Did you ever play them back in the day? I emulated old games for years before I realized how much some of them were designed to be viewed on a CRT. CRT shaders have gotten to be pretty good these days, and it does a lot for the experience for me.
This series is pretty crazy to play through back to back, because they have to escalate so many times.
Borderlands 1 has the flattest progression curve of the series, and I say that in a good way. I very much prefer flatter progression curves in RPGs, or loot games in this case. It solves a lot of problems with scaling difficulty, eliminating grind, and so on. That said, this is the only game in the series that checks this box. This one sticks fairly close to its North star of Halo meets Mad Max; the premise is simple and it works. I played Roland, because the turret seemed to be helpful when playing solo.
Borderlands 2 is where it finds its identity that it’s known for; actually, they sort of found that identity in the DLC for the first game, but here the characters get much talkier. It comes with a major upgrade in game feel and pacing.
The Pre-Sequel is the blandest of the series by far. The characters are boring, and the elements they use to spice up the formula are not very spicy. The boss fights are well designed though, even in a way that gives it something it does better than 2. But something else interesting happens in this game. I played the class where you get a little drone that comes along and marks targets. Later up the skill tree, this gives you access to a little mini game of killing the guys that you marked to extend the timer of your active ability, plus one or two other gimmicks that create a positive feedback loop. This makes the moment to moment decision making far more interesting in a fight, but it’s a shame how boring a lot of the game can be otherwise.
Tales from the Borderlands is probably the only truly standout writing in the series.
Borderlands 3 is one I seemingly enjoy more than most people. The villains are terrible, I’m sure we all agree, but what’s important to me about the writing in this series is that it has personality more than anything else. I’m not really expecting to hear a ton of great jokes, though I’ll admit I consider the part with Ice T in the body of a teddy bear to be pretty damn funny. The mini game that I noticed in Pre-Sequel that creates a positive feedback loop? It’s kicked into overdrive here. Building out my skill tree is so much better and more interesting than in its predecessors, and there’s yet another major upgrade to game feel over 2 and Pre-Sequel. The decision making in each fight is all about that feedback loop rather than just mindlessly shooting until health bars deplete. I really enjoyed this game. I’m somewhat new to the loot game genre in general, but I have finished Titan Quest before this series, and this positive feedback loop seems to be a relatively recent innovation in the genre; maybe around Diablo 3? I took a brief walk through some other games and couldn’t find anything like it.
New Tales from the Borderlands should have been thrown right in the garbage. It is the worst writing in the series by far.
Borderlands 4, I have yet to finish, but I’m probably 3/4 of the way through, and this time I’ve got a co-op partner. It stands on the shoulders of all the improvements in 3 and adds some new movement stuff as well as some subtle changes to the general design of classes. I once again play a gadget class, but even though my class was functionally nerfed, the way they did it made it more interesting to play. Even with a performance patch, the game still runs pretty shit, but I’m having a good time. The open world may actually be a detriment compared to the old way the game did things, but not so much that it’s a huge drag.
If I’m picking favorites, at this point, it’s a tough call between 3 and 4.
There are too many games I want to play and not enough time to play them, and with a programming background, I decided to basically use Agile methodology to schedule which games I can reasonably finish in a given month. I’ve been tracking my completion times and comparing against How Long To Beat to get good ballpark estimates. This year, I’ve beaten 30 games, 15 of which came out in 2025, and I think I can beat 3 more before the year is done. When a new game comes out, I don’t like to play it unless I’ve played the earlier / mainline / canon entries in the series, so not only did I play Borderlands 4, I played through 1-3, the Tales games, and the Pre-Sequel. I played through the first three Mafia games and intend to play The Old Country once the Steam sale starts. I played not only Kingdom Come: Deliverance II but also its predecessor.
Speaking of KC:D2, that’s the best game I played this year, by quite a margin. Obsidian put out two great games this year in Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2, but despite obviously sharing a lot of the same bones, they deliver quite different experiences. Dispatch was a treat. Split Fiction was what I wanted as an iteration on It Takes Two. Borderlands 4 continues what Borderlands 3 set up in making its systems fun for math nerds. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was fun and novel in so many ways, and I love the story behind its development; I do wish that I loved the execution of its story more, and I wish the combat wasn’t so feast or famine, but those things didn’t seem to bother most people. The Alters might be the most slept on game in 2025 relative to its quality; seriously, it’s a great story, and it’s nice to see that level of presentation in a game of its scope and genre. (A lot of Unreal 5 games in that list…)
I have now caught up to where the show left off, and I’ll probably pick up the comics during an imminent sale somewhere. I did hear that this game would have an original story, and given all the deconstruction of its genre that that show does, it gets me excited that they’re doing something similar for tag fighting games. A riff on Storm from Marvel vs Capcom 2 would be perfect for that.
I played quite a bit of Pocket Tanks, but there’s a huge gulf between that and the public consciousness that came up around indie games in the summers of arcade.
Xbox 360 and Summer of Arcade are major pillars in bringing indie games into the spotlight around exactly that era. There may have been Darwinia and Ragdoll Kung Fu on Steam at the time, but it was the likes of Braid, Super Meat Boy, Bastion and such that really came up within the XBLA promotions.
What we think of as the rise of indie gaming was when they started getting publishers to promote them. You needed one in order to be listed on XBLA back in the day.
Hundreds of people worked on that game, as many as some AAA games, and yet games like Blue Prince, from a solo developer (or very close to it?) had to compete against that?
Moby Games lists 121 people in the credits for Blue Prince and 416 for Clair Obscur. At some point, the number of people who worked on a game is nearly arbitrary once your publisher enlists a QA contractor or starts localizing to more languages. I don’t think it’s ever been murkier territory to try to classify a game as indie.
Wuthering Waves should not be surprising. It’s a game that’s popular in China. If you’re polling people from all over the world to determine a winner, the one that wins is the most popular game in China.
Clair Obscur is a good game, but I definitely like it far less than everyone else, and if I were god of video game awards, it would have gone to Kingdom Come: Deliverance II this year.
Fatal Fury winning best fighting game was the objectively correct choice when faced against an early access game and several collections.
The Alters losing out to a port of a PS1 game, even a spruced up one, for the strategy category is pretty stupid. The Alters also should have shown up in narrative and performance.
As for reveals, there’s lots to be excited for. My most anticipated game for next year is probably Invincible Vs; I have not seen Ella Mental at where I’m at in the show, and maybe she won’t show up until later seasons, but she looks like a great Storm archetype for that game.
Indie games have to launch on steam or they fail miserably. Seriously though. This is why I roll my eyes at people who claim steam makes it breaks these games.
Those two things aren’t opposed though. Launching on Steam doesn’t guarantee success, but I believe what they’re claiming is that not launching on Steam more or less guarantees its failure.
What you need to do in that case is be prepared for lots of smaller games to not hit, and then eventually one will that will make up for all the experiments you did along the way. That’s how they and their peers used to operate before they all tripled down on those big hits and stopped making new IPs.
It’s short by JRPG standards, and if you find a deep enough sale, I’d say there’s still a good chance you’ll be into it and it’s worth a try. It’s very JRPG but also very different from others I’ve played at the same time.