Next on my chopping block is a game by Runic Games called Torchlight. Yet another decedent of grandfather of action-RPG's, I was drawn to this game due to it's Diablo II nature. Would I finally find a game that lives up to the classic?
Synopsis:
Torchlight is to Diablo II like I Can't Believe It's Not Butter is to Butter. After playing 5 minutes, it can be quickly noticed how much this game takes after Diablo I, Diablo II and the visual aspects of WoW. In many regards, it is simply a carbon copy. It does however, offer a few of its own ideas, most in the name of player convenience.
Torchlight is set in a mining village named after its title, the main quest taking place in a dungeon that expands and changes for over 30 levels and ends at the bottom.
My play through is with the class Vanquisher, on Hard. I finished the campaign and planned to play the extra dungeon for longer, but stopped when the game entered a crash loop.
Pro's and Con's
Graphics Engine
The graphics engine OGRE was not developed by Runic, but it was a strong choice for this type of game. A limited but effective physics engine is also present on top of this which seems mostly employed in "knockback" effects which was amongst the strengths of Torchlight. This gave attacks made by a player or monster an empowering feel, which, when applied to a dungeon crawler game alleviates boredom well. The graphics are made to be cartoony and are very similar to the comic book artistic style of WoW using strong base colors. I would say however, Torchlight is more willing to use darker tones. It ends up with a somewhat upbeat gothic feel. Visually I thought Torchlight was quite pleasing.
Sound
From the moment I entered the town of Torchlight and my ears were filled with the plings of an acoustic guitar I could hear the influence brought by Diablo I and the music of Tristram. I later found out that the composer was the same person. While Diablo I had great music, I feel Torchlight not taking any steps to create a separate atmosphere to be concerning. The sound effects, especially those related to combat seemed to be spot on. Wacking or Shooting sounds were highly satisfying giving the player a sense of "doing damage". Item drop sounds were however limited and often were drowned out by the rest of the music so the game misses out on some audio cues for the player. The dungeon music also became droning after a while but I did enjoy the ambient noises for the most part in each dungeon texture type. Overall the sound for the game was good but with very little innovation.
Style
This is probably one of the weakest points for Torchlight, in that it has very little in the way of style. While there was some funny characters involved (like a robot bard or Gar who spoke nothing but gibberish) the fact that they had nothing but repetitious dialog made sure their characters never developed into anything interesting. The main characters of the piece had very little interest and were as 1 dimensional as possible sticking only to their initial perceived purpose. The corrupt bad guy whose story never expands, the NPC heroine who needs to stop him "because that's what she's there for". The art and the sound feel very borrowed as well so there's no style points there either.
GUI
The visual aspect of the GUI was done quite well, with maybe an exception to the minimap. The letters were clear and bold, the skills were easily identifiable in the "skill belt" down at the bottom and everything was artistically pleasing on the eyes. The menus had the same artistic style as the rest of the game, sporting that cartoony comic feel while still being organized and everything being easily indentifiable. My deconstruction of a few things I feel didn't work out is still in order, however. The minimap overlay was faint, making it a tad hard to read. The radar version didn't seem to present with the right scale of information. The health and mana indicators were a bit hard for me to notice at first, compared to the large globes Diablo II presented but I got used to it.
The only major issue was the hotkeys. Using a number to link to a skill is fine, however, the fact that pressing that assigned number would make the skill a 1 time use rather than a bind to a mouse key made its use for spamming it limited. The game instead offered a one time TAB button to change what the right click did. In honesty, the games skill trees worked with it okay since a lot of skills were passive or buffs/summons that only need to be cast once in a while but I find the design to be limiting. What if I do end up with 4 offensive skills I want to quickly switch between in combat? Having to press 4, then left click, 4, then left click over and over again gets a bit annoying and makes it harder for me to position my character while I do it, since when I press the 4 I've dedicated to using the skill instead of movement. I prefer the Diablo II method of F keys (Although number keys are just as good) and them all binding to either left or right click for constant use. This didn't really hurt Torchlight too much, but it would hurt expansive skill trees.
Overall Gameplay Experience
Torchlight is fun and well structured. I really think the game does exactly what it sets out to do. Stick to a concise dungeon crawler formula, add a few conveniences and just stop while you are ahead. The game is definitely fun to play for a while, especially if this genre appeals to you but it is entirely possible to find the lack of deep substance diminishing the overall experience and causing the joy to peter out on your own time.
Breakdown Of Gameplay
My favorite part, and lots to talk about when dissecting the good and the bad in Torchlight.
One important aspect of action RPG is not letting the eyes get bored. Torchlight did this quite well by having only a few levels of each terrain type before mixing it up into something very different. Each terrain had its own color patterns and general feel. The way to access secret areas was changed up and that to me was a very playful and elegant idea. In Diablo II, most peoples least favorite Act is Act 2, and probably because for 80% of it you stare at sand while running around trying to find something. Wether or not it takes more time to do than the other acts, it sure *feels* longer. That's why changing things up is important. Also, an instant sense of accomplishment and progressive joy is sent to the brain when one clicks on a set of stairs and the terrain is completely different than the last 3 levels and creates constant new desires to continue forth. (Sometimes also inspiring fear and worry, as in, oh crud there is lava everywhere this can't be good). Either way, it sparks an emotional response and I was happy with Torchlights execution of it. (But really, it just mainly copied Diablo I).
I want to re-mention the Knockback and the limited physics. While physics are not entirely noticed in a 3rd person top down compared to an FPS, they still add to the feeling that when you do something like bash down an enemy, that you are *really* doing that. Diablo never offered that, with every enemy death causing him to drop in place on the ground. In torchlight you can knockback kill something sending it rolling off a cliff and never seen again. The screen would shake ever so slightly as if your blow was so strong it caused minor tremors. These small additions to combat were among my favorite parts of Torchlight.
Character progression was interesting in Torchlight. The stats were made to be extremely simplistic in what they did, but difficult in knowing what you need. I thought this was a great approach. Three of the skills, Strength, Dex and Magic all just directly increased the damage of the weapon type they effect. Little thought came into it once you knew what weapon you wanted to use. I used ranged weaponry so Dex was my major dump point. Everyone, however, could benefit from defence. What really made it interesting was the items requirements. Armor was not all based on strength or defence, making one stat better than another automatically. Armor could be found using any of the requirements, therefore any of the stats could still show some use. However, the breakdown to this is, the most effective thing to do is still max out the stat you use for weaponry and defence and simply be more picky about what armor you use, and in the end game, just get the best stuff requiring those. While your exploring however and don't have gear to pass down, that is simply easier said than done. I think the system makes for an interesting first time playthrough in that you may spend points all over to meet certain requirements, but very linear on subsequent playthroughs.
The skills in Torchlight, for the two classes I observed seemed to be far too packed with passive skills that overshadowed active skills. Worse still, each class seem to have the same ones. None of them were fine tuned to specific situations either, making them all valuable to the overall success of your character. The problem with that theory is that it limits the feeling of choice. It took the "what kind of character am I going to make" and turned it into "What passive skill should I raise first?". Active skills are really what make a character in the end. But to be fair, Torchlight did have enough so that you could try different things, but not enough complimenting skills to try different skills.. differently. Basically, the ideal thing to do is to pick one active skill you want to attack with, raise that to max and raise all the passive skills to max as well and call that a character. I think in the end that allows for as many characters as there is active skills, but no creativity allowed to the player who wants to try iterations and combinations of skills.
The item system mimicked strongly Diablo II's execution, with a few allowances added in. I noticed a prefix-suffix naming convention, however I noticed no such system that forced only so much from each of those catagories. Any item ability could find itself on an item in any combination. This allowed items to be more varied I thought. Items could also be enchanted (having a random enhancement added to it) any amount of times for a scaling amount in gold. I am all for constant enhancement, but making it limitless has obvious issues. The clear one, allowing items to become overpowered. The second, not being able to throw it away because of the vast fortune you spent on it, even if you find a new item with base abilities that suit your fancy a lot more. I would think it more practical to allow it to be enchanted MANY times (somewhere around the notion of 10-12) and then say, "that's it bubs, end of the line". With enough prefixes and suffixes floating around you are going to end up with a varied weapon of interest that can be compared to the other items you've done the same thing to and having an interesting choice to make. It also makes you not so commited to the singular item.
The prefixes and suffixes themselves seem to be the same from diablo II, with simple number tweaks. Life leech didn't exist, but "Gain this much life on hit" did. Which, honestly, is a good idea. Leech gets too complicated anyways, and much harder to balance. Torchlight did many adjustments to make things simpler, and in good ways too. Resistances and Armor did not reduce anything in percentages, but rather by a flat value that was meticulously balanced and well executed and followed the amount of health I had and damage I was dealt in a relative fashion. One of the best designed aspects, in my opinion.
The pet idea was novel, kept simple and done well. The pets were mini versions of the player, not sporting any stats or skills but just raising in power by level alone. They could wear two rings as items and sport up to two spells for personal casting. While you don't really have as much customization as a Diablo II merc to aid your journey, two key things made them quite a success. First off, they can't die. We all know computer AI never does what we want it to do in combat. AI teammates in any game just seem to want to end their miserable existance, pets from Torchlight included. Instead, they "retreat", exiting them from combat for a moment where they will either self heal or you can heal them with magic/potions. They don't self heal so fast that you can use them to fight a fight themselves, but aren't gone so long you forget about them. They simply become a useful aid. No more spending money or other precious resources, including time, dealing with the pain of your ally. Goes to show how simple and smart some ideas can be. Secondly, pets can sell stuff for you without exiting your immersion from what you were doing. I like going back to town, but not to sell junk if I know I'm not going to be browsing the shops. Torchlight simply takes that tedium out by allowing your pet to go in your place, and bringing back the profits. And thankfully pets aren't so strong that I can't continue without them, even if I do miss their presence a bit. The last use of pets, the fish, that turn your pet into other animals seemed superfluous. But to me, that was okay, because Torchlight seemed to only stick to conventional ideas taken from Blizzard games and this was at least a way to say "Hey, we did SOMETHING different." It wasen't a powerful ability really, but it was interesting and cool. It gave the game a bit of depth.
The last thing to touch upon is the story/quests. Here is the major downfall of Torchlight and a good lesson to anyone wanting to make an action RPG. You simply can't make a classic game without a story and interesting plots/characters no matter how good the character progression is. Ah, I wont say that, but in this case, it's true. Fighting the minions of hell, saving villages, cleaning plagues, defeating forgotten skeleton kings and appeasing backstabbing goatmen brings an extra level of substance that a Bard who is asking me to kill a monster on some level for the 12th time while an old man looks for a slightly different gem can't compare to.
Conclusion
Torchlight is a fun game, for a while. Where your enjoyment stems from action RPG's will determain your milage. If it's in character development and interesting items, Torchlight will take you for a sizable ride. If any of it lies in the story and meaning, prepare to stop short. At least what it meant to do, it did pretty well.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Borderlands 7/10
I'm going to kick off my first review with a title by 2KGames and Gearbox called Borderlands. I wanted to play this game because I had been told it has a Diablo II-esque feel to it.
Synopsis:
Borderlands is one of few emerging FPS/RPG hybrid games with a higher focus on RPG elements like random items and character progression trees. The most notable difference with these type of games and other conventional shooters is that we feature a progressing health bar and damage is displayed numerically.
Borderlands gives a post apocalyptic backdrop with an unique world filled with crazy bandits and strange creatures.
I played through the first playthrough as a Hunter playing solo. The second playthrough was done with a Beserker companion
The Pros and Cons:
From the very beginning of being kicked off a bus by a greedy merchant to meeting a lovable dancing robot it's clear this game has style. Although the game runs off the Unreal Engine it is made to look similar to cell shading though it does not share the same annoyances that cell shading does. Without seemingly complex textures the game had a slightly cartoonish feel that disassociated it from reality. Though I'm not sure if I liked it visually speaking, it did further add to the style of the game. The Tarintino like entrances of certain characters sealed the deal.
Borderlands was also quite humorous. Many weapons had funny inscriptions and the characters were all larger than life and kinda wacky. I really could go on about dancing robots..
I had no problems with the physics engine and movement seemed quite fluid. Being able to forever run was quite refreshing though it did make me wonder why I ever had a walk function. Nothing took too long to get used to.
The voice acting in Borderlands seemed spot on, but other than that the sound in borderlands was lackluster. The music didn't reach me and sound effects seemed generic. Generally in a FPS I think you can get away with that but when you are going for re-playability I think could be improved upon.
The GUIs in the game were clean and well structured. I was pleased with that aspect.
The gameplay has its share of ups and downs. My experiences and feelings of the game seemed to go on a rollercoaster with high exciting parts and low slow-grinding parts. The heart pounding moments of watching the death meter slide down as you grasp for a second wind or some of the games larger than life bosses to the endless sidequests that seemed too low level and made you revisit maps over and over again.
One of the highlights of any game with character progression is the feeling of, well, progressing. I found that borderlands truly did not offer a lot of that. When you feel like you are no longer building your character you relize you are just.. shooting things. I love shooting things, but it's a short lived fling of fun.
Break Down of Gameplay:
Character progression happens in many ways throughout this game. There is item progression, skill progression and level progression.
One of the biggest issues I had with this game was the power of the level progression. I do not know the formula used, but it is quite apparent that simply being higher level than something was more important than what your skills were or what weapon you were using. The damage that you do to your opponents and the damage they did to you would be effected majorly with the addition of a single level. This ended up completely dwarfing other types of progression making them all but inconsequential. This to me encouraged a steady pace of going through the game, doing all sidequests and constant grinding and disallowed straying from that variant. The fact that your health goes up by a few percent doesn't seem to match the fact that damage is reduced by seemingly 10% or more for every level you have on someone. My personal opinion is that this entire mechanic should be removed and that it ruined a large portion of the RPG aspect. Who cares if someone is higher level than you and you want to fight them? Let your skill and ability to find good items and tweak your character depict if you can or cannot.
The second issue, which ends up compounding with the first was the unimaginative skill trees. All characters trees are built the same way, employing 3 paths that were somewhat themed into a type of character. All 3 paths are built on a tier system stating you must spend 5 points in a tier to access the next. There is 4 tiers in total. I actually had no issue with this system at all. It was simple to understand and allowed for a feeling of choosing a path. I personally think it was good design. My beef was with the skills themselves.
None of the skills save the very first one which you are forced to buy gave a sense of personalization and changed how you played the game. To give a good example, I go back to Diablo II. If you played a Sorceress you had a plethora of spells to choose from as attacks. I can take 3 skills (albeit maybe not the most powerful, but good at illustrating the point) and show how they changed how you played the game. Inferno, Meteor and Fireball. Inferno was a mechanic where you stood still and made a stream of fire damaging all within the cone. It was high damage but also made you vunerable. You had to get in close and be quick about getting out when you had to. Getting enemies in a long straight line becomes beneficial. Fireball is a long range explosive. Ideally you want enemies bunched together tightly and shoot and run strategies are highly effective. Meteor decent a meteor from the sky on a few second delay, meaning you have to predict where the enemies are going and lead them to that location as they chase you around. The point is that your positioning and playstyle changed based on what skills you chose. Borderlands does not offer this.
I played as the hunter and my first skill was a Bird called Bloodwing. I could throw him out and he would attack an enemy for me and deal some damage. I really liked the mechanic but the fact that you HAVE to get this skill means it is a given perk for the class. You then have a multitude of skills that further increase what he does. The skills include giving him the ability to stun, leech health, deal extra damage and attack multiple enemies. You could also make it so he came out more and more often by reducing the cooldown on the skill or making it so when you shoot something, more cooldown is removed. The issue is that there is no choice for these abilities, you just choose them all and they all stack. That means its all or nothing. Do you want this forced ability to suck or be good? If you want it to be useful, you will have to devote about half your points you will ever get to it too.
Mechanics like this do not work. You have to scale the base skill so much so that if someone DID get everything it wouldn't be overpowered. And what happens when they don't get anything? It's underpowered. You get one choice, good or bad.
I think the proper design for these abilities would not to make the base skill 1/1. Let it progress and let it include damage/speed and any other obvious base ability. And finally, don't force me to get it and have the option to ignore it. The health leech, multiple attack and stun abilities were good ideas but they should have been choices. What kind of bird do I want? If I had to choose between those, suddenly I have 3 different types of characters I could make. A Bird-leecher. A Bird-stunner. A bird-DPSer. Instead I was able to be all of them, making one type of character. A bird-user. Every other character's tree suffers from the same issue.
The other skills are mostly lackluster. One skill for me increased my Sniper Rifle damage by 4% per skill point I put in, which is outclassed by level bonuses. The max is 20% extra sniper damage. I don't find that that is a huge bonus and really makes me a "Sniper". Small bonuses to damage and reload rate and things like that I can understand but they don't offer a playstyle and only make the character slightly better than just anyone using a sniper rifle. Although that could have been intended, making it possible for other classes to use sniper rifles or other specific weapon types and not having to dramatically nerf the base items. Still, if being slightly better at something makes me a certain class, I see very little in terms of customization. The worst was Deadly, giving an extremely minor 6% critical hit extra damage. Sniper rifles came with a base of 150% critical hit damage. Spending 5 of the 50 points I get to get it to 180 is a minuscule difference.
A few abilities from the Hunter are interesting. One has a bypass shield ability, another makes enemies drop more loot. There's another that makes you fire faster and deal a decent amount of more damage when you get a kill. Unfortunately none of them change your play style.
A seperate issue befell my Beserker companion in that his special ability, which is to go crazy and punch things became useless as he didn't deal the damage and more importantly, lost all survivability in the later levels. This was due to a fact that his health regeneration was not based on % of health but rather a set number and simply diminished in usefulness as levels went on until it simply had no chance.
Lastly was items. Items prospects in this game were decent but to standards of an RPG they fell a bit short. A good list of base properties existed. Damage, accuracy, magazine size, fire rate, elemental ability and you could argue reload speed although it showed up as special text. With these numbers being randomized it made for interesting possible combinations of guns.
Though that this was slightly being hindered by grouping certain qualities together. The guns had manufacturer's and they were known for certain qualities like high damage but low magazine size and another with an exact opposite. This prevented the possibilities of just finding an all around perfect gun or one that was complete junk, which, to me, kind of defeats the purpose of item hunting. There was variations within the manufacturer's themselves that held interest and made some better than others, but I don't think the system helped. As substitute I'd suggest manufacturer's bestowing completely random guns with a certain bonus. For instance a sniper rifle can have a magazine size of 2-5 but a certain manufacturer is known for large magazine sizes and gives a 20% bonus. Only a random gun with the highest roll and this manufacturer could have 6. That way it still means something but doesn't form fit every gun of it's type.
The damage was a single number rather than the varied ones commonly seen in RPGs. I find that is a loss of item mechanics that takes away player decision. If you have a gun that does 1-10 damage or 5-6 which do you take? If you have one gun that does 5 and the other does 6 you don't think about it.
The elemental effects were also a tad too streamlined. There was Fire, Lightning, Acid and Explosion. For some reason they went up by multiples from X1 to X4. I never learned the meaning behind that. I just assumed that more was better. It would also state as special text what the chance of the effect happening was. However, it was also not a number, just "a chance" or "high chance" or "very high chance". If it was a % that had variation, again, there would be more variation and decision making for the players. The fire damage could have been listed, the amount of shields knocked off by lightning could have been listed and the amount of shield reduction from acid could have been listed and varied further. I don't understand why they were not. It makes many guns similar to many other guns.
I definitely liked the unique items, despite many of them being too weak. Many of them fired strange and interesting thing. A shotgun that shot out a wave of energy fluctuating up and down and spiral flying bullets that bounce around after hitting something for examples. I ended up setting on a sniper rifle that just plainly did explosive damage and seemed to outclass every gun I ever got from level 29-50. I'm not sure if that gun was particularly made correctly.
The best of the items were definitely the class items. This is how the rest of the items in the game should have been like. They gave bonuses to random skills or have effects that can benefit you in powerful or interesting ways. Included in that was team abilities making certain items much more interesting in large player games. The bonuses that came from them could be quite large making defining character statements thus giving the players a sense of development.
My conclusion on character progression in borderlands is that an overbearing level based damage system, streamlined weapons and a skill system lacking a bit of creativity and character defining abilities made the feel of progression diminished compared to other RPGs.
Another issue to bring up was the car. When you first get it, you can basically kill anything by driving over it. You made less xp, but you were invincible so it made up for it. I really don't think that made sense, but it actually wasn't a big deal since most XP was made up for in quests so no serious farming I think would occur. Then, during the later levels, you learn that the car takes damage for hitting enemies with a lot of health. Then, even later, you learn your car will explode by touching near everything. Imagine driving around and a spider ant pops out of the ground where you are driving. Due to momentum, you hit it, causing your car to explode and you to have to fight wave after wave of spiderant just to move on. Of course, when you are done, you are forced to walk. I just don't think the numbers were balanced on this one. Why couldn't it just have been a % of the car's total life? That way levels could have scaled better.
I would also say there was a small lack in the types of enemies in the game. You end up fighting a LOT of the same thing. The lack of variety in this ends up taking it's toll later when you are just sick to death of humans and spiderants. It takes time to animate and create these creatures, but even adding 3 more would have greatly improved the scenery and interest of the game. Diablo II has many types and I think Borderlands employs somewhere around 6-7 types of monsters. (This isn't counting subtle variations on the same type).
The last thing I want to touch upon was the PVP. I can't say I have play tested all the scenario's, but the results of Hunter vs Beserker was both of us being able to 1 shot each other. With a heatseeking bird that stuns it really made things rather unfair. The defensive capabities of characters no where matched the offensive and made it somewhat pointless. I don't want to even imagine having to fight a soldier with an instant killing turret or a character that can go invisible. I think the damage would have had to be scaled back a bit or health increased. If you ever want to make PVP be a part of you game, make sure to balance it end game or simply don't include it.
Conclusion
Borderlands is a fun game to run through but doesn't have the re-playability of other action RPGs as it wont be too different each time. The multiplayer co-op was definitely the best part and I highly suggest people who have not played the game to run through it for first time with a friend.
Synopsis:
Borderlands is one of few emerging FPS/RPG hybrid games with a higher focus on RPG elements like random items and character progression trees. The most notable difference with these type of games and other conventional shooters is that we feature a progressing health bar and damage is displayed numerically.
Borderlands gives a post apocalyptic backdrop with an unique world filled with crazy bandits and strange creatures.
I played through the first playthrough as a Hunter playing solo. The second playthrough was done with a Beserker companion
The Pros and Cons:
From the very beginning of being kicked off a bus by a greedy merchant to meeting a lovable dancing robot it's clear this game has style. Although the game runs off the Unreal Engine it is made to look similar to cell shading though it does not share the same annoyances that cell shading does. Without seemingly complex textures the game had a slightly cartoonish feel that disassociated it from reality. Though I'm not sure if I liked it visually speaking, it did further add to the style of the game. The Tarintino like entrances of certain characters sealed the deal.
Borderlands was also quite humorous. Many weapons had funny inscriptions and the characters were all larger than life and kinda wacky. I really could go on about dancing robots..
I had no problems with the physics engine and movement seemed quite fluid. Being able to forever run was quite refreshing though it did make me wonder why I ever had a walk function. Nothing took too long to get used to.
The voice acting in Borderlands seemed spot on, but other than that the sound in borderlands was lackluster. The music didn't reach me and sound effects seemed generic. Generally in a FPS I think you can get away with that but when you are going for re-playability I think could be improved upon.
The GUIs in the game were clean and well structured. I was pleased with that aspect.
The gameplay has its share of ups and downs. My experiences and feelings of the game seemed to go on a rollercoaster with high exciting parts and low slow-grinding parts. The heart pounding moments of watching the death meter slide down as you grasp for a second wind or some of the games larger than life bosses to the endless sidequests that seemed too low level and made you revisit maps over and over again.
One of the highlights of any game with character progression is the feeling of, well, progressing. I found that borderlands truly did not offer a lot of that. When you feel like you are no longer building your character you relize you are just.. shooting things. I love shooting things, but it's a short lived fling of fun.
Break Down of Gameplay:
Character progression happens in many ways throughout this game. There is item progression, skill progression and level progression.
One of the biggest issues I had with this game was the power of the level progression. I do not know the formula used, but it is quite apparent that simply being higher level than something was more important than what your skills were or what weapon you were using. The damage that you do to your opponents and the damage they did to you would be effected majorly with the addition of a single level. This ended up completely dwarfing other types of progression making them all but inconsequential. This to me encouraged a steady pace of going through the game, doing all sidequests and constant grinding and disallowed straying from that variant. The fact that your health goes up by a few percent doesn't seem to match the fact that damage is reduced by seemingly 10% or more for every level you have on someone. My personal opinion is that this entire mechanic should be removed and that it ruined a large portion of the RPG aspect. Who cares if someone is higher level than you and you want to fight them? Let your skill and ability to find good items and tweak your character depict if you can or cannot.
The second issue, which ends up compounding with the first was the unimaginative skill trees. All characters trees are built the same way, employing 3 paths that were somewhat themed into a type of character. All 3 paths are built on a tier system stating you must spend 5 points in a tier to access the next. There is 4 tiers in total. I actually had no issue with this system at all. It was simple to understand and allowed for a feeling of choosing a path. I personally think it was good design. My beef was with the skills themselves.
None of the skills save the very first one which you are forced to buy gave a sense of personalization and changed how you played the game. To give a good example, I go back to Diablo II. If you played a Sorceress you had a plethora of spells to choose from as attacks. I can take 3 skills (albeit maybe not the most powerful, but good at illustrating the point) and show how they changed how you played the game. Inferno, Meteor and Fireball. Inferno was a mechanic where you stood still and made a stream of fire damaging all within the cone. It was high damage but also made you vunerable. You had to get in close and be quick about getting out when you had to. Getting enemies in a long straight line becomes beneficial. Fireball is a long range explosive. Ideally you want enemies bunched together tightly and shoot and run strategies are highly effective. Meteor decent a meteor from the sky on a few second delay, meaning you have to predict where the enemies are going and lead them to that location as they chase you around. The point is that your positioning and playstyle changed based on what skills you chose. Borderlands does not offer this.
I played as the hunter and my first skill was a Bird called Bloodwing. I could throw him out and he would attack an enemy for me and deal some damage. I really liked the mechanic but the fact that you HAVE to get this skill means it is a given perk for the class. You then have a multitude of skills that further increase what he does. The skills include giving him the ability to stun, leech health, deal extra damage and attack multiple enemies. You could also make it so he came out more and more often by reducing the cooldown on the skill or making it so when you shoot something, more cooldown is removed. The issue is that there is no choice for these abilities, you just choose them all and they all stack. That means its all or nothing. Do you want this forced ability to suck or be good? If you want it to be useful, you will have to devote about half your points you will ever get to it too.
Mechanics like this do not work. You have to scale the base skill so much so that if someone DID get everything it wouldn't be overpowered. And what happens when they don't get anything? It's underpowered. You get one choice, good or bad.
I think the proper design for these abilities would not to make the base skill 1/1. Let it progress and let it include damage/speed and any other obvious base ability. And finally, don't force me to get it and have the option to ignore it. The health leech, multiple attack and stun abilities were good ideas but they should have been choices. What kind of bird do I want? If I had to choose between those, suddenly I have 3 different types of characters I could make. A Bird-leecher. A Bird-stunner. A bird-DPSer. Instead I was able to be all of them, making one type of character. A bird-user. Every other character's tree suffers from the same issue.
The other skills are mostly lackluster. One skill for me increased my Sniper Rifle damage by 4% per skill point I put in, which is outclassed by level bonuses. The max is 20% extra sniper damage. I don't find that that is a huge bonus and really makes me a "Sniper". Small bonuses to damage and reload rate and things like that I can understand but they don't offer a playstyle and only make the character slightly better than just anyone using a sniper rifle. Although that could have been intended, making it possible for other classes to use sniper rifles or other specific weapon types and not having to dramatically nerf the base items. Still, if being slightly better at something makes me a certain class, I see very little in terms of customization. The worst was Deadly, giving an extremely minor 6% critical hit extra damage. Sniper rifles came with a base of 150% critical hit damage. Spending 5 of the 50 points I get to get it to 180 is a minuscule difference.
A few abilities from the Hunter are interesting. One has a bypass shield ability, another makes enemies drop more loot. There's another that makes you fire faster and deal a decent amount of more damage when you get a kill. Unfortunately none of them change your play style.
A seperate issue befell my Beserker companion in that his special ability, which is to go crazy and punch things became useless as he didn't deal the damage and more importantly, lost all survivability in the later levels. This was due to a fact that his health regeneration was not based on % of health but rather a set number and simply diminished in usefulness as levels went on until it simply had no chance.
Lastly was items. Items prospects in this game were decent but to standards of an RPG they fell a bit short. A good list of base properties existed. Damage, accuracy, magazine size, fire rate, elemental ability and you could argue reload speed although it showed up as special text. With these numbers being randomized it made for interesting possible combinations of guns.
Though that this was slightly being hindered by grouping certain qualities together. The guns had manufacturer's and they were known for certain qualities like high damage but low magazine size and another with an exact opposite. This prevented the possibilities of just finding an all around perfect gun or one that was complete junk, which, to me, kind of defeats the purpose of item hunting. There was variations within the manufacturer's themselves that held interest and made some better than others, but I don't think the system helped. As substitute I'd suggest manufacturer's bestowing completely random guns with a certain bonus. For instance a sniper rifle can have a magazine size of 2-5 but a certain manufacturer is known for large magazine sizes and gives a 20% bonus. Only a random gun with the highest roll and this manufacturer could have 6. That way it still means something but doesn't form fit every gun of it's type.
The damage was a single number rather than the varied ones commonly seen in RPGs. I find that is a loss of item mechanics that takes away player decision. If you have a gun that does 1-10 damage or 5-6 which do you take? If you have one gun that does 5 and the other does 6 you don't think about it.
The elemental effects were also a tad too streamlined. There was Fire, Lightning, Acid and Explosion. For some reason they went up by multiples from X1 to X4. I never learned the meaning behind that. I just assumed that more was better. It would also state as special text what the chance of the effect happening was. However, it was also not a number, just "a chance" or "high chance" or "very high chance". If it was a % that had variation, again, there would be more variation and decision making for the players. The fire damage could have been listed, the amount of shields knocked off by lightning could have been listed and the amount of shield reduction from acid could have been listed and varied further. I don't understand why they were not. It makes many guns similar to many other guns.
I definitely liked the unique items, despite many of them being too weak. Many of them fired strange and interesting thing. A shotgun that shot out a wave of energy fluctuating up and down and spiral flying bullets that bounce around after hitting something for examples. I ended up setting on a sniper rifle that just plainly did explosive damage and seemed to outclass every gun I ever got from level 29-50. I'm not sure if that gun was particularly made correctly.
The best of the items were definitely the class items. This is how the rest of the items in the game should have been like. They gave bonuses to random skills or have effects that can benefit you in powerful or interesting ways. Included in that was team abilities making certain items much more interesting in large player games. The bonuses that came from them could be quite large making defining character statements thus giving the players a sense of development.
My conclusion on character progression in borderlands is that an overbearing level based damage system, streamlined weapons and a skill system lacking a bit of creativity and character defining abilities made the feel of progression diminished compared to other RPGs.
Another issue to bring up was the car. When you first get it, you can basically kill anything by driving over it. You made less xp, but you were invincible so it made up for it. I really don't think that made sense, but it actually wasn't a big deal since most XP was made up for in quests so no serious farming I think would occur. Then, during the later levels, you learn that the car takes damage for hitting enemies with a lot of health. Then, even later, you learn your car will explode by touching near everything. Imagine driving around and a spider ant pops out of the ground where you are driving. Due to momentum, you hit it, causing your car to explode and you to have to fight wave after wave of spiderant just to move on. Of course, when you are done, you are forced to walk. I just don't think the numbers were balanced on this one. Why couldn't it just have been a % of the car's total life? That way levels could have scaled better.
I would also say there was a small lack in the types of enemies in the game. You end up fighting a LOT of the same thing. The lack of variety in this ends up taking it's toll later when you are just sick to death of humans and spiderants. It takes time to animate and create these creatures, but even adding 3 more would have greatly improved the scenery and interest of the game. Diablo II has many types and I think Borderlands employs somewhere around 6-7 types of monsters. (This isn't counting subtle variations on the same type).
The last thing I want to touch upon was the PVP. I can't say I have play tested all the scenario's, but the results of Hunter vs Beserker was both of us being able to 1 shot each other. With a heatseeking bird that stuns it really made things rather unfair. The defensive capabities of characters no where matched the offensive and made it somewhat pointless. I don't want to even imagine having to fight a soldier with an instant killing turret or a character that can go invisible. I think the damage would have had to be scaled back a bit or health increased. If you ever want to make PVP be a part of you game, make sure to balance it end game or simply don't include it.
Conclusion
Borderlands is a fun game to run through but doesn't have the re-playability of other action RPGs as it wont be too different each time. The multiplayer co-op was definitely the best part and I highly suggest people who have not played the game to run through it for first time with a friend.
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