In Defense of Borderlands' Millions of Guns
Over at Bitmob, my buddy Rus McLaughlin has put together an editorial on why first person shooters only need about eight guns. In it he puts down a mild condemnation of the millions of guns that can be procedurally generated in Borderlands, and looks to Borderlands 2 to suggest that maybe Gearbox should dump the one biggest, most unique feature it had (in my opinion) to go back to the FPS traditions of old.
I love ya, Rus, but you've got all those other shooters to continue to enjoy while we have one game that lets us play around with how developers make one of the things near and dear to a FPS fan: the gun itself. While Rus suggests that gamers don't remember or care about particular guns in their hand, the use of the Call of Duty franchise to support the argument might not be the best of choices. After all, the four non-WWII CoD games released so far use many of the same weapons, and the only way to tweak them is by either finding the gun with the attachments you want in single player, or in multiplayer, by adding attachments you want or by playing MW3 where guns are leveled up and gain selectable "perks" separately from the player rank.
Still, there's a good point here: yes, a good shooter only really needs eight or so guns. Usually it goes something like this: pistol, shotgun, sub-machine gun, assault rifle, sniper rifle, grenade launcher, rocket launcher, experimental energy-type weapon. Well, Borderlands has eight basic gun types covering most of those bases, and then it has revolvers separate from semi-auto pistols. But when you think back, some shotguns behaved almost like grenade launchers, and while the Eridian weapons were certainly terrible, it's mostly because they never went past "green" quality. I'm betting they'll be improved in the sequel. So, I do agree that you don't need that many guns, but I'd probably better refine it down to needing eight gun types, and that it's up to the developers if they want to allow players to make choices inside that.
I firmly believe that a significant chunk of Borderlands' success came from the way that people got to fine tune their preferences inside each of those gun archetypes by picking the ones with the right rate of fire, faster reload times, elemental damage properties and such. In an FPS, the gun is often the star of the show, not the character you're playing, and making sure that that gun you're holding is interesting and cool goes a long way towards making a mediocre FPS a good one, or a good one a great one. Borderlands did this by adding in first-person animations and making sure that different scopes, magazines, reload styles and speeds were used, inviting players to get down a rhythm while shooting tons of enemies in the face - and then tweak or re-set that rhythm when a better weapon came along. It's the same reason why nearly all Call of Duty players care about what attachments go onto their guns, but here, many of those properties are built directly into the guns when they're generated.
A lot of people I know that love Borderlands can't explain why they like it, even pushing aside the game's sharp sense of humor and unique art style. Rus over at Bitmob does not agree and generally seems to, at the very least, not like the game as much as the game's fans. I doubt I'm capable of putting any argument together that flips a switch in his mind to make him like Borderlands, but maybe this article can explain to him (and others) who didn't like the game why the rest of us do so much.
That said, the sequel really needs to open up the gun-generation system, expose how it works to the players, and even let them take part in it a bit. I'm not just talking about MW3's attachments, although also adding that to Borderlands 2 might even be a fun way to further customize the weapons. What I mean is every once in a while allowing the player to pick out the parts and building their own gun using a slick graphical interface. People actually wound up figuring out a crude way to do this in the first game by developing an external utility, but unfortunately it was also way too easy to cheat with it, and this utility contributed partly to the ruination of the multiplayer where people run around with guns that kill everything in one hit. (Yes, we're hoping that Gearbox makes some kind of server-side character save feature in the sequel so that multiplayer games aren't so full of cheaters.) Either way, a feature like building your own guns would need to be limited, or you'd never want to loot a generated gun again, so I'm thinking Gearbox could make it so that only get to do it once every few levels or something.
To those who dislike Borderlands, I want to point out that I am not trying to sway anyone. The game is years-old now and I doubt I could convince anyone with any kind of argument. But there are unique things in this game that go beyond its look or its attitude, and for many of us, I imagine that these are the things that kept us coming back. The guns themselves become the protagonists, and the way they take apart enemies is the most important role for them to play. For some of us, the more we get to choose how that works in a game, the more we love that particular game. So I say, bring on Borderlands 2 and its millions of guns, and double down on the gun generation.
