entirely by the PC gaming audience. The interface wasn't entirely mouse-friendly but little additions like field of view adjustments, toggle-to-aim (or crouch) toggles, things like that would make a big difference for many gamers. The more recent iterations of Unreal Engine (which the first Borderlands runs on) have been notorious for a lack of close-to-the-metal options, as they also have iffy support for things like antialiasing and the like. I'm not advocating swtiching game engines, but we have seen a few games on UE3 start to support these things properly; Borderlands 2 should follow suit.
Having none (or at least relaxed) DRM policies will help, too - we've already seen that heavy DRM or always-online requirements can do a lot to hurt a game's chances on PC, and while it's probably reasonable to include DRM to block playing the game before the release day, promising a first-week patch to remove all DRM (as a few games have had great success doing) is helpful, too. Or just go with the basic protection Steam offers, because even though that's actually more restrictive than what I've just described, people at least know what they're getting with Steam's content protection.
Online play could use a little work; GameSpy middleware was a pretty crappy system to use in the first Borderlands, and while I really do appreciate that the game included direct LAN play - something many shooters refuse to even consider nowadays - internet play was difficult through GameSpy. It created client-hosted games anyway, and the service can throw off errors and other issues pretty often. In general, PC gamers only want to sign into one account at most in order to play, so if that's Steam or some other direct-download service, that's fine - just try to make that the only thing someone has to log into.
Even after all that, PC gamers can be a fickle bunch, and it's certainly possible that in today's climate - where announcing a simple pre-order bonus can spark off hundreds posts of bitter hatred and calls of boycotts - it's impossible to please every PC gamer. But I think that a range of improvements as mentioned above could please most, and it could help bring the game's PC sales up into the range of either the PS3 or 360. (Hey, it's happened before!)
What not to change
There's a lot unique about Borderlands that I feel should stay in the sequel. The general art style is a winner and it still stands out even today, and while expanding the environment types beyond the dry dustbowl (and snowy scenes near the end) would probably be a good idea, that graphic novel look of black outlines and hand-drawn surfaces really sets Borderlands apart from everything else out there - even games with similar color schemes and environments. But what's just as important is the sense of humor exhibited throughout the game through its characters, jokes, enemies, the naming systems, all of that. It's often a bit strange, but it's also very charming and highly original. That should certainly be developed upon in the sequel.
What else? Making headshots and weak spots into critical hits was a fantastic move for an FPS/RPG, and that should certainly continue on in the sequel. Vehicles should stay in in some capacity, but reworking them is probably a reasonable move.
Finally...
I want to point out that this is in no way meant to be a big list of complaints revolving around how much I hate Borderlands. I absolutely love the game, but the complaints I have heard about its limitations are certainly valid. Gearbox and publisher 2K took a big risk in creating a new IP, especially with so many decade-running series and rehashed ideas selling millions of copies, so it's nice to see new ideas be rewarded. Now, while it'll be Gearbox themselves doing the sequel-making this time around, they have the opportunity to infuse Borderlands 2 with great new ideas to keep it feeling fresh and unique - and hopefully make this one of the most successful new franchises of the last ten years.
