Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Game Night - Love In the Borderlands Part 2!

I’ve got a bit of a love-hate relationship with the ammo shops in Borderlands. On the one hand, it’s nice to be able to conveniently buy ammo at bargain prices. On the other hand, there’s no “fill me up with this kind of ammo” option. Moreover, the cost of ammo makes purchasing it less a decision pertinent to resource management and more of an inconvenience you have to deal with every once in a while.

But what really gets my goat about ammo shops is that they demonstrate a serious problem with Borderland’s loot system – the ammo drops are erratic and all too often unhelpful. If the loot system in Borderlands functioned as one might expect there’d be no need for ammunition stores. Instead you’d receive plenty of ammo for the weapons you use. But no, the ground is littered with repeater rounds and shotgun shells, absurd heaps of them that no one has any room in their inventory for. In this post-Half Life 2 world responsive random loot systems aren’t an unreasonable expectation, especially in a game like Borderlands where you don’t want to be running back to the shops every five minutes.

Why, you might ask, would you not want to make these shop runs aside from the obvious inconvenience of moving across a huge map again and again? Because Borderlands tends to respawn its enemies fairly quickly. I suppose if it didn’t do so I’d complain about Borderlands seeming barren. After all, it is set in a desert and its inhabitants are jam packed with personality, but it can be problematic to run into hordes of screaming enemies on your way back to sell the loot from a particularly difficult fight.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The only redeeming quality of the ammo shops is the nice feeling of fullness they give you when they’ve let you fill up your personal stores to the brim. The ammo upgrades are nice, too, but the real appeal of ammo shops is that feeling that your hunger for bullets has been sated. That’s how I felt after I’d finished stocking up mid-quest. Like I was ready for anything.

As it turns out I was mostly right. After a little bit of yammering we moved back towards Moe’s last known location. This time I’m not the first one on the scene. Instead of seeing Moe and getting a good warning, I find out from Alex.

“Found him,” he says. “Mother fucker.”

I’m about to ask what’s wrong, but before I have the chance Alex runs into view, firing as he walks backwards like some sort of militant, less talented Michael Jackson. Bounding behind him is Moe, electricity crackling from his skin as he charges and shakes his head.

We don’t talk much at this point. Borderlands has taken its toll on our psyche, and we all know what we need to do. We pour ammunition into Moe’s gaping mouth. Each time he spits lightning or charges at us we briefly scatter, then reform and redouble our efforts to attack him. Before long he falls to the ground mid charge, showering me with loot. Alex and Dan rush up and we grab whatever we can. Well, I do at least.

“What the fuck Grove?” Alex interjects as I pick up a shiny new submachine gun, a vast improvement over my current one.

“What? I’m the SMG guy.”

“So you just take it?”

Alex has a good point. Loot in Borderlands varies from crucial to useless, and it depends entirely on the luck of the draw and your personal preferences. But showing each other gear and trading it is difficult. In fact the only way to do so is through the same methods the first Diablo used. You need to drop the item and then let your friend pick it up. Even if you just want to show a friend an item it has to leave your inventory.

This is the point where a nice person would apologize and then explain his case. Instead I shrugged and equipped the new gun.

“Whatever.”

“God you’re greedy.”

It’s a valid point, but greed pays in Borderlands. Why give your friends firearms if you could use them instead? After all, I’m the SMG guy. I should get the SMGs. I let him have most of the sniper rifles, except the ones I want to use or sell. I don’t get what he’s all bent out of shape about it. I decide to change the subject.

“Let’s just drop off the quest and decide what we want to do next.”

“Whatever.”

It’s hard to begrudge Dan his silence at times like this. If I’d followed his example the issue of the submachine gun would’ve fallen out of collective memory in a few seconds. What’s a single piece of loot in a game where you receive a new, potentially better, one every five minutes? But now the argument and my greed are the subject more than the gun itself. This is the power of multiplayer games – the ability to make seemingly trivial decisions about resource management into larger issues about social interactions emerging through play.

Our trip back to the bounty board, much like our trip from the ammo store to Moe, is filled with trash mobs. The snap at us and taunt us and die quickly and easily without giving us much in the way of reward. The loot we do find is largely worthless, and by now this is the fourth time we’ve passed through this area and fought these enemies. It’s unpleasant, it’s irritating, and it’s unnecessarily repetitive. The only upside is that it’s frustrating enough that it distracts Alex from my greed.

“Fuck. Why are they still here?” he asks. I hear the clink of glass as he takes another shot. I follow suit; I assume Dan already has.

“It’s the game,” I choke out through the whiskey’s burn. “It fucking hates us.”

“It’s annoying,” Dan says, putting a combat rifle round through the head of the same bandit bruiser we’ve killed three times already. If I were given a survey and asked about this I would check “strongly agree,” but we’ve become quite good at clearing out the bandit camp and the scags “hive” by this point so it doesn’t take us long to clear the last hurdle and rush back towards Fyrestone.

The return trip from the Arid Hills is much like the original trip. Dan leaps into the driver’s seat and takes us far past the entrance to Fyrestone, forcing me to leap from the moving vehicle and be launched several feet when he backs up over my legs and most of my torso. When I finally do get back to the bounty board I mash enter until there are no more green quests left on our docket.

“Let’s go into the cave next,” I suggest. Alex grumbles something that approximates a response while Dan continues to drive in circles outside town. It is decided, then.

I could describe the trip into the cave in detail, but it’s much the same as our adventure with Moe and Marley. We rush off to the diamond highlighted entrance to the cave. We enter. We kill several new enemies, and the interest they present rapidly gives way to boredom as we realize we’re going to be fighting identical copies in the same spot in five minutes when it’s time for us to leave this place. We fighting some creatures and take turns dying. I yell at Dan for failing at the simple task of resurrecting me while he’s taking fire from multiple bandits. We rescue a claptrap and get a little inventory boost. It’s a heartwarming celebration of a set of jobs very similar to the ones we just did.

By the time we’re finished I can’t disagree with Alex’s next sentiment.

“Fuck I’m sick of this game. Let’s go play Sins.”

“Let’s turn in the quests first.”

Alex sighs. “Fine.”

I couldn’t agree with him more, but I don’t like leaving quests half finished in this game, especially when we spend most of our time playing it as a group. Borderlands is pretty unforgiving in how it allows you to deal with the completion of scripted quests and I’d rather not take a chance.

But he’s right to be bored of the game by now, and I am too. Borderlands is repetitive. Really repetitive. It’s like Diablo with guns, plain and simple. You point your gun at enemies and fire down the sights until they go down. Sometimes you might change your tactics up but you’re going to be running into the same handful of enemy types for most of the game, again and again. There’s not a lot of variety when you come right down to it, and that can be frustrating.

So when the “host has left the game” message flashes across the screen I lose no time n leaving Borderlands behind and leaping in to Sins of a Solar Empire’s waiting arms. Because as fun and conceptually fascinating as Borderlands is, it’s taken in small doses, and we’ve certainly had enough of it for one night.