1841

It’s a great song but I’m surprised this game is the first place you’ve heard it - it’s been getting a lot of airtime around here.

So I just picked this up, popped it in the PS3, and the next time I looked up 3 hours had passed. That’s some good shit right there.

1842

Just had a good coop session with a guy on GWJ’s ventrilo server. That’s the way to play, coop with good voice communication.

1843

The funny thing is that song was a free iTunes selection of the week a few months back and I was warned that I was about to buy a song I didn’t know I already owned. I wound buying the rest of the album, recommended!

1844

I think I probably wouldn’t play through this game again with a new character. The playstyle of the other characters just don’t seem that interesting to me.

1845

The Steam voicecom seems to work pretty well, also. Except when steam goes down… There was about 15 minutes where I thought I said something wrong and wisefool didn’t want to talk to me anymore.

1846

I started playthrough 2 and decided to respec my Hunter from Sniper to Bloodwing/Pistol, and I’m loving it!

I have a great mod that gives me +45% Bloodwing damage on top of +3 to the Swift Strike skill (+Bloodwing damage), so my bird just does ridiculous damage. The mod also gives me +4 Aerial Impact, so I only have to put 1 point into the skill to get the 100% chance to slow enemy speed and reduce accuracy. And finally, +3 Out for Blood, so I only have to put 1 point into that skill to get pretty much full healed to full any time I release my Bloodwing. So, I have a lot of extra skill points to spend on pistol damage to back up my Bloodwing who’s pretty much one-shotting everything anyway.

Here’s my spec: http://talent.87bazillion.com/hunter.php?000000050511325500511

1847

I thought playthrough 1 was boring. Playthrough 2 was pretty good though, but Jarrod is right in that the real fun isn’t until you beat PT2.

Everything in the whole game scales to 50-52 when you finish it and hit 50. I would actually suggest saving your sidequests until you’re done so you have plenty to do with the challenging enemies.

1848

If I bought a second hand Hellgate London would the single player still be playable? I bought it and hated it but I went in thinking FPS+RPG would suck. That was confirmed by Fallout 3 (I didn\'t like it).

But Borderlands is great so I want to revisit HG:L. I would have much preferred seeing Fallout redone in a Borderlands style game - more FPS heavy combat, not so generic looking and not these huge voice acted monologues. I always read faster than they speak so I skip the voice stuff anyway. I prefer the old school system where a catch-phrase or first short line of dialogue is spoken when you talk to an NPC and the rest is for you to read.

I have spent 12 hours with the PC version of the game and read this entire thread. 6 hours solo and 6 hours co-op (so at about the same point in the game now - Sledge). I play duo with my wife and just the addition of one person improves the combat gameplay immensely. For example, while playing solo, I wasn’t ever really challenged. Was kind of a by the numbers fps. With an addition of one more person there are a lot more mixed up enemy groups from the get go which makes battles a lot more nail-biting.

Things I really like about Borderlands:
*The art direction. I love the look. Its not generic at all and makes the game more enjoyable to play.
*The FPS combat. FPS combat suits games with guns more than RPG/dice rolling combat ala Fallout 3. The other advantage of FPS is, at least for me, the only game style that gets me really involved in the game. For example being jumped or mobbed really gets the adrenaline pumping. I remember on more than one occasion actually panicking and emptying entire clips of SMG ammo and RUNNING to survive.
*The Diablo-esque looting.
*Co-op SP! This is always a big plus for me since I play with my wife. We even play games together that DONT have co-op just at the same time (like Majesty). Both Diablo, BG and Borderlands were about x50 more fun for this simple addition.
*RPG elements are melded nicely with the FPS combat.
*The Firefly/Mad Max feel of the game.
*Inventory system is straight forward. You can carry X and that\'s it. No juggling the actual inventory to fit stuff like some tetris game.
*UI is clean and light (but see below)
*LAN play!

What I\'d like to see:
*Fallout 1 or 2 redone in this engine with this art-style/assets. So slightly more emphasis on the RPG elements.
*No zones.
*Armour drops would be cool. If your going Diablo go all the way.
*Weapon Custimisation (“geming”)
*Armour/weapon sets
*Stash
*mod support
*option to hotkey the medkits
*A difficulty setting which includes hard-core.
*Make the achievements a bit more obvious. The game has a ton of them and its just a text that pops up on the screen. I didn’t even notice them until my wife pointed them out deeper in the game.

What I didn’t like:
*Unskippable intros, are you kidding me?
*No scroll bars on inventory? pgup/down enter/esc -> crazy.
*No way to turn off all those buy/sell confirmation boxes.
*Compare interface is clunky.
*UI is clunky on the PC. Lots of PC specific options missing and so fourth.
*Do all futuristic games have to be set in desert/post-apocalyptic worlds? Forests and jungles can be just as dangerous (death worlds in w40k are generally lush green worlds for example). Can we have some green please?

Overall its been a very enjoyable experience. Battles have been nail-biting. Its a surprise game for me since I didn’t know about it until PAX 09. I purposely ignoring both Torchlight and Dragon-Age until I have finished at least 1 play-through of this game.

I do have one unanswered question… why does Matthew Gallant hate Gearbox and this game so much? This thread started in mid-2007 and his been dissing it all the way. What\'s the real story? And the stuff about being a RPG purist doesn’t ring true at all.

I am also curious why PC versions of games released on the 360 don’t just use windows live? I know people think its pants but I have never had a problem with it. You also get proper achievements tracking that way. Instead, PC version of games always use seemingly random systems for multiplayer - release on steam and use gamespy doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

What’s the reference?

1849

Probably Steven King’s The Dark Tower Series.

If you are interested read the first book and pretend the rest don’t exist. It’s an exponential curve of shit as the series goes on.

1850

Hellgate London’s single player still works, yes. And make sure you get the latest patch. I reinstalled it prior to Borderlands’ release and discovered it had become a lot better than I remembered. It’s no Borderlands, though.

1851

If you were disappointed by Fallout 3’s RPG-ness, you might consider a Big Guns character. When you have Big Guns primary, the game plays a lot more like an FPS than it does with Small Arms. You’ll spend less time in VATS and more time shewting.

1852

solomani: Check the Gearbox PC Issues thread for fixes for some things, like vSync.

As for comparing weapons, I find just mousing over the inventory weapon and looking at stats, and then mousing over the equipped weapon. Going through the compare screen takes too long. Another method is to just compare the weapons as they’re on the ground, as you can see the attributes there.

I highly recommend the 5-line description fix until it’s patched. Right now you’re only seeing 4 lines of description text on a weapon when there can be 5 lines (and reportedly more than 5).

1853

If you futz with font size, you can fit a lot more than just five lines onscreen. At 1440x900 and a font size of 8 I can comfortably read the text and while nothing has had more than four lines so far, it could easily accomodate ten.

1854

It’s hard coded to 5 lines, so that does you no good anyways at the moment.

The proof is that all scoped weapons show a scope multiplier in the descriptor. People have shown scoped high level weapons with a full list of 5 modifiers that didn’t show a scope multiplier.

1855

Oh yeah, I got all the fixes in there already and I do exactly that for the compare. Thanks for pointing it out Pogo and UM. I was just making a note that I shouldn’t really have to do that. But its cool that I CAN fix it myself as needed. I saw an interview where the chief of Gerabox was going on and on about the PC as their dev platform and that Borderlands was built for PC first. That was just a flat out lie. I am impressed by his audacity.

Fallout 3 plays like an FPS with big guns? Interesting. May take another look at it. I just had no motivation to help people in that game. Dialogue was just too long (and I loved Planescape, BG1, BG2 etc so its not an FPS elitist thing. I’ve played a lot more RPGs than FPS games in my gaming life). Just different strokes for different folks.

Is Hellgate available anywhere for digital purchase? I am guessing no… and which was the FPS character in that one (as in I hit where I aim - more or less).

I am looking forward to more Borderlands tonight. For those people saying SP is too easy on the PC couldn’t you just start up two instances of the game and have one character just logged in. We use to do this all the time in D1 and D2 to make it tougher.

(sorry for all the \ seems my work proxy doing something funky there).

1856

My friend who just read the series and recommended it to me this week responds:

“I disagree. I will say it requires an increasingly strong ability to suspend belief”

1857

Don’t worry, there’s a lot you can do that isn’t helping people. The only character I’ve gotten to level 30 so far is a filthy, maniacal cannibal slaver.

1858

According to the twitter of some Gearbox guy, we’ll be hearing news about a Borderlands PC patch sometime this week…hopefully it has a good deal of stuff, and not just the few fixes the console versions got last week.

1859

Hard coded for weapons - mods and artifacts can have more visible, so it’s still worth doing to get more than 5 lines.

1860

I really would like a modifier, tweak, mod or option to play it with the game believing there are more people in my game. It seems like Diablo also had it, a parameter called -players X, so you could play in single player as if the game was played for two players, or something like that.