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My main issue with Bunkers and Badasses was having PhysX turned on for the final tower area. That area is not optimized at all...
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Apr 20, 2019 00:24
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Andrigaar posted:Oh man, I'm getting my rear end in a top hat torn to shreds in BL1 right now. It's the mission where you have to shut down 4 smoke signals while armored lancer guys swarm and murder you from behind an entire level of waist-high walls to hide behind. I honestly don't recall this many enemies just spawning around you and murdering you from behind. You have an acid gun, hopefully?
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Apr 20, 2019 00:30
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Lance didn't really gently caress around in BL1. A strong Acid gun (Defiler comes to mind) really goes a long ways against them, especially the Badass Defenders. I think Explosives helped too.
Orange Crush Rush fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Apr 20, 2019 |
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Apr 20, 2019 00:47
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I was a Berserker with explosive fists. I'm quite positive they have high explosion defense, which is why I was having such a miserable time. Been a year or so... I forgot what they were weak to  Anyway, found a chintzy little corrosive SMG and swapped my fists to spray acid... that last one is weird. Still getting mowed down since I'm melee focused, but I'm dragging way more corpses down with me each pass.
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Apr 20, 2019 01:11
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I mean in that case look for a decent ish Corrosive Fist mod and just use that.
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Apr 20, 2019 01:12
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Andrigaar posted:Oh man, I'm getting my rear end in a top hat torn to shreds in BL1 right now. It's the mission where you have to shut down 4 smoke signals while armored lancer guys swarm and murder you from behind an entire level of waist-high walls to hide behind. I honestly don't recall this many enemies just spawning around you and murdering you from behind. I rather like the Old Haven quest, but then I mostly beeline for the nearest roof when I get in there and then proceed to jump between buildings wherever possible and shooting down at the ground troops. I just finished the main story line a couple of hours ago as Lilith and The Destroyer dropped a high physical damage sniper rifle with +800% critical hit damage. I'm thinking of rolling a sniper Mordecai, but I'm guessing they did not add any simple way to transfer items between characters in the remaster? Bofast fucked around with this message at 02:29 on Apr 20, 2019 |
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Apr 20, 2019 02:25
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Bofast posted:I rather like the Old Haven quest, but then I mostly beeline for the nearest roof when I get in there and then proceed to jump between buildings wherever possible and shooting down at the ground troops. https://sourceforge.net/projects/willowtree/ I mean, it's an option.
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Apr 20, 2019 03:14
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Tendales posted:Is there a specific joke behind people calling Janey Springs Jenny Sparks? Because I've seen it other places besides here and I can't tell if it's a reference to something or just a collective brainfart. brainfart in my case Kerrzhe posted:also this, who the gently caress is jenny sparks?? a character from Authority, a comic. also a character people get mad about, although for mostly unrelated reasons. hammerlock being gay is AFAIK a thing they didn't mention in any way until presequel (although i admit my memory of his BL2 DLC is real hazy except for the fact that it sucked). you have his boyfriend mail him what turns out to be a raid boss in BL2, and that's all the mention of his sexuality that there is. there's a bunch of low-key stuff like that in BLPS.
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Apr 20, 2019 03:59
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It's not super in-your-face about it like Springs, but Hammerlock being gay does come up in BL2. The quest to collect Taggart's ECHO logs for Hammerlock's book describes him as an old boyfriend. Gaige also has a crush on him and tells Moxxi "If Hammerlock ever switches sides... mmm. I am going to lock that down." during the wedding day massacre dlc.
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Apr 20, 2019 04:14
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Cease to Hope posted:brainfart in my case Taggart was introduced as Hammerlock's ex boyfriend, I think. (The guy that got his arms eaten by Henry)
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Apr 20, 2019 04:15
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Bofast posted:I rather like the Old Haven quest, but then I mostly beeline for the nearest roof when I get in there and then proceed to jump between buildings wherever possible and shooting down at the ground troops. I am not good at the jumping in this game, and I get annoyed at how many objects look solid but aren't. So, ran around, finished this one, did some side quests and dinged up to L52. The leveling in this game has a weird pace to it and I'm not sure how the playthrough after this one has a lot of space to grow.
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Apr 20, 2019 06:55
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Kerrzhe posted:is it offensive if i say it shouldn't matter whether a character is gay or not? i have no idea these days. At the risk of  I wouldn't call that offensive per se, but I'd say that I'd love for it to be truly nbd who a character wants to bang (or not at all). But we live in a world where LGBTQ+ folks are still often seen as alien at best and even the barest hint of "this dude likes other dudes" (or more often, "this girl likes other girls") leads to chuds making GBS threads themselves about having politics shoved down their throats.There's also a lot to say about intersectionality and writing queer characters and a bunch of other stuff to the point where I'm not sure I'd even agree "it shouldn't matter" in a vacuum even though I fully understand the sentiment. In the specific context of Borderlands, where the writing mostly exists to explain mission objectives, make some jokes, and otherwise fill dead air...yeah it's probably not the most important thing. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 07:26 on Apr 20, 2019 |
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Apr 20, 2019 07:21
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The question of "does it matter" is valid but when you consider the in-your-face nature of game's -hetero- characters you'd almost have to include gay characters. I mean this is where I just show a gif of Moxxi.
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Apr 20, 2019 07:34
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yeah borderlands is not a great example for this sort of stuff, even when you have decent ones like axton and hammerlock they still manage to gently caress it up with poo poo like janey. the most important thing is writing a good character to start with, and it's even more of a struggle when the best character of all time already exists (it's krieg)
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Apr 20, 2019 08:43
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I'm actually a big fan of Handsome Jack and the Claptraps. Well ~66% of Jack in TPS. Once he stops focusing on heroics in TPS, he turns into a mustache twirling douchewad stereotype that the voice actor barely saves. My point is that TPS takes the good balance of schlocky fun, and just loving has explosive diarrhea all over it and is too self-absorbed to realize it. Several of the side missions got back into that groove, but the main story is more like a bad xerox of a bad xerox. Let's see how many people have to search what even means 
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Apr 20, 2019 08:54
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TPS is a fractured mess because it's trying to tell its own story, and mostly fails at it (I still barely understand the how's and why's of everything that transpired), act as a character piece and origin story for Jack (but without being able to play as Jack), and act as a prequel to Borderlands 2 (with, outside of a vanishingly few nods to the first game, a bunch of random and forced interactions between characters from 2). Like I think a big failure is how instead of the animosity between Jack and the BL1 crew being more sparse on details (IMO it just works better for Jack to literally not give a poo poo about the vault hunters because they're just more bandits in need of "civilizing" to him) instead it turns out that Lilith and Roland, the two characters who just so coincidentally play significant roles in the last act of Borderlands 2, are actually super familiar with Jack, have interacted with him lots, and specifically do a bunch of stuff to piss him off. I think that manages to cheapen the drama in BL2 rather than enhance it. You also have odd turns like how Athena's entire excuse for even being around (and then coming back yet again after her happy ending for the DLC, oops) is "needed the money  ". I guess in reverse you also have Nisha where Lynchwood feels like a weird area that was planned to be DLC or cut or something but then kept in anyway, with her being Jack's girlfriend feeling like something that maybe was supposed to go somewhere but didn't.
John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 09:46 on Apr 20, 2019 |
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Apr 20, 2019 09:42
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I initially thought Nisha was supposed to be a sequel hook when she was announced for TPS as Jack's girlfriend. I completely missed her in BL2
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Apr 20, 2019 09:54
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anthony or one of the other writers expressed regret over killing her in bl2 after fleshing her out in tps
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Apr 20, 2019 09:59
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Rinkles posted:anthony or one of the other writers expressed regret over killing her in bl2 after fleshing her out in tps Just say the vault hunters didn't go to Lynchwood in the canon? Seems like they could bring her back if they wanted.
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Apr 20, 2019 10:03
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Speaking of pointless characters, Wilhelm got shafted after being built up to be the strongest bad guy Jack has under his command, yes I am also aware Jack had him throw the fight as part of his master plan, it makes him look even lamer after TPS.
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Apr 20, 2019 10:05
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BizarroAzrael posted:Just say the vault hunters didn't go to Lynchwood in the canon? Seems like they could bring her back if they wanted. also, if you're a lore buff you might know about this obscure technology called new-u digitstruct stations
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Apr 20, 2019 10:09
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Rinkles posted:also, if you're a lore buff you might know about this obscure technology called new-u digitstruct stations Declared non-canon from within the canon!
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Apr 20, 2019 10:19
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Judge Tesla posted:Speaking of pointless characters, Wilhelm got shafted after being built up to be the strongest bad guy Jack has under his command, yes I am also aware Jack had him throw the fight as part of his master plan, it makes him look even lamer after TPS. According to TPS, Lilith is also responsible for Jack's face. Am I misremembering this or is this one of several lovely attempts to expand the canon?
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Apr 20, 2019 10:33
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I agree that generally BL2 works better if Jack just doesn't really give a poo poo about the vault hunters except as mere bandit leaders, but I will say that I think Jack saying "sup" after killing Roland is a bit more impactful as a retort to Lilith having punched his face off, rather than just being a retort to the escape of sanctuary. Mind you that whole Angel->Roland->Lilith sequence is narratively one of the worst bits of the entire series, so it doesn't help much.
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Apr 20, 2019 11:32
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Andrigaar posted:According to TPS, Lilith is also responsible for Jack's face. Am I misremembering this or is this one of several lovely attempts to expand the canon? Allegedly there's a thing in 2 where if you have Lilith deliver the killing blow on Jack, his mask will fall off. That's kind of it though. Reveilled posted:I agree that generally BL2 works better if Jack just doesn't really give a poo poo about the vault hunters except as mere bandit leaders, but I will say that I think Jack saying "sup" after killing Roland is a bit more impactful as a retort to Lilith having punched his face off, rather than just being a retort to the escape of sanctuary. I am dumb and never picked up on the significance of that line. I do see your point but I think it still holds up well enough on its own (and helps that it's a repeated line from Lilith during other climactic moments). Jack throwing that back at Lilith after killing her boyfriend, as revenge for Angel, is pretty darn in-character. Though admittedly it also falls into the inescapable problem that a lot of Jack's motives boil down to "he's loving nuts with a side of petty and ego".
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Apr 20, 2019 11:46
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Can't wait to have that exact same villain split into two different genders and maybe be even creepier relationship than Jack had with Angel.
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Apr 20, 2019 12:07
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Borderlands 2 and Presequel suffer a lot from a lack of protagonists. Lilith and Roland's melodrama is bad even by the standards of game writing, and the beginning and end of the game suffer from running out of characters to care about. (There is also the fact that the entire story is some thin bullshit that relies on the same tired damsel tropes that the game specifically goes out of its way to mock.) Your character's big accomplishments don't happen in the game at all: they're either related to you as exposition (You survived Handsome Jack!) or missable ECHO tapes (you're a badass from offworld who inexplicably has to have your backstory told to you?) You aren't playing a character so much as a floating gun-camera who happens to passively watch the story happen. BLPS is a little better about this since your character is more integrated into the story... if you're playing Athena or Claptrap. Wilhelm, Nisha, and especially the DLC characters are again nonentities in their own story. Even then, Athena's narration kind of gets forgotten for most of the game, and her big ending with Jamey Springs is quietly relegated to a blink-and-you'll-miss-it thing in the DLC. The main reason your character feels like less of a cipher is because everyone is a cipher; most of the game is spent running errands for largely inert characters like Moxxi and Pickle. The closest thing this game has to a protagonist is Jack, and his descent into evil is completely unconvincing to me. (He mostly feels like a dick who becomes a more powerful dick and integrating Roland and Lilith into the story is distracting and pointless - although it's nice that they aren't useless chumps for once.)
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Apr 20, 2019 12:55
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No, instead of Jack just removing people because they could be a threat, it was actually something Lilith started with him and of course, a petty rear end in a top hat would want to kill you for that. Even if Moxxi is probably right and Jack could have tried to murder everyone eventually, that's basically true for almost everyone on Pandora and Jack could have not been an evil that specifically wanted to kill you and anyone associated with you. When everyone becomes generally an unlikable, creepy, murderous psychopath more than Krieg, its hard to care when any of them get killed off. Especially if you make a game set in the past that makes me like them even less because they should have known what Jack would do/they specifically helped him rise to power to become a threat. Oh and, I loved how they failed utterly in explaining why people in 2 would have gone OH NO, WILHELM. Yeah, the wimpy robot guy. OH NO! Crabtree fucked around with this message at 13:13 on Apr 20, 2019 |
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Apr 20, 2019 13:09
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Cease to Hope posted:Borderlands 2 and Presequel suffer a lot from a lack of protagonists. Lilith and Roland's melodrama is bad even by the standards of game writing, and the beginning and end of the game suffer from running out of characters to care about. (There is also the fact that the entire story is some thin bullshit that relies on the same tired damsel tropes that the game specifically goes out of its way to mock.) Your character's big accomplishments don't happen in the game at all: they're either related to you as exposition (You survived Handsome Jack!) or missable ECHO tapes (you're a badass from offworld who inexplicably has to have your backstory told to you?) You aren't playing a character so much as a floating gun-camera who happens to passively watch the story happen. I actually like TPS quite a lot, mostly for things like the hunters being more talkative that in the other games. Beyond the isolated quips, they have conversations with the NPCs, with stuff like Janey telling them that they're not her type (except Athena) and their responses to Claptrap('s psyche) storming off after they snap at him (people like Nisha are dismissive and glad he's gone, Athena remorsefully say's she's sorry after him) I'm hoping they keep that for BL3. And the Grinder. And lasers.
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Apr 20, 2019 13:42
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I feel like we are all General Knoxx in that no matter how much we try we just can't escape Pandora and this series.
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Apr 20, 2019 13:49
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John Goodman or not, its not good if we all agree with the guy that just asks us to bomb the whole planet.
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Apr 20, 2019 13:58
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BizarroAzrael posted:I actually like TPS quite a lot, mostly for things like the hunters being more talkative that in the other games. Beyond the isolated quips, they have conversations with the NPCs, with stuff like Janey telling them that they're not her type (except Athena) and their responses to Claptrap('s psyche) storming off after they snap at him (people like Nisha are dismissive and glad he's gone, Athena remorsefully say's she's sorry after him) I'm hoping they keep that for BL3. And the Grinder. And lasers. Apparently people wanted that even for regular BL2 but the devs thought they knew better.
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Apr 20, 2019 14:22
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BizarroAzrael posted:I actually like TPS quite a lot, mostly for things like the hunters being more talkative that in the other games. I agree with all of this about the better line-to-line writing in BLPS, but not about the Grinder and lasers. I think a lot of the affection for the Grinder and lasers comes not from the fact that they were good ideas, but the fact that they patched up BL2's bad ideas. The Grinder is a patch on BL2's hosed-up loot reward system but it introduces new problems. It requires a ton of inventory fiddling and returning to Concordia to solve a problem that could be more easily fixed by making good loot drop more often. Not only that, but BLPS also has a better, less fiddly, more thematic solution: putting good guns in vending machines so you actually care about money as much as all the characters seem to. I don't like crafting systems in Diablo-likes very much. I feel like they always require a bunch of tedious inventory management that distracts from actually playing the game. Lasers are a bunch of good ideas for guns that technical limitations prevented from fitting into the existing loot structures. I am all for guns which shoot lasers, especially if they're based on the fun lasers from BLPS, but the family of overpowered guns that span everything from melee weapons to sniper rifles would be a bad idea. Something like e-tech (but not bad) or Maliwan guns shooting laser bolts feels better than a catch-all family of weapons that includes literally everything. Lasers mainly had the benefit that they were plentiful and even green/blue lasers were always good enough to at least be usable. The solution isn't for BL3 to have lasers, but for BL3 to make even the midrange generic loot compelling to use and assault rifles not garbage. If every green/blue drop was about as good as a green Hyperion shotgun or Maliwan SMG or Jakobs semiauto sniper rifle in BL3, weapon balance would be in a good place.
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Apr 20, 2019 15:21
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BL2 always feels like a game that succeeded literally in spite of itself. There were lots of terrible choices made in the mechanics, writing, and quest design. I guess the fact that there are so few multi-player RPG/adventure games is probably it's secret sauce. I'll never understand why the community was so obsessed with Jack though or why there have been so many articles written about Jack as a complex villain. He starts the game as a creepy, mildly funny sociopath and the more the game tries to humanize him the less I believe it. I feel like the writers are constantly trying to say, 'Look! He's complex!' and I just keep making the grimace emoji.
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Apr 20, 2019 17:21
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Did it ever really try to humanize him though? I never felt sorry for Jack in the slightest and it never felt unintentional. I think people latched onto him firstly thanks to some great voice acting. Beyond that, he's the "every villain is the hero of their own story" adage taken to the extreme which is at least interesting to poke at compared to a lot of other game writing. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Apr 20, 2019 |
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Apr 20, 2019 17:39
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John Murdoch posted:Did it ever really try to humanize him though? It tries to explain why he's doing what he's doing, yes. If he just wanted to control Pandora for Reasons than it would be standard fare. Instead it constantly tells you that he just wants to end bandit rule on Pandora. It brings in this whole thing about his daughter. TPS tries to explain 'why' he's so angry at the BL vault hunters. The game's constant litany about his motivations is absolutely an attempt to humanize him and the fact that he's a psychopath makes all of them sort of moot.
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Apr 20, 2019 17:42
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Dirt Road Junglist posted:https://sourceforge.net/projects/willowtree/ Thanks, friend 
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Apr 20, 2019 17:43
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Mendrian posted:I'll never understand why the community was so obsessed with Jack though or why there have been so many articles written about Jack as a complex villain. He starts the game as a creepy, mildly funny sociopath and the more the game tries to humanize him the less I believe it. I feel like the writers are constantly trying to say, 'Look! He's complex!' and I just keep making the grimace emoji. I can understand why people feel that way, although I disagree with them and agree with you. Jack is the closest thing BL2 has to a clear protagonist. He also has a personal conflict that is interesting: he thinks he's a hero but isn't. He also stands in sharp contrast to the rest of the cast, who tend to have one thin joke in lieu of a personality or motivations. He's not the protagonist, but he's the character people will often latch onto and identify with the way they would a protagonist because of the thinness of the other characters and the relative disposability of the early cast. Jack is also a mystery box. What did he do to your character right before the game? How is Angel suddenly his daughter (and how much of Angel's backstory is he lying about)? How did he build Hyperion and take over Pandora? What did he want with the Destroyer and what does he want with the Warrior? Why does he have a looming giant H? Some of these questions get answered and some don't, and I think the latter part contributes to his appeal, especially because it was 2011 and everyone wasn't sick of JJ Abrams and Steven Moffat yet. (I also think this is part of why BLPS is less successful: a lot of these questions are more interesting as questions than they are as answers.) Jack isn't especially complex. He's a self-congratulating dick who manipulates people's credulity and advantages that he hasn't earned. His personality works on two levels: either unironically laugh at jokes like the diamond pony Butt Stallion, or you can laugh at Michael Scott as a memelord in space, an overbearing dick boss who thinks his poo poo's hilarious because people have to laugh with him. The only thing complex about is his awareness of the fact that he's in a narrative but his mistaken belief about his role in it. That's funny and effective, because it helps us understand and better detest his self-importance, and also because some people like that sort of meta humor for its own sake. There isn't anything else to it, though; he's just a self-important dick who is a little genre-aware. In particular, I think whatever BL2 is going for after Angel dies works as an escalation of the stakes, in that Jack is done toying with you and now he's doing things for real, but everything about this story is just so stupid that it doesn't bear being taken seriously. Roland and Lilith blunder like idiots into what they knew was a trap, Angel demands someone who has repeatedly said "I do not trust you" follow her instructions to the letter instead of sharing information she has no reason to withhold, "Better dead than a damsel" despite the fact that Lilith is a textbook damsel in distress, etc. I checked out of taking BL2's story completely by the time Jack drops out of the rafters to instantly kill Roland, so I wasn't interested in any questions about whether Jack's pain is performance, self-delusion, selfishness, or genuine grief for Angel's sake. Jack - and everyone else - is too cartoonish to take that seriously.
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Apr 20, 2019 18:36
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"What did he do to your character right before the game?" He lured you onto a train and then blew it up leaving you for dead in the frozen wastes?
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Apr 20, 2019 19:00
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Mendrian posted:It tries to explain why he's doing what he's doing, yes. Except the game also makes it clear that his definition of "bandit" is literally anyone who isn't some corporate-approved rich person or drone. Yeah, the game tells you he wants to "end bandit rule" on Pandora, but then Jack tells you that (by constantly calling the player and everyone around them "bandits") that he's not talking about the enemies you fight, which are a threat to everyone, but about all of the people he wants to get rid of to make way for his vision (which is everyone, he wants to kill everyone). The game does mildly "humanize" him through his rage-grief over Angel but he also gets even more murdery and torturey so also not really. I haven't played TPS so I don't know what that game does but BL2 never tries to make the player think that Jack has a point. He's got a great voice actor and people think he was funny and charming when they first heard him so when the game yanks the rug out and reveals that he actually is just a rich corporate rear end in a top hat who casually murders anyone on his way to the top some people just can't get past the "But he made me laugh!" stage. It reminds me of Star Trek DS9 and the character of Dukat, where the actor and writers did a really good job of showing that Space Hitler got to be Space Hitler because he was personable, charming, funny, ambitious, and smart (in the ways he needed to be). Unfortunately a bunch of fans were never able to look past the personable, charming, funny, ambitious, and smart parts and, with no irony whatsoever, started to think that Space Hitler wasn't actually so bad despite the constant reminders of him doing Space Hitler things. They finally had to produce an episode that spelled out how evil Dukat really was in no uncertain terms. That doesn't mean the show did a bad job with the character, it means they did too good of a job. BL2 isn't that good but a bunch of people willingly thinking that the slimy corporate dick actually isn't that bad isn't a knock on the game, it's a knock on the idiots who think that.
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Apr 20, 2019 19:01
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