I never even finished 3 because got seriously bored with it, and never had a whole lot of interest in 4, especially hearing how badly optimized it was. It just didn’t look like anything worth the money to me, that’s all. Then I literally forgot it has been out for a while because I was so disinterested.
I really enjoyed both of them. It may just not be your cup of tea, but I get the sense that the average person just plays them sort of mindlessly. For 3 and 4 especially, I found there’s a really interesting layer in there when you start min/maxing around creating a feedback loop. In case you ever found yourself curious enough to give them another try. It makes them very memorable experiences.
I have played the original Borderlands more times than I can reasonably recall, and Borderlands 2 three or four times, but gosh I tried so hard to like BL3 and it just never landed with and felt tedious by that point.
3 was extra short, didnt feel like replaying it, just played it last year, didn’t feel like buying 4 and I can afford it + have free time. It just doesn’t look appealing, will def buy when it inevitably goes on sale for like 10-20$
Their How Long to Beat times are all a tight spread. Having just played through them all in the past year, I can tell you that the only thing that makes 2 longer than the rest is that it has more DLC.
Borderlands was in essence an open world game. Two was so connected you could walk from the very beginning to the very end without any use of vehicles if you so chose. Borderlands 3 was the equivalent of Final Fantasy X.
If you say so. I can tell you I’ve been tracking my times pretty judiciously in the past year. For each of those Borderlands games, my times were:
Borderlands 1: 23h17m
Borderlands 2: 35h15m
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel: 22h21m
Borderlands 3: 35h25m
Borderlands 4: 28h26m
So I guess Borderlands 2 wasn’t longer, like I may have remembered it. In each case for the above, I basically just did enough side missions to keep pace with the recommended level of the next main story mission, which amounted to a few hours per game. All of those times include the DLC except for Borderlands 4, and the DLC is also very similarly sized and paced across games.
A former friend of mine voice acted in Borderlands 3. The moment I heard their voice I shut the game off and sold the disc back to the store, a long time ago.
In a way, they spared me a lot of boredom. I like to think I put those abruptly-refunded hours into Clair Obscur.
No, Tanis, you put them into a ton of failed Megabonk runs that you got slightly ticked off at, so the net effect emotionally was basically the same.
Today on Horde Kitchen I’m gonna teach you how to make hot moldy cheese while being attacked on all sides relentlessly. Now, you’re gonna need to find a microwave, and once you do, slap that rotten cheese on in there and set it to high. Don’t mind the smell, it’s killing the audience around you as fast as it’s choking you out. Now when your cheese is cooked, cook it again. You can make cheese out of anything: sunglasses, keys, bracelets, if it’s food or spelled with the same alphabet food is spelled with, you can make cheese out of it. Oops, I just got touched by a random goblin who fell off the cliff I was standing next to. Until next time, on Horde Kitchen!
I think the onboarding ramp is pretty standard across the series. If you stopped at 2, I thought the active abilities and corresponding upgrades were far more interesting in 3 and 4, even from the get go.
I skipped 1, I adored 2 and played it to a harmful degree, I tried 3 and got bored after three attempts to get into it. There was a fourth??
I mean, the second game was basically setting the thing up for a MMO open-world, group-mission-running/loot extraction type game across a huge, cel-shaded world with open PvP areas and wild custom characters… and they dropped the ball on that?
Would switch 1 have done anywhere near what it did without pandemic? Every last model of the DS is still incredibly expensive on the aftermarket, due to pandemic. Before that used consoles of previous generations were pretty readily available at cheap prices.
Point being of pandemic made even a bygone generation of handhelds revitalized and holding value for 5 years. It’s impact on Switch 1 sales cannot be underestimated.
We’ll see how the holidays go for Switch 2 without the power of FOMO and existential nomadic existence.
There was a whole price fixing thing for retro games that happened in the same time frame, so it’s not an experiment that could be run with only a single variable. Old hardware is going to become more expensive as time goes on, as it becomes harder to source; young people are finding a curiosity with old tech that has no mandatory online connectivity, for a host of reasons; and quite honestly, the Switch 1 launched with Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild in its first year, with Smash soon after, Mario Kart 8 being one of the best-selling games of all time even before the pandemic, and Animal Crossing would have done gangbusters regardless. I’m convinced the pandemic had little to do with its success, even if Animal Crossing has a major chapter in it.
I played through it once (twice?) and put a good amount of time into endgame. Fun game for a bit, better than 3 at least, but god the performance is abysmal.
The key is, Nintendo produces more Switch 2 on release than Switch 1. Also when Switch 1 got released, nobody knew how hot it would be, as the last console prior to it was the Wii U flop. So given those two points, its only logical that the Switch 2 sells more on launch than the Switch 1 did. The question is, how long this will last.
Unless there’s a prolonged software drought, analysts say that if it did this well during the holiday, it will probably do just fine into the future. Switch 1 numbers are a high bar to clear long term, but it’s on pace to outdo most consoles historically. In less than one year, it’s already putting up numbers that rival what the Gamecube or Xbox did in four or five years.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot this week. I played ACS at launch, got ten hours in before I got bored and cancelled whatever the subscription is. Came back last month, got ten hours deeper and uninstalled.
It did kind of give that alpha stage vibe, but if it was like a few bucks, it probably buy it. It was a remake after all, with slightly better graphics.
Warrior Within totally fucked up the vibe though, and the combat was rubbish. It’s a puzzle game, the fighting was just a little break, but they tried to make it too big a part.
Two Thrones was 50% SoT and 50% WW, when it should have been 99% SoT and 1% WW. The voice in your head thing from TT was pretty good, until you have to fight it.
I’m going to guess that decision was based on the failures of the recent 2.5D PoP games, which were well reviewed but barely advertised (and oft compared to indie games)
Dammit, I was looking forward to SoT seeing as it plays pretty janky now compared to modern standards and I was hoping they’d fix up the combat a bit. That said, I only have the Xbox version to go off of. Is the PC version any good? Maybe someone will do a Black Mesa on it.
Well, having not played the Xbox version… ;-) Once you’ve got it running, it remains one of the finest games of all time.
Getting it running is the real sands of time, tho. It has a particular hatred of multi-core CPUs, requires a graphics card that supports both hardware transform & lighting but also truly ancient versions of DirectX, and is obstinately not-widescreen. You’ll be wanting a fan patch; last time I tried one, it was a bit of a crash-fest (it wasn’t, back in the day) and some of the SFX looked plain wrong.
Graphics still held up perfectly - the art style is very strong - and the story remains charming. All I wanted from a remake was the damned thing to start up in a modern screen resolution, and it seems they’ve managed to spend years on it without even managing that.
The combat is fine, my only issue with it was the camera trying to get you killed, especially around corners. Still one of the best games Ubisoft have ever made.
I tried going back to it on pc recently and was met with a pretty janky experience. GoG and Steam versions. I ended up emulating the PS2 version with some upscaling and it was great. There’s community texture packs and widescreen patches as well if you have the hardware to run them (low bar fwiw, I had success with an anbernic android device and a few mods as an example).
Yeah literally the only IP I’d even consider giving my money to Ubi for. The only other one I have been at least lukewarm interested in is BG&E2 but the problems there are it’ll never release, and they’ve completely missed the mark on what fans have wanted this entire time.
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