 Hey everybody, I really am gonna get my video about free DLC up next, but I realized something interesting this week. I'd heard about the updates to the PC versions of Borderlands and Borderlands 2, and I decided to check it out and see how they looked. The game looked about the same as I recall, although there seems to be cooler lighting and maybe a little bit sharper textures, but more importantly, I found myself replaying the entire game. Now, Borderlands 2 isn't some perfect game, but it's surprisingly enjoyable despite having a bunch of things that piss me off. Like hours and hours of inventory management, hours and hours of pressing buttons to open boxes and then pressing the same button up to one to seven more times to pick up shit from those boxes, and occasionally janky combat against certain enemies like Rax, or the worst enemy I've ever fucking fought in a game, these assholes here. Fun note, the developers obviously knew how annoying these guys are, because when you enter the level they first appear in, this is written on the wall. So even though I found myself pissed off fairly regularly, something kept pushing me through the game. I never got bored in the way I did with the Division 2 or Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Those games have much higher production values, and in many ways, much more streamlined and polished gameplay or inventory systems, so what was it? Why did I enjoy this huge, long, basically open-world loot-filled game when AC Odyssey felt like it had been purposely designed to make me angry? Why did I genuinely enjoy my 60-plus hours with Borderlands 2 when the Division 2 had me playing in kind of a generally positive but sleep-like state? Why did I never get bored here while Anthem bored me so much I literally had to push myself through it? Well, I'll tell you in a relatively short video after the logo. There's a lot of hype surrounding Borderlands 3, and when you read posts about why people are hyped, you'll almost always see things about how they love the loot system. And because I'd mainly been reading about people looking forward to a game that, quote, gets loot right, I found myself quite a bit less excited than most. Because honestly, I find the sheer volume of loot to be exhausting, man. You spend a crazy amount of time picking shit up and then opening a menu and comparing it to other, similar shit and then equipping both and deciding which is marginally better and then having to go find a vending machine because your backpack is full again and then selling one until you do it all over again. If the loot was the most important thing in Borderlands 2, it's likely I'd have stopped playing this game after like 2 or 3 hours. I don't like inventory management. It feels like homework. Like something I must now do in order to keep playing the game part of the game? Fallout 76 felt like the developers had mathematically arrived at a time limit I was allowed to play before paying for whatever fun I'd had by doing fucking math. I have the unpopular opinion, I guess, that almost every game ever would be improved by cutting the amount of shit I have to pick up by half. I'm replaying Wolfenstein 2 and the amount of times I have to look at the floor and aim at a 1mm squared point in space to pick up armor is horrendous. I swear to God, in the last 3 years I might suspend 100 hours looking at the ground while strafing side to side pressing X or E. Now Borderlands 2 is less toxically awful because at least 6.3% of the time you're picking shit up you get something fun. The guns are very cool and it is fun to use the different types of weapons but the loot is only a tiny part of what makes the game so compelling. I remember the big outcry that loot drops too rarely in Destiny 1 and I kinda agreed I guess, but in Destiny 2 you cannot go one minute without having to pick something up and then deleting it in a menu. At least Destiny less to be picked up by walking over it though. Still, less loot of better quality is preferable to a diarrhea geyser of loot I'll need to sell or deconstruct or drop on the ground so I can sprint again. Borderlands 2 buries you in loot, it drowns you in shit. You end up literally needing to pick up loot as you fight. It's too much loot is what I'm saying and yet. If I find a torrent of loot to be too much of the game what could possibly have kept me playing so long? I really struggle trying to figure this out for a while because make no mistake I had a blast replaying this game like a shockingly good time. A good 40% of the time I play video games I'm either cursing or sighing and I almost never did that here. So again, what's the secret sauce? Was it the gunplay? No, the gunplay is fine, it's good but it's not spectacular or anything. I definitely enjoyed the combat more than the vision but less than Destiny or Warframe or Doom, was it the enemy design? Now there is a great amount of enemy variety and most of the combat sections are challenging enough to be fun but that's not it either. For every excellent battle scenario that mixes 8 different enemies that all require different approaches there are 5 scenarios of killing 35 dogs that are repeatedly spawned out of holes in the ground. Maybe it was a level design. Now this does matter. Borderlands 2 does a really great job with its semi open world maps. The world is big and diverse with regions feeling distinct and having enemies that fit the locations. The maps are big enough to feel like you're exploring and things are cleverly hidden to reward that exploration but it's not some massive fucking chore. It's not an endless expanse of rusted cars and ghouls or 3,000 miles of ancient Greece that all looks exactly the same. It's more good than great. You don't marvel at Borderlands level so much as never get very annoyed. Now a game that doesn't annoy me with its shitty open world map is rare so credit where it's due but no that's not the main reason either. It was only near the end when I completed a certain questline that had hit me. Borderlands 2 is excellent because all of your actions are contextualized. Let me explain. Why am I getting this thing again? I need to give a shout out to Anthem here because it was Anthem that made me realize what's so great about Borderlands 2. I just bought a new Z390 motherboard and an i7-8700K to go with my GTX 1080. I overclocked the CPU, I got it to 5.2GHz and I wanted to see if I noticed a significant improvement in gaming. Anthem is a dog that runs like garbage unless your PC is a beast so I booted that up to see the difference. And side note, Anthem now runs spectacularly well. It is still amazingly bad but it runs buttery smooth on ultra at 1440p at like 80 frames a second. I played about 5 legendary contracts in Anthem and a couple of legendary missions to check out the new CPU while I was in the middle of playing Borderlands 2 and I found the game shockingly boring, like epically boring. I was far too kind in my review of the game frankly, Anthem is the ambient of video games. As I was flying from one hot and cold mini game to the next I started wondering how anyone could find this fun. There's simply no way even the developers could enjoy this game for more than like 15 minutes at a time. It was this couple of hours while in the middle of playing Borderlands 2 that really drove home what was wrong with the game. And it's the same thing that's wrong in another much much better game. Why does Division 2 blur into an enjoyable but incredibly forgettable series of combat encounters? Why does Anthem put me to sleep? Because the range of reasons you are given for the shooting and looting is insanely low. You're rarely given much of a reason at all. And when you are it's almost always something incredibly shallow or forgettable. Or so silly it makes you shake your head inside. Or so dumb it makes you angry. Or at least it makes me angry. Sometimes you're given literally no reason at all. The game will just be like yo kill bandits. I can only remember a tiny few of the reasons I did any mission in the Division. I liberated control points because they were red and I wanted to make them green. I was sent to save certain dudes because they were dudes who needed saving. And I guess I shot down propaganda broadcasts because they were saying bad things apparently. Oh I retrieved the Declaration of Independence. I shot guys in a series of hallways that somehow saved the president. I remember that because it made me laugh when the president pieced out by hopping on a ladder and being pulled into the sky by a helicopter. I tried shooting him but nothing happened. In Far Cry 5 the only missions I recall are the linear story missions. I saved hostages that had no names. I took over control points because I needed to fill up a meter. I blew up trucks because I like blowing up trucks sometimes. Anthem won't shut the fuck up while you're doing its missions. But I cannot recall one single example of why I was doing a mission. Actually I do recall one. I remember having to get a gift to give a lady so I could go to that lady's party. But that is it. The other 40 hours I killed dudes. I picked things up and I brought those things to other things for no real reason at all as far as I can recall. You will often hear this complain about mission designing games and it's something that specifically appeared in almost every single review of Anthem, including mine. The complaint goes like this. Every mission is the same. Go here and kill these guys or go here and get this thing. Go here and kill these guys and get this thing and then bring that thing back. These complaints were totally valid. But in the back of my mind I've always thought, but wait now. Every single game ever boils down to a sequence of repetitive tasks. Dark Souls. Every level's just about killing things and opening shortcuts. Doom. All you do is walk down hallways and pull the trigger. Borderlands 2 has the exact same structure. Every mission, and there is an unbelievable amount of missions, is go to this area and kill things. Some of the missions ask you to go somewhere and kill things until those things drop an item for you to pick up. Others just want you to kill things until they are dead. So why does go here, kill that and pick up an item, get insanely repetitive in the Division 2 and Anthem, but stay impossibly fresh in Borderlands 2? Because the context applied to those actions matters an insane amount. More than it should. More than we even realize. Borderlands 2 has an unprecedented amount of context added to these actions. Every single quest has a story attached to it. Every cookie cutter fetched quest gives the player a compelling reason to fetch the quest. And the stories attached to these quests is usually more than these outlaws are also bad and must also die. Hell, even when Borderlands does use that exact same framing device, it does it in a unique way by adding humor and characterization to not only its friendly NPCs, but also the enemies. You're told about specific outlaws, what they did, and why they need to be shot in the face. The items you're told to pick up are interesting or funny. You're told why you should pick them up and why you're bringing them back. Anthem has you constantly picking up relics to shut down portals. It's like 80% of the mission design, I shit you not. And holy crap, you will get tired of finding and picking up relic fragments in Anthem. Borderlands also has you picking things up all the time for quests, yet even though the act of picking up the item is mechanically identical, every time I don't think Borderlands has you pick up the same item twice. And if it does, it's never for the same reason. We're going to only look at a few quick quests here, but literally every single quest in the game is framed as well as these. There's a famous and beloved character in the game, Tiny Tina, and like all the other friendly NPCs, she has a quest line for you to complete. The quest line is called You Are Cordially Invited and it boils down to killing flying helicopters and picking up the stuff they drop, going to an area and killing bugs to get a thing, going to another area and picking things up while bandits shoot at you, kiting one specific bandit a few hundred feet and doing a wave defense section. This is the same formula used in Anthem. Go here and kill these things until they drop stuff, go over here and pick up a thing and maybe fight some enemies while you do, stand here and do a wave defense section. In fact, that is almost every single quest in Anthem with almost no variation at all. So why did I have such a great time doing Tiny Tina's side quest and remembered it almost entirely from seven years ago when I have only the haziest recollection of any of Anthem's main story missions that feature the exact same mechanical gameplay system because the framing around the actions is unique and interesting. It's what you're picking up and why you're picking them up. You're getting a hand grenade that's dressed up as a stuffed animal and a small deadly insect inside a jar that are Tina's only friends. Then you're kidnapping an enemy and fighting a wave defense while Tina has a tea party with the bug, the bandit and the stuffed animal grenade while she tortures the person who killed her parents. The character Tina is totally unique and interesting. The quest story is totally unique and interesting and it lends novelty to player action. You want to find the items because you're curious what they are. You want to pick up the items and bring them back because you're interested in seeing what happens next. The context drives you through those actions and makes them meaningful and story and context are the reward for your actions as well as the impetus and you will also get a gun or some shit afterwards. There's a late game quest where you go to various bandit camps and kill them and pick up items to bring back to an NPC. The entire quest line is driving to a location, killing bandits, picking up five items and returning to an NPC, driving to another camp, picking up five items from garbage cans while fighting off bandits and returning to the NPC and then fighting a tougher enemy boss. It's probably the 200th time you've done this in the game but it is still totally fresh because the NPC is a robot who wants to be human and the items you're fetching are clothes and human limbs for the robot to wear at which point he realizes he still doesn't feel human and should try and kill you because humans are violent. The NPC dialogue is both hilarious and insightful. You want to see what he'll say next. You're curious what the robot thinks will make him human and so you happily fetch the quest. There's a quest where you kill a monster that ate an NPC's arm and leg for revenge. There's one where you try and win over a woman's scooter likes only to find she joined the bandits to escape scooters unwanted advances. You set captive animals free. You find out why a mining operation disappeared, et cetera. There are just dozens and dozens of unique characters and an unbelievable amount of imagination went into the creation of these scenarios. It's almost unprecedented in its commitment to making sure you never do the same thing for the same reason twice. Even as you are doing the same thing over and over and over it's always and I mean always for a new and interesting and entertaining reason. Once I realized this, I started to notice how incredibly impressive it is. How ridiculously rare it is in a shooter and even more so in an open world shooter. And yeah, I think we can call Borderlands open world. Even though its maps are broken up like larger separate levels, they aren't linear shooter levels. Then I started to get like really blown away at the sheer amount of effort that must have gone into the creation, writing and scripting of this many unique scenarios. It's a Titanic achievement and it's what kept me plowing through hour after hour. It also made me realize why exactly Borderlands 3 has probably taken so damn long. Borderlands 2 has like huge RPG levels of writing in its quest design. It is totally unique amongst shooters. No other game is even remotely like it in this regard. And because of the reason you're given for shooting and looting are always either entertaining or thought provoking or ridiculous and funny, the NPCs who gave you these quests suddenly become people you're attached to. That Fester quest for Tina was funny but it also explained Tina to me. I was rewarded with humor, characterization, combat, dialogue and after all of that came the gun or whatever she gave me, which I don't remember. Do you remember any of the quest givers in Anthem or in the Division 2? Do you even remember any of the quests? And remember now the Division 2 is a well made game. It's mechanically tight. It's quite pleasant to play much like Far Cry 5 is. But those games both put you into a kind of catatonic state. You get lulled into continuing on because the game feels pretty good to play but it's ridiculously repetitive. Anthem is so repetitive the game is bad as a result. None of these games ever engage you beyond their base mechanics and systems. When those systems are sound like Far Cry or the Division, they feel like well made products. When they aren't sound like Anthem, it feels like a mindless chore. But they don't ever go beyond feeling like pleasant time wasting. They don't drive you on to play so much as not give you a good enough reason to stop playing. And again, the quests themselves in Borderlands 2, the actual mechanical functional quests are exactly the same. Go here, kill these enemies, pick up this thing. It's exactly the same. But in Borderlands, a skippable side quest is you starting a gang war or avenging a killed pet bird or stealing refund checks from mailboxes because a shopkeeper is an asshole. You're checking on a bad guy's grandmother or helping a robot become human or robbing a train or helping a bandit burn themselves alive as a sacrifice to a cult or breaking up that cult because it's crazy and worships one of the quest givers as a god or killing yourself because the main villain paid you to do it. The sheer range of context given for player action is incredibly diverse. It's a lesson that any game in any genre can learn from Borderlands 2. Borderlands defining legacy has ended up being lots of guns. It's most referenced as the first loose shooter and FPS Diablo, but that is not what makes Borderlands or Borderlands 2 so incredibly unique and satisfying to play. It's loot and abilities and skill trees have all been copied and in some cases surpassed. The one thing that hasn't been copied is its insane commitment to giving the player a compelling reason for almost every single action he takes. Probably because it's really time consuming and therefore expensive or maybe because nobody even thinks about how damn important that ends up being to a player or maybe because smarter devs have realized it's easier to addict a player for 50 hours than to engage them for even one. Everyone loves Borderlands for its charm and humor but that charm and humor are devices that drive the player to complete repetitive actions. The hundredth time you kill a bandit and pick up a thing should be boring. It should be annoying. It should make me angry. I should be writing that it pissed me off so much my wife yelled at me. But it never is. She didn't yell at me once the whole time I played Borderlands 2. It's the game's greatest triumph and it's this that's made me realize it's actually kind of a masterpiece beyond far beyond what I realized. Video games are repetitive by their very nature but they're also unique amongst games and that they're able to provide real narrative framing for all your actions. Borderlands is totally unique amongst big open world games in this regard. It's closer to a really funny narrative RPG with guns than it is to Division or Destiny. Playing it again made me realize how much better it is than I remembered and I really, really hope that Gearbox fully realizes what makes it so special isn't just a billion guns. The guns are really just a way to keep the combat interesting as I plan another tea party or get a robot human limbs to wear so we can feel like a real boy. All right, that's it for now. A video about the Epic Store and one about free DLC will be coming up soon. See you next time. Thanks for coming. Bye.