This past week,
Borderlands 4 came out. I am for the first time in years doing a full video game vacation (for a week so far!) because Borderlands is 100% my game. It's the one. I used to say Diablo II was my all-time favorite game, and for many years I'm sure that was true. But ever since Borderlands I was released in 2009, I have been locked in. It's the perfect combo of complex skill and gear systems with fast action gameplay. My heart lies at exactly that intersection. So it's great to have a new one. Which is very awesome except for some nitpicks. The biggest is why WHY WHY does it include the "acquire" bounty board objectives where you have to hold the acquired object in one hand and can't even drive your motorcycle with it? You can carry 50 guns in your backpack, but not this little plant sample? The system itself is good - there are some fun short challenges inside missions where you need to get a battery somewhere and juggling it while grappling onto walls is a fun and interesting challenge (the Crawler challenges are based around this and they are some of my favorite things in the game). My own game
Wee Ninja is closely related! But having to just jog over a mile of flat terrain while holding one is not fun or interesting. Especially fun is that half the time you throw the item (because you need your hand for other purposes), it ends up vanishing. Sometimes just because it's almost invisible and you can't find it again, but other times I'm almost positive it actually resets to its original location. So that's my pro-tip: Never take the Acquire bounties. You don't have to, they're not side quests or anything, just random content.
It's also very very hard, and specifically the bosses are insane bullet sponges. On the final boss, I ran out of ammo multiple times over before winning (you can collect more, but the fact that I had to do so means he took way too many shots). I really wish the bosses had about 1/3 the life that they do, but I know the pros can kill them in literally one shot as-is. Still, probably better to tune for the normies, right? You can't even use leveling to overcome this, as their level is based on yours (
pet peeve alert). I may have just gotten even older somehow, though. Super fun game, and it's really built for satisfying moments of gameplay involving the dashing, gliding, grappling, and your special abilities. It really feels at its best when you are facing a giant crowd of enemies and you're zipping from place to place dropping grenades, ground slams, head shots, and then punching the last guy into a bloodsplosion.
Before starting that vacation though, I finished major content in
Broken Build Simulator - We now have all 24 weapons fully implemented (and in need of serious balancing), and Trigonometry Wars is complete (and in need of serious balancing). That just leaves one more game mode... and the endgame mode which I wasn't sure I was going to create for a long time but now it seems like an integral part of the 'plot', so it's happening even if this game takes
another 3 years to complete. And of course, 99% of the commentary tracks need to be recorded (and 80% need to be written). So lots of creative churning out of content, moreso than creating of gameplay and code. Hopefully in a couple months we can head into a beta testing phase with some new testers while I continue to churn out said content. I'd really love to see some fresh input from somebody other than the two knuckleheads I have been bouncing this game off of for all of this time. If it turns out the game is insane, it's because it's aimed squarely at those two. Much like Borderlands 4, BBS is definitely too hard right now.
