Be Excellent To Each Other

Confirmed, trailer released, it's going to be a thing.

Will it be a modern style 'AAA LIVE SERVICE' horror show, released unfinished and buggy and loaded with shitty monetisation and microtransactions?

OR, will it be MOAR BORDERLANDS in that it's basically the same sort of thing as BL2 but with a new story and characters, and a strong campaign with a great narrative? (And fixing some of the problems BL2 had, such as the clonky inventory UI.)

Place your bets!

(For the record, BL2 is one of my Top Ten Games Ever (Steam shows 250 hours playtime, which is still increasing), so I am pretty hyped for this.)

I'm betting the first one, where you can buy "Eridium Tokens" that allow you to make your guns better.

Super excited, all in day one.

Hmmm. The microtransaction thing is a good point.

Off the top of my head, if they were being arseholes about it.

Be incredibly stingy with the golden keys for the chest in Sanctuary, and sell them for real money. (They're still releasing 10 keys per month for BL2, even now.)

Nerf Eridium drops in the game to make getting ammo and backpack upgrades really frustrating. Sell Eridium for real money.

Nerf loot drops in the game. Sell loot boxes.

And so on.

On the plus side Randy Pitchford is on record as saying he's opposed to such practices and especially so in full price games. But then again he's a pathological liar and charlatan who basically stole Sega's money to fund BL2 whilst hiving off Aliens Colonial Marine to a different developer.

I played a bit of 1, but hopping in and out of co-op messed up the level scaling and I stopped. I own but have never played 2 (MrsDoc completed it, I think.) Not convinced I was on the hype train in the first place!

There's also a remaster of BL1 coming, a new high-res texture pack for BL2, and free expansions for BL2VR:

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019 ... -next-week

(I am seriously considering BL2VR.)

BL2 is fantastic in co-op with someone who is (a) happy to play with you from start to finish and (b) in proper communication with you. (Same room is ideal, but headset would work well I guess.)

Me and Mrs Hearthly are currently Level 25 and have done every step of the way together, and it's working very well, but playing with the Saturday night chaps years ago was an absolute bombsite.

I'd look into BL2VR before making the jump, the reviews don't make it sound like the best experience in the world.

It got Aim controller support a few weeks back, which has apparently significantly improved matters.

Piss my pants stoked.

That is all, with an eeeny weeny bit of skepticism.

I missed BL1 the first time around as it came out when I was on honeymoon. When I got back everyone had pretty much finished it in coop and I didn’t fancy it solo.

I have a weird thing where I can’t play a sequel without playing the game before (with some exceptions) so I never even considered BL2.

What about Turrican?

I've never played BL1 and don't particularly feel the need to (although I might check out the remaster), by all accounts BL2 is quite the substantially better game out of the two.

There's a nice little 'on a previous episode' intro for BL2 which basically brings you up to date with the story from BL1, so I felt quite comfortable in BL2's world right from the get go.

BL2 is a remarkably good game, give yourself a treat and snag the Handsome Collection (PS4/XB1) or the GOTY edition for PC.

Handsome Collection is about £8 on PSN at the mo

I think I played 2 very briefly on the Amiga. Never played the original.

I’ve played 1, 2 and 3.

3 had Amiga mode 7!

If you're playing co op then 1 is well worth a go. The story and ending are great, plus it's MOAR borderlands.

I have a love/hate relationship with Borderlands. How much fun it is, is directly related to which random weapons you get. If you end up with shit weapons or ones unsuitable to your particular character/build, long periods of the game can be boring and frustrating.

I think the trick is to not be shy when it comes to using golden keys at the chest in Sanctuary, Gearbox themselves have said on many occasions that the keys are supposed to be used relatively freely, as a useful mechanism to fall back on if you get a bad run on loot drops.

I've generally been using a key or two per level as me and Mrs Hearthly have been levelling up, but if I've got a gap in my arsenal I've been lobbing a few more at it until I get something close to what I'm after.

All that said, it can be a bit frustrating if you really just can't seem to fill a gap on a bad run with loot drops, but the loot distribution in BL2 is so ridiculously generous that in my experience it's rarely a problem. (Although I didn't really get massively far through my UVHM playthrough, but for normal and TVHM back in the day, and now again with my solo levelling and co-op with Mrs Hearthly, there haven't really been any humps in the road.)

I've read that this will be exclusive to the Epic games store. Is that an issue for anyone? The Internet seems to think it is.

I reckon it'll be on consoles too, judging by that image

Ah yeah, of course... I was thinking about the PC release. Probably should have mentioned that. In my defence, I'm not feeling very well today so I'm a bit slower than usual.

It's ok, bud. I'm in a snarky mood. Have some vitamin C and get some sunlight

A lot of people are butt-hurting about the various exclusives the Epic store is getting, but the simple fact is they offer publishers a much better deal than Steam, (they're also outright giving publishers big piles of cash to entice them to go exclusive on Epic).

It's a slight annoyance for me as it means installing another game launcher, but in essence that's all it really means. (I already have Steam, Origin, GOG and Battle.Net launchers installed on my PC, one more won't kill it.)

I can't get my head around the histrionics some people are working themselves up into over it TBH. Yes it's true that Epic is massively lacking in features compared to Steam, and on balance I'd rather have it on Steam, but as long as I can install and play the games I want, I don't much care.

Valve have got fat and lazy over the years with their near monopoly, they need a fucking kick up the arse, this should give it to them.

Thanks. Vitamin C shouldn't be a problem but it's dull and grey here in Dudley today... and raining. Rubbish.

The bigger issue with the Epic Store is it installs spyware on your machine, have ripped code from Steam and their CEO appears to be a giant turd.

I’m no Valve fanboy and I definitely think they need competition, but I’ve not heard anything positive about the Epic Store whatsoever. Also I can’t see spending big money on exclusives is a profitable long-term strategy for them. It kind of reminds me of venture capitalists just throwing money at something to see if it sticks.

https://zerolives.com/article/ovFs8GSj/ ... team-users

https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&sourc ... 2345157065

Calling the stuff in your links "spyware" is pushing it a bit far. It's not hoovering up browsing histories or passwords. Let's keep our threat models in mind here. It's shady and worrying, but I won't come to any harm from my Steam friends list and game playtimes being scraped -- that stuff is public anyway. Unless there's more to the story than you've linked to?

None of your links mention code theft. Source?

I respect anyone who can stick to "don't buy things from companies run by giant turds", but I think that's a hell of a steep hill to die on.

You'd never buy anything.

Actually, on the subject of giant turd CEOs, Randy Pitchford appears to be a twat. (cf: the Aliens: Colonial Marines debacle and outright lifting the art style for Borderlands from an indie movie.)

My understanding here (probably limited, as I didn't follow it much after the initial revelation) was that even if you had those things set to be private on your Steam profile, they could still be sent to Epic because they read the contents of local configuration files directly rather than requesting the info via Steam's API (which would have honoured your privacy settings)

I mean, I suppose fundamentally you're right, you're unlikely to come to any harm from having the Steam friends list and playtimes hoovered up, but it's still not particularly great either IMO.

I'll be completely honest, we cheated. We got so sick of the weapons system that we used a tool to create weapons. It was me really. I just couldn't find anything decent at all and was dying left right and centre.

What I love most about BL is the exploring, doing the quests and ETC. The combat is fine, but the weapons were pretty random and usually terrible.

We didn't do it in the Pre Sequel though.

I can minimise it by not buying from the most egregious dickheads in charge of companies though.

I will never be able to afford a Tesla but I sure as hell can choose to buy games from another PC storefront (or not at all if they’re Epic exclusives).

He's ruined my plans for a trip to Mars too.

Venture capitalistism was described to me as "rich people giving money to richer people who give to to even richer people who give it to soon to be rich people".

Saw this on the subject.

https://forum.facepunch.com/general/bvn ... Spyware/1/

God, the Reddit thread that links back to is fucking amateur hour. Like, nobody having a goddamned clue what they're doing.

The Epic Store has a fucking "Roadmap", because what doesn't, these days?

(Some of the things in there are egregiously pie-in-the-sky features like "Shopping Cart")

It's so bad. I tried to read it back when the story broke but the eye rolling was going to send me blind.

I think it largely depends on which character and build you are using. Some are heavily specialized on one weapon, or weapons with certain properties, that it heavily penalises your effectiveness of you don't have a decent example.

I guess my info on it is outdated then, seems like much of what I heard has been disproved.

I'm not sure who you're replying to there, but the Reddit thread was the one with the spyware claims and yeah, it's 90% horseshit.

Just referencing my post earlier up in the thread basically.

Which would be the better character and build to go for, to minimize such annoyances? I quite fancy trying BL2 again but have limited time for experimentation.

Just pick the Mechromancer (Gaige) and go down the BEST FRIENDS FOREVER tree, Deathtrap turns into quite the tanky tank and can gloss over any deficiencies in your gun collection and/or abilities rather effectively.

An Twitter thread of pertinence.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1125565281261297664

The fact that Randy Pitchford is such a predictably and consistently awful person does take a little of the sheen off the entire Borderlands experience.

Whatever Randy's version of events is, the opposite is probably true.

The whole gaming industry increasingly looks like a polluted morass of shit to me, it's genuinely making me question if the human cost involved in bringing many games to market can be justified.

Forgot to thank you for this advice. Not fired it up, mind, just started Transformers Devastation, which is pleasingly immediate and bananas.

May try BL2 next.

Apparently there's a rocket launcher that fires hamburgers. When you hit people it says "dayum dayum dayum" in large red letters.

I started this earlier in the week, have only done a mission but am enjoying it. BUT what is going on with the audio levels? Claptrap is super loud, but I can't turn dialogue volume down because the audio for the AI ghost woman is barely audible. Really weird sound mix.