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.
Add the fact that roguelikes are almost exclusively procedurally generate
If they’re not procedurally generated, they’re not roguelikes. It’s a defining feature. It’s also not lazy to define a set of rules that generate good, interesting levels every time you boot it up. I’m basically the only guy who didn’t enjoy Hades, and a large reason why is that their level generation is sorely lacking compared to so many others (though Hades is more lite than like) I’ve played.
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.
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 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.
The sane reckoning that more of the industry needs to have. And both Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed were some of my favorite games from last year, so hopefully what they’re talking about with building on the work they’ve already done can speed things along.
If the world needs more good games, they should have designed it to last rather than inevitably shutting down in under two years if it doesn’t take off.
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.
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.
Larian’s party size is only 4, so it’s not much larger. Your breakdown of your spent time in Fallout sounds a lot like you’re trying to speedrun it compared to how I play it (I’d be surprised if you stood much of a chance in late game Fallout without giving combat more thought), so the differences in how we play it is probably somewhere there, and I think Larian’s games will probably force you to engage in more of those aspects in order to get through them. Divinity: Original Sin II regularly goes on sale for quite cheap these days, but I’d be lying if I told you it was anywhere near as good as Baldur’s Gate 3 despite having a lot of the same DNA. For one, the D:OS games just about encourage the genocide of every monster on the map in a way that BG3 doesn’t, but at least I’d strongly doubt your ability to play through the combat thoughtlessly.
I’m a very recent fan of loot games, and I only briefly tried Torchlight 1 as more of an academic exercise to see how the genre evolved over time. There was some special sauce that I observed starting around Borderlands 3 or Pre-Sequel (that I suspect originated in Diablo 3) around class design that was still absent from Torchlight. Other than that, I didn’t form much of an opinion on it.