@dudeglove said:

I really don't think Anthony Burch "made an attempt to apologize for his atrocious writing." It was the best he could come up with, and evidently he was pretty self-conscious about the quality of his writing relative to other funny games out there at the time. Internet humour was where he was at, at the time, I guess.

I bring this up because while I see people bash on Burch a lot for his writing contribution to Borderlands 2, I feel like the blame really belongs to Gearbox for ever hiring someone so inexperienced to be the lead writer for their flagship franchise. Based on his Giant Bomb bio, he would've been 24 when Borderlands 2 shipped. Based on what little I know of his personal history, I think he was hired to Gearbox pretty much right after finishing college (I believe he had known Mikey Neumann for several years prior, so somehow I think that got him an in at the company). He had never worked a game industry job before, and his writing experience was basically a handful of comedy webseries and whatever writing he did in college. His web shorts are competent for what they're trying to be, but nothing about his past work indicated that he was some kind of comedic writing rockstar. I don't see how Gearbox possibly expected that to turn out well.

I just see the whole Borderlands 2 writing thing as another indication that Gearbox is a studio that just really wildly mismanages most of their projects. It's completely beyond me how they didn't have writing duties shared among more people than primarily Anthony Burch, or hell, tell him that they can't hire him right out of college and they'll give him a shot in a few years when he's worked on at least 1 or 2 smaller projects first. It just feels grossly irresponsible of Gearbox to put all of the writing of their big budget multimillion dollar project in the hands of a 22-year-old kid. Giant surprise, the final game was pretty cringy.

Well I think that games pretty damn funny so if all that's true he should just keep his head up.

@efesell: I used to listen to his podcast years ago. He and his sister had some good conversations. Ironically he seemed way more interested in like, games by Jason Rohrer, and that other guy who did a playthrough of Far Cry 2 as if it was permadeath and you might die forever due to some malaria or jammed gun bullshit so you had to be super careful. Borderlands didn't really seem like the kind of project where his passion would lie, but he happened to know some people at Gearbox so that's where he started off I guess. I haven't really followed what he's done since leaving Gearbox.

I have very fond memories of the first one and almost none from the second one; part of that though is from playing the first so much and getting tired of the grind once the last two pieces of DLC were released.

The first was a pretty serious game originall; even though it still had the Mad Max-influenced world and characters, the art style changed at the very last second, so the jokes weren't too reflective of that yet and were still in tone with the original more serious take. The first DLC is where they started to really dive into the whacky and silliness, and once the second game came out and it just spouted meme after meme and other jokes that just fell flat, it became tiresome. Add to that like I said originally that the grind of the type of game just wore me down, and I put maybe 4 hours into the second game and that was it. Even after buying the PS4 version recently, I still can't bring myself to play it for too long; to be fair, I also don't think I could ever play the first one for more than an hour nowadays.

I thought Tales from the Borderlands was actually pretty solid though.