General Gaming Megathread: What are you playing?

I finally got to Arceus and it's kicking my Arce.

I am an expert hunting Alphas now tho.

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Been playing through the borderlands games, I'm about 24 hours into Borderlands GOTY enhanced, I've finished the story and the first DLC, the second DLC is an arena thing that takes a while without friends so I'm pacing that while playing through the third DLC which needs some fast travel spots. I also started playing Borderlands 2 concurrently and it just feels and plays like butter compared to 1, a shame that the first Borderlands was the only one with decent writing though.

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Gonna have serious difficulty balancing Final Fantasy and Lost Ark now. Too many good games coming out that require you to time sink.
 
Aurelius Of Phoenix said:
Been playing through the borderlands games, I'm about 24 hours into Borderlands GOTY enhanced, I've finished the story and the first DLC, the second DLC is an arena thing that takes a while without friends so I'm pacing that while playing through the third DLC which needs some fast travel spots. I also started playing Borderlands 2 concurrently and it just feels and plays like butter compared to 1, a shame that the first Borderlands was the only one with decent writing though.
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I played Borderlands 1 and Borderlands 2 and most of the DLCs for either a couple of years ago.

I found Borderlands 1's main campaign in general somewhat bland, with it only picking up the pace near the end when the Crimson Lance finally showed up and the plot because a bit more military science fiction.
The random, irreverent, and sometimes dumb humor that would become more prevalent in its sequel, that makes you question if basically everyone is either insane or a sociopath could already be felt but there were still some sane people around.
It would be taken up a notch in the DLCs.

The first one was basically a Halloween/Zombie tale but I found it in general amusing. I do think it went on a little too long though.
Some parts could have been cut back, and some of the sidequests were annoying collect-a-thons that I probably spend way to much time on for the sake of grinding.


I could not bother with second one as I played the game solo, but the bank was welcome for a time until I realized I was better off selling a lot of the guns I kept storing there.


The third one (I need to drag up my memories about it as it has been so long ago) was probably one of the few times developers actually managed to pull off DLC concept well ever since it was made up as a replacement for expansion packs.
It actually offered a decent amount of new content next to recycling and reskinning previous material.
A lot of new enemy types, new drive-able vehicles that previous either was only used by a boss or served as background props, a lot of new territory, but driving between all these places really became a drag.
The story is basically there. I guess Knoxx can be amusing amusing in his echo messages but I honestly do not rate him above most of the other characters.


The fourth DLC feels a little of an afterthought that ties into the joke epilogue of the main campaign.
But I don't think the premise had that much meat on it. Find the intergalactic ninja assassin Claptrap and defeat him before he 'claptraps' everyone on Pandora.

I did like the Hyperion soldiers (someone actually made new skins or models rather than recycling the Crimson Lance troops), and Hyperion's representative Mr Blake which I really wish had been more used.
The Claptrap enemies were disappointing through, either it was too difficult to re animate the models to hold guns or the designers could not be bothered.
And the rest of the enemies are redressed BL1, DLC1, DLC3 enemies with a new skin, including bosses from these such as Dr Zed, Commandant Steele, and general Knoxx.
If I recall correctly we had to fight these twice, on the various maps we have to visit, and again on the final map in a boss rush mode before we can face the final boss.

I remember feeling a little disappointed with this DLC. I was however surprised to hear that when the third Borderlands game was released, that the random planets Marcus mentioned actually appeared as game locations.


If people ask me what my first thoughts are when they tell me to talk about Borderlands 2 I would say; Youtube poop, twitter humor, and pop culture references that are now dated like hell.

It definitely runs a bit faster than Borderlands 1 but I really miss the health kits we could carry with us.
Now instead we depend on what health pick ups enemies drop during battle, and character abilities that either regenerate health, or replenish health when we kill enemies.

There is more of a plotline in BL2 and Handsome Jack works better than Commandant Steel and the Crimson Lance who were not that much of a presence until near the end of BL1's campaign.
But I find I find him way overrated by many of the fans of Borderlands 2 as being this sort of super memorable villain all other antagonists are measured against from now on.

I feel he is rather treated in the same way as the Joker is to Batman, I am talking about the ultra psychotic joker who just maims and kills for laughs, and whose activities mostly revolve about doing this on a wide scale as possible in order to upset Batman. (shoot him, just fucking shoot him. But then you would loose your play pal, won't you Dark Knight?)

The majority of the people in this game seem to have gone down even further in both reasoning capabilities and morality, including the players themselves.
I really did not find anyone really likeable. Most of them are just wacked out anarchist nut jobs, the stupid type of anarchists.
Player characters might actually be an improvement as some of them are at least sane murderers.

Even the so called resistance is not that much of an improvement.
Their basic motivation to fight Handsome Jack and Hyperion is so that kill crazy anarchist assholes can continue what they do now, instead of high class sociopaths taking over Pandora.

I guess their leader Roland is somewhat respectable even if I think Pandora could do with some law and order, various echo logs make it clear how people here have been screwing each other over way before Jack came along.

In a way it is hard to find Handsome Jack being at fault for wanting to clean up Pandora. I guess he is worse because he has his scientists do experiments on people?
Oh he is a grade A jerk, and blasting his arrogant ass feels good, but I feel I more want to kill him because he is very set on getting me/my character killed rather than that I think I need to save Pandora and its people from him.

Like BL1 the game starts somewhat slow, and I can honestly say that I that after BL2 and most of its DLCs that I am pretty fed up with a majority of the campaign being about having to shoot bandits and psychos when I am not doing animal control.
So when the robots/loaders and the soldiers finally showed up, I welcomed this change in theme.

I am however not that sold on crazier and wackier.
For one, I did not like the character of Tiny Tina.


The DLCs. I would rather prefer about the DLC that I did like than the ones I felt were average or okay.
Yeah, they were more Borderlands 2, but often the parts I did not care about.

The one DLC I liked, Commander Lilith and the Fight for Sanctuary, was a real late surprise entry, coming years after the other main and mini DLCs to form some kind of bridge between BL2 and the upcoming BL3, setting up some of the plot elements at the start of that game.

First reason I liked this DLC is that it felt like an epilogue to the storyline of BL2.
Jack's defeated, Roland had a funeral, and life goes on.

Our 'wacky and plucky heroes' now have to decide on what they are going to do next.
Hyperion is shambles. Not just because of Jack's death, but also because Helios got destroyed between Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon's Keep (some talk about that DLC in a moment) and this DLC.

This of course happened in the adventure/interactive movie spin off Tales of the Borderlands.
Two of the characters of TFTBL off also actually make their appearance in this DLC though the DLC writers were not able to handle them on the same level as the people of Telltale did. The personalities of these characters were somewhat rewritten.

Less mention is made of Borderlands The Pre-Sequel which also takes place before this DLC.
No mention is made of Athena or that Eridani Guardian who warned that a war is coming.


Second reason is that we finally get to deal with a somewhat more serious villain again after the joke villains of the previous large DLCs.
Hector, like Handsome Jack before him intends to transform Pandora according to his vision. In this case making it into the paradise Dahl, his and his men's former employer, had promised them before the corporation betrayed them.
But rather than the risk of being forcefully 'civilized', the people of Pandora are now threatened with being either made into fertilizer or be transformed into human-plant mutants.

Despite being a more serious antagonist Hector has his amusing sides too such as his sarcastic comments over the communication network when he reacts to the actions and decisions of the player.

Note: I did not know that Hector was a lot like Colonel Zarpedon from the Pre-Sequel as I played that game after I had already finished this DLC.
Another villain who was more threatening as she is actually serious and sane.


But this DLC has its weak parts too, and a lot of them lay in the maps which are in general rather underwhelming.
Even visiting the wreckage of the Helios station is really not that interesting.
Like with BL2 it were only the final maps that really started to appeal to me because of their themes (exploring a laboratory, having to go through the guts of the ship Sanctuary was actually build on top of)


We get some new enemy types such as hostile plants and mutants caused by a special gas Hector and his men use to create their plants.

Note: many of these new enemies were actually designed for Borderlands The Pre-Sequel's second DLC before it got canceled and 2K Australia was dissolved.

I think the new soldier types are reskins of the Pre-Sequel Dahl Last Legion soldiers. They are definitely a lot stronger than the Hyperion soldiers from BL2.

Outside two of the bosses, the rest of the enemies are of course recycled from BL2 itself, but they have gotten a skin replacement to go with the plant mutation theme.
For the rest they behave like the vanilla versions.


An additional but not original gameplay element is that the player now sometimes has to enter areas that are overrun with plant spores where he or she can not stay too long.
Well it is obvious what will happen when you are stubborn or don't get out on time.


I just remember this. Something that was absent in this DLC was that the player characters own comments and reactions on events.
In the main game and the DLCs before the final one the player characters would talk from time to time, responding on something the NPCs said or making observations.
This made it feel that the characters were actually involved in the storyline, and not silent observers during cutscenes.

But in this DLC's cutscenes the main characters are Lilith and the remaining characters of BL2.
The player character is never actually present or acknowledged during these.

Most likely Gearbox did not feel like hiring the old VOs again to do a few new lines.

Still of all the BL2 DLCs this is probably the only one I would like to replay.


Now I did actually also like the fourth DLC, Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep, which is also the favorite BL2 DLC of most other BL2 players.

This is probably the DLC that received the most new assets of all the DLCs as it completely switches to a fantasy setting.

The storyline, dialogue, and parody of fantasy RPGs was genuinely funny in parts such as when in one quest that was clearly inspired by MMOs I got to 'teabag' a bunch of killed NPCs that are based on player characters, coming complete with very angry responses for doing this.

And during the rest of the game I also got to face various D&D adventurer parties who were out on some epic quest before they happened to get in my way.

The main problem that I feel with this DLC is one that is with most jokes. After you have seen, heard, or read it for the first time and got a good laugh it is not as funny any more when you hear it for the second or the third time. The surprise element is gone.
It may still make you smile, but that is it. And this DLC is build on amusing people with parodies and jokes about fantasy tropes as the rest it is just more BL2.


I will try to keep it short about the Pre-Sequel. In general I liked it as I enjoy the change of scenery and the space sci fi themes.
I also don't mind that Elpis, the setting of the game, is basically space Australia, complete with Australian culture-isms.
It makes a rather nice change from the Borderlands wasteland that is clearly inspired by the Mad Max movies but populated by Americans.

The new energy and cryo weapons were very welcome, they are much better than those damn slag weapons they replace.

The game also felt a lot more story driven.
It is not exactly a stellar script but it is at least there from the start rather than the slow burn that was the previous game's storyline.

And like the player characters in BL2 the player character you use actually comments and responds when main NPCs actually talk to him or her.

Gameplay changes were a little getting used too such as now having to keep an eye on the O2 meter and being able to make big leaps.
I myself never made much use of the alternative O2 mods that can give additional abilities such as a slam attack. I kept using one of the starting ones that give you O2 bottle pick ups after you have defeated an enemy as I found those much more useful.

I do think this game got a rather undeserved negative reputation as it does do a lot of things quite right, and perhaps even better than BL2.

The game however does not have the length of BL2 (though I think a lot of BL2 is filler), and there are a number of bugs that should really have been addressed.
At one part of the game I suddenly lost the ability to pick up O2 bottles that enemies drop for no clear reason, and I had to restart the game to make that gameplay part work again.


I have not played the game's single DLC yet so I can not give any feedback on that.
 
I played Borderlands 1 with my little brother 10 years ago but it could not hold my interest.
 
I played it for a bit but the dialogue was insufferable. Then I watched the trailer for that Tina Spin off or whatever and almost went into shock from cringe.
 
Borderlands 3 is even worse in the cringe department and i'm one of the people that actually tolerated the humor in Borderlands 1 and 2.
 
TorontoReign said:
I played Borderlands 1 with my little brother 10 years ago but it could not hold my interest.
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I really get you.

I start playing Borderlands 1 and its DLCs around the same time or perhaps even earlier. I can't remember when it was released.

Having already played most of the other shooter games at the time, and I think even FNV multiple times, I just wanted something new to go through.

But damn did I get bored during the opening part of the game.
I had never played looter shooters before, or those random generation games, and as Borderlands 1 is primarily about doing missions for money and items and there really being little to no story or goal other than collecting parts of the key, I think I stopped halfway as there was no compelling reason to go on.

Other things happened (I think I was still in school), other games got released, and I all forgot about Borderlands 1 until at some point I must have started on it again. And this time I actually made it to the part in which we got to fight the Crimson Lance and the Guardians, and the plot finally started to take off after I had to go through hours and hours of shooting bandits and animals for no reason other so that I could finally move on to the next damn map or reach the next level so I could use better equipment.

I definitely enjoyed that zombie DLC a lot more as it was shorter than the main game, and I did not have go through not shitloads of bandits again (what is Gearbox's designers obsession with these).
The zombies though became tiresome in their own way.


I forgot to post this in my other post but as some people here may now, the original Borderlands was suppose to be a much more serious story driven game. I think with actual dialogue trees and perhaps quests with different outcomes.

But then Gearbox's team redesigned it as a looter shooter and gave the graphics the cell shaded look.

I would actually liked to have seen what the original Borderlands would have been like before these changes.
Could it perhaps have been more like FNV?


Walpknut said:
I played it for a bit but the dialogue was insufferable. Then I watched the trailer for that Tina Spin off or whatever and almost went into shock from cringe.
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I had actually been thinking about that one when I was trying to come up with what I wanted to write about Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep.

I would like to bring up a comparison. Has anyone here seen the series Community, and in particular the paintball episode of season 1?
Or those who watch Rick & Morty. Do you remember the episode with interdimensional television?

Both were very unexpected episodes, one being an amusing take on a sort of zombie or infection epidemic scenario, and the other about the main characters watching weird television shows and advertisements from other dimension the writers of the episode probably just made up on the go as they wanted to come up with silly or ridiculous random stuff such as the bizarre manufacturing process of some kind of alien household item with no clear use, or some guy who during the making of an add for stick on doors decides to leave the studio while the camera keeps following him to his house where it is revealed that it is all part of the add.

Both were a hit with the audience and the next season the producers of these shows (interesting enough the guy who made Community also made Rick & Morty) decided to bring these plotlines back, but making it even more over the top or weird.
They wanted to repeat a random success by making even more of it. Well I don't need to explain what the problem of a random success is, it explains itself.

And that is what the Tina spin off feels to me.

A lot of BL2's humor is a miss or cringe, and Tiny Tina was a big part of that.
I don't find her an adorable psychotic girl with an obsession for explosives, I find her a fucking annoyance. And I was always glad that I was past the parts BL games in which she appeared.

I also feel there was definitely some nepotism going on at Gearbox as she was voiced by Anthony Burch's sister.
But I could be wrong and the actress' voice was really what the production team of BL2 was looking for.

Anyway, this spin off or sidequel feels like an attempt at doing Dragon Keep over again, but this time dialed to 11.

So we probably get more 'meta humor' again with Tina being narrator and dungeon master, changing the situation on a whim because she does not like the current setup or other players comment on what is currently going on.


Actually talking about the Borderlands games actually made me realize that I am pretty done with the series now.
I have no interest in playing Borderlands 3 and its DLCs, or the old games again.
 
Streets of Rouge is better than it has any right to be.

Also I don't want to hear about good TB and RTwP RPG's not being made anymore because you guys just aren't playing them or at least are not talking about them. I'm having trouble keeping up now that I don't mind playing something not generic post apocalyptic desert with leather and mutants and some wacky weapons. Expeditions Rome is just another TB RPG that looks to be interesting.

The only complaint Codex can put forth is some of the games have gay stuff.
 
Bought a Nintendo Switch Lite, gonna get Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition. I do have the original on the Wii, but i think my Wii no longer works. Plus i basically lost all its cables (probably in a bag somewhere though), same for the controllers.
 
TorontoReign said:
Streets of Rouge is better than it has any right to be.

Also I don't want to hear about good TB and RTwP RPG's not being made anymore because you guys just aren't playing them or at least are not talking about them. I'm having trouble keeping up now that I don't mind playing something not generic post apocalyptic desert with leather and mutants and some wacky weapons. Expeditions Rome is just another TB RPG that looks to be interesting.

The only complaint Codex can put forth is some of the games have gay stuff.
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Streets Of Rogue is amazing and I look forward with great anticipation for the sequel which will be open world.

Who's been harping on about there not being any good cRPG's being made anymore?
 
Mr Fish said:
Streets Of Rogue is amazing and I look forward with great anticipation for the sequel which will be open world.

Who's been harping on about there not being any good cRPG's being made anymore?
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It's the general mentality probably because Fallout is shit. I'm genuinely surprised how many good RPG's are coming out and have came out the past 15 years. Nobody here seems to play them.
 
Forgot to mention in my previous post that i got back into Grim Dawn after a two months break. Leveling a Paladin for spam pierce Aegis of Menhir because the devs finally allowed that to be a thing (it is on an item though).
 
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Mr Fish said:
List 'em.
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I honestly don't want to go through all of them to vet the list. There are plenty. Even if you only play sci fi style RPG's there are enough coming out that nobody really should bitch about there not being games to play anymore. Even forgetting RPG's the FPS genre has returned to a more old school root, indies exist, metroidvanias exist, clones of popular games that are dead exist, etc.

Basically the only thing that has been ruined is popular IP's that should die anyway.

Norzan said:
Forgot to mention in my previous post that i got back into Grim Dawn after a two months break. Leveling a Paladin for spam pierce Aegis of Menhir because the devs finally allowed that to be a thing (it is on an item though).
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Example. Grim Dawn was made since Diablo and Blizzard sucks. I still need to beat it.
 
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