Borderlands 2

Yeah, I guess they have a way to push out better weapons. Yesterday and this morning it's snipers, although I didn't encounter a single dropped sniper (or even in a chest) during the hour or so I played yesterday.

SuperJay - the event just changes the distribution of the type of weapon. Today until around noon eastern its sniper rifles. Then it'll switch to the next one I think.

So for the snipers, you'll just see a greater amount of them, and those that are seen will be of a higher rarity on average. I think it's most apparent when farming bosses, where folks are reporting lots of purple stuff dropping, including some uniques that are not typically found other than on a couple of bosses.

Since I'm not 50, I don't find much use for the event since ill out-level the ones I get anyway. But I'm also wrapped up tight in two other games right now.

Huh, interesting. Cool that Gearbox can do such things.

So that's why all those guns I didn't want were falling on me maybe. I do hate trying to figure out which of two shotguns is betterer than the other. And, of course, the guns that I use a bunch are dropping while I'm at work.

Trying the game again. A little bit annoyed at the relatively small number of side quests I have in my log at any given time, but maybe I haven't hit my stride yet. I met the Firehawk and went back to Sanctuary and only that character had any quests to give me, and then I logged out. I actually kind of like having dozens of sidequests to do in an area at a time.

Having a small number of side quests is certainly not a problem I'm encountering.

Brian, if you're just meeting the Firehawk you're basically at the very beginning of the game, so there's likely not much to do yet. As MrPants says, my problem was generally having too many sidequests and not much reason to do them.

I'm sort of screwing around in TVHM at about level 42, and I'm now choosing missions based on how much XP they're worth rather than trying to re-play the main game in any particular order.

EDIT: The sniper event just ended.

So, basically I'm never going to finish this game. Because in an entire afternoon, I managed to finish the quest content from where you get to Sanctuary through where Firehawk resolves, but back at Sanctuary.

I think maybe I explore too much. I blame those stupid challenges. It would have taken me at least one less hour to do the Firehawk thing if I hadn't known that there were a bunch of hidden Echo recorders that gave me points toward tiny, insignificant character bonuses.

You get more bonus points from just blowing things up usually, so after a while I ignored those little find the hidden things and just blew up bandits in new and creative ways.

Yeah. IMO those little Badass challenges are nice bonuses to accumulate along the way but I never made a point to deliberately pursue them. They're not particularly significant and may be best left until after completing the game, assuming you really need to pursue them at some point.

This game is a curse to those with real completist tendencies. Luckily I am not one of those.

Today's gear up event makes varkids more likely to evolve up the ladder, thus making it more likely for Vermivorous the Invincible to spawn. His chance of dropping the Norfleet is also increased. Hawkeye Fierce and I were able to get him to spawn and kill him twice in about an hour and a half, and he dropped two Norfleets. Which is cool and all, but it looks as if he only ever drops one orange at a time, so it's less likely he'll drop the legendary class mods that I want to get.

Puissant Norfleet w00t

Dufresne, what level are the Norfleets you got, and where did you get them? My partner's a Level 50, and I'm a 42, and we got ours in Tundra Express. The launcher we got was only a 40. :(

Both were level 50s, but we were both 50 ourselves. We got Vermivorous to spawn in Tundra Express as well, right by the farmhouse.

I actually joined up with three other friends later in the evening for another crack at Verm, and holy cow, it's WAY easier to get him to appear with 4 people. We killed him 3 more times, and the third time we actually had trouble clearing out the extra varkids once he spawned, because they kept evolving. We somehow had another Ultimate Badass Varkid appear in the middle of the fight. THAT was fun.

In any case, he dropped 2 more Norfleets, 1 Legendary Mechromancer Mod, and the Kawaii Killer head mod for the Siren. That last one is so goddamn rare that we duped the shit out of it between the four of us.

Then one of my friends and I took a crack at Pyro Pete the Invincible, but I'm pretty sure we need more DPS for that fight than we had. 4 attempts and we kept getting stomped.

Do you think it was the fact that I was a mere 42 that made the Norfleet that dropped a 40 instead of a 50?

I haven't fought these bosses, but yeah, I would think so. Were you hosting the game and your partner joining? Most of the item levels in the game depend on the host's main story progress, so I'm guessing that applies here too.

I think we were in her game. Ah, well, the 42 Norfleet is pretty damned good and will help me get to 50.

So having played through the new DLC today, I can say its... not great. Torgue is a hard act to follow in any case, but this is still the worst of the DLCs.

The art of the new zones is pretty good. Great White Hunter aesthetic is kind of neat, but it's only really apparent at Hammerlock's Lodge, and everywhere else there's a more "tribal" variant of your typical bandit decor. It has the best-written and funniest villain in the game next to Jack himself. Also there are airboats.

Unfortunately that's all the praise I have for it. The zone design in general is a mess. Most of the zones are huge, yet except for the first one there's only one teleport point per zone, and they're not easily accessible. The zone with the most access to airboats consists of a bunch of little tunnels, so you can't ever really open it up. One of the quest givers is also right in the middle of a "savage" town, so every time you go to turn stuff in, you have to fight your way back through the whole town again.

Not that you have to worry much about the sidequests. Almost every quest in the DLC rewards you with cash, XP, or green weaponry, and the only exception just gives you a new character skin. So no fancy unique guns like the other two DLCs, and I didn't get a single new upgrade while playing through it at the level cap. So at level 50 it's best to just charge through the main quest to unlock the quest to kill the raid boss.

So yeah, underwhelming. Time to go back and listen to Mr. Torgue scream at me some more.

WTF is wrong with Borderlands designers? Did they read any of the feedback for Borderlands 1 DLC? Did they not notice that nearly everyone wants more teleport zones? I have a life and I want to be able to quit playing anytime I please without losing progress.

Disclaimer: I haven't played the new DLC yet. Just going off Dufresne's feedback, and my hair trigger tolerance for games wasting my time when there are a million cheap games to choose from.

Still no raising of the level cap??

Man... Borderlands 1 DLC was better than this.

And weirdly, some of the enemies in the new DLC are at 53.

And still no new bank space or Eridium sink. I'm not kidding: if the next expansion was JUST that, I would be happy.

Do you know about the unlimited bank trick? I haven't tried this yet, and hopefully it hasn't been patched.

Bank space was pretty much the only reason I started all four (now five) characters. Unfortunately, you still have to grind through to Sanctuary. I've barely played Zero or pigtail girl at all beyond that, while my other characters are in their 30's and 40's.

Bank & backspace limitations is why I haven't purchased a single DLC and will not until they adjust these signficantly.

This might be a game I shouldn't play. I just put in an afternoon and a half and all I've done is advance through Wilhelm. There are still entire hub cities to get to, according to the achievements list. And thus far it's followed the one-to-two side quests ever at a time in a zone formula. I've started ignoring the zone-specific challenges where they aren't of the "find all the audiologs" variety (my want find all voice acting, because I'm apparently old enough that "seeing the recorded thing" still reads to me as a basic reward for doing the game), but this is still not particularly swift going. Of course, I also think that I really probably suck quite a lot at this game, as virtually any encounter that cannot be negotiated at a safe distance involves me running around like a screaming idiot with my ass on fire while my pet robot does his best to punch at least one enemy in the junk until he is dead. The stupid quest with the corrosive transforming bugs was particularly irritating in that regard. I think I might have liked the pacing better in the first game. Then again, from the looks of things, this game is like three or four of the first game lined up one after the other, and I'm not sure how well that will wear over time. I'll also need to slow down leveling soon if I'm supposed to have to start a new game to hit 50, because I'm definitely not a third of the way through and I'm already 18, although the leveling already feels like it happens at a fairly glacial pace. Of course, I'm also also not sure that I'm the target audience here. I strongly suspect that the entities that constructed Tiny Tina figured that was hilarious, but yo - that shit is just extremely sad for me. And there's so much murdering. And it's called murdering. The game knows that you're violently killing people with bullets and robots and billions upon billions of explosive barrels and it seems to think that some element of that transaction (I push button, man fall down) is funny in some kind of lighthearted, childlike way, not unlike a man getting hit in the face with a pie, and I just don't get it. I may have wandered into the wrong club on this one. It doesn't offend me - it just doesn't hit at all, and watching a thing try to be funny at me for this long and just being completely unable to give it anything back is starting to feel a little awkward.

This game is built for multiple playthroughs. You cannot do all the side quest stuff without outleveling other quests or outleveling the story. Weapon drops are tied to your progress in the main story. It's not the best system but it's better than Borderlands 1. Don't try to do all the content.

Hey Brian, dude, why are you playing this game? You've had a couple posts like this re: BL2, and it just sounds like you're playing it out of some unnecessary obligation or something. If you don't find it funny or entertaining and aren't enjoying yourself, stop wondering aloud whether you're the target audience (who cares?) and just put it down and move on. If Tiny Tina just makes you sad - and given her situation that's not an unjustified reaction - then call it a valiant attempt and move on. (And yes, there is murdering. That part should have been obvious, but you do indeed shoot a lot of people indiscriminately.)

Shooty McFace, for example. I am also wondering why someone who doesn't like endless, egregious manshooter games would buy a game whose single verb-noun combination is ">SHOOT MAN". And then complain that the manshooting is too egregious. Trying to grind through games that are too hateful for you just isn't healthy, unless you're a game reviewer, and that's a different kind of sickness.

The point is not that the shooting of men is egregious - the point is that the murder itself is supposed to be some kind of entertainment, and I just don't quite get that. I'm down with all manner of violent games, but not many of them go quite so far over to the "FAMILY MURDER C-C-C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER" side as this. Even the first game, I felt, wasn't leaning so hard on how terrific it is that you're waltzing around blowing people away. I mean, take...I dunno, Rainbow 6. You don't get the sense that the game thinks you should be giggling every time you kill a terrorist. Like I said - I don't find it offensive, but I do find it baffling, and the degree to which I find it so completely incomprehensible leaves me feeling uncomfortable. And it's not like there's nothing in there to like about it - I like exploring the environment and when I don't feel like it's trying to tell me a joke in Esperanto I like the shooting part, and I even kind of like the characters that were apparently in the first game that I never met, despite having actually been one of them. Mechanically, I think so far the only things I would change are 1) make denser zones that actually reward exploration; and 2) god damn your skill trees are so infinitely boring (I'm still kicking around on how, specifically, I would change that one, but when this many of your skills involve a plus sign and a percentage, I don't think that's a good situation).

That said, I do believe that I might have to give up on Borderlands 2 for the second time. Maybe in co-op it will be better if my group ever gets around to it. I just keep waiting for it to open up and for this terrific writing that Tara Long keeps chirping about to show up, and I guess it's just not for me. Fortunately, Far Cry 3 was on sale today, so I'll either have a new game to be very disappointed with or something I enjoy a little bit better by Thursday. I'm hoping for the latter.

That's interesting, but wasn't really my take on it all. I got the sense that the continually overexaggerated violence was treated as a sort of farce that parodies itself rather than just a one-note celebration of gleeful carnage. I think the game continually draws attention to its own implausibility ("guess what, ANOTHER VAULT and this time we're sure it's for realsies!") as a way to both illustrate that ridiculousness and have some fun with it. The "bandits" are effectively nameless Imperial Stormtroopers that work as anonymous fodder. (Where do they come from? You never see a female bandit, they must reproduce with spores.)

One the one hand, it doesn't take itself too seriously at all, but on the other, I never felt like the handling of tragedy / death / loss in relation to the main characters was treated so lightly as to be uncaring or undermining. The shit that Jack does is horrible. The things that happened to Tiny Tina were awful. You kind of laugh along with some of it but its more a laugh of horror than a laugh of cheap amusement. But in Tiny Tina's case, for example - she really is hilarious, I thought, and I simultaneously laughed at her ridiculous dialog and cared for her on a deeper level due to her past.

None of this is to say you should like it or should keep playing it, just saying that I thought there was a deeper layer there that wasn't just crazed gleeful murder.

And even if it were JUST crazed gleeful murder, that would be okay too. Different strokes, etc.

Maybe. Don't you think Tiny Tina was kind of a badass though??

Yeah, I agree, it's more a parody of carnage than say...Soldier of Fortune, or whatever that old game was that was all bout it's gruesome ability to dismember your foes.

He tends to not only exaggerate, but exaggerate every negative as soon as he gets to it without giving himself the time to actually put the subject into a greater context. "Family murder c-c-c-combo-breaker" is said by Claptrap within the first 10 levels of the game, and I'm pretty sure he only says it once.

Borderlands 2 isn't about accentuating violence, it's about accentuating the ridiculous, and it has been ever since you fought Nine-Toes in the first game (he has 3 balls).

Confession time re. Tiny Tina: Main game? Tolerable, even fun. Torgue DLC? Insufferable and annoying.

I can't be angry at anyone who hates raisin cookies as much as I do. Because chocolate chip is the for real deal.

It seems they are following the same plan since I think only 1 DLC from Borderlands 1 rose the cap. And there's at least 1 DLC left in B2.

Btw, is there a guide telling the best order of stuff including those DLC in the flow?

There's a good chance of a second season pass. And they are going to raise the level cap by end of march. Then there's one major expansion (I suppose more than current DLC is scope), and they just announced at least one new character class via Randy on Twitter. They keep this up and I will gladly pop this game in every week or so for a few hours for a long time to come.

Wow - that's a lot of extra content. B1 just had the two add-on campaigns, right?