Borderlands, this generation's Diablo?
By mindphlux 2 Comments
Now, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction is a game I played online daily for over a year without any significant break. You could call it "excessive" without exaggeration. It was "old" at that time already, but I wasn't bothered at all by the dated graphics. No, I loved it because it offered endless replayability in form of the incredible amount of extremely rare loot. You could literally search for weeks, if not months for a single item you desired, and when the golden Hydra Bow finally dropped, it totally made your day (or it completely messed up your day, when the server crashed and rolled back just after that drop - it happened to me, oh the drama!). And then you needed to socket it, so you had to farm or craft more for a fitting jewel or rune, and so on. I spent hours each night farming Mephisto or Diablo on Hell difficulty, sometimes in random 8-player games so more loot would drop. I would study drop lists and recipes, and power level dozens of chars to get a chance of high level runes from the Hellforge. You could have accounts and accounts filled with loot, ready to trade endlessly with other players, almost like it was a MMO. Good times!"Borderlands, I adore you. You're Diablo for a generation raised on first person shooters."
-- Cliff Bleszinski on Twitter
Borderlands has very little of this. Yes, random loot in many different color coded tiers is nice. Four different classes that actually feel different are great as well as being able to customize them via talents, but what's missing here is replay value. To finish all achievements, you don't even need to replay the whole game twice - I dinged 50 on trash before the Rakk Hive - and beyond that, there's nothing to do besides leveling another character. The overly easy bosses more or less always drop the same unique and pretty terrible weapon that's often not even of appropiate level, so even though you can farm them, there's no incentive to do so. With items being mostly randomly generated, there is no real draw for "that one more run" to get your damn rare and valuable gear - of course you can get lucky with affixes, but it's hardly as exciting as the cited Windforce drop, because there's no "omg it dropped" moment when you have to compare stats first. But it seems that Gearbox isn't all that keen on getting too close to Diablo anyway, considering they didn't bother to implement a (much requested) trade interface in multiplayer.
One more thing, the bosses. Little did they learn from challenging bastards like Diablo or Baal Hell, where you could die almost instantly from being uncautious, unless you had really good gear. No, Borderlands "bosses" are always weaker than their trash, to a degree where I could kill several of them without ever moving even once. They just didn't do anything to damage me, not even on Playthrough 2, where some of the trash mobs posed much more of a threat (souped up elemental damage Spiderants mostly). I'm not too surprised that these bosses never dropped anything of relevance for me, considering how easy it was to finish them off.
The difficulty doesn't ramp up properly either. Playthrough 2 was mostly easier than the first one, with the exception of said Spiderants. That's not Diablo either; Nightmare might have been manageable, but Acts 2 to 5 Hell were pretty insane after patch 1.10 was released.
So, while I did play Borderlands quite a bit over the last week, I'm not putting in more time until the DLC is released, and only if it features achievements. So, while Borderlands might look like Diablo, in the end it's too shallow to resemble any part of Blizzard's finest. Maybe that's what CliffyB meant in the first place? Doubt it.