Its not COD, Its not Fallout 3, its Borderlands. Treat it as such. Potential for GOTY.
One, maybe two games every year get me extremely excited. In 2009, Borderlands has been that game. Since I first heard about it two years ago, it has struck a chord with everything that I appreciate in a game. Let's see if I can sum Borderlands up in a few sentences. A game that successfully combines FPS and RPG elements, including fast-paced shooting, massive amounts of loot, quests, bosses, character classes, unique skills, and leveling up. It takes place on a planet called Pandora where a legendary vault filled with alien technology is rumored to exist. It also contains a wicked sense of humor. More than that, it brings the fun back into video games.
I knew exactly what I was going to get when I bought Borderlands, because I bothered to do my research, rather than watching one youtube video and passing judgment. I didn't expect a plot-intensive game. I didn't expect dialogue trees. I didn't expect a post-apocalyptic setting. I didn't expect any of these things, because Gearbox told us the game wouldn't contain them. A game earns major points with me for having no illusions about what it is trying to do.
What the game does have, is millions of guns, among other things. I know what you're going to ask. Yes, some of them are very similar. But even if you find a gun with the exact same name as another (most guns can have their major traits identified through the name), it may not look the same, and it probably won't have the same stats. Since these are guns we're dealing with, these stats seem to matter a little more than in some RPG's. A 30 round clip certainly makes a difference compared to a 20 round clip. From what I've seen, the majority of the guns will at least have some small visual difference between them. Even unique guns that drop from bosses, or are given as quest rewards, can be different. My version of TK's Wave, a unique shotgun, only held two shells and fed like an over-under shotgun, while my friend's version of the same gun held six shells and fed like a revolver. So yeah, there's a gun for everyone. My current favorite is a sub machine gun that fires 4 projectiles per bullet, and has a high rate of fire, as well as a reflex scope, and a 70 round clip. Its basically a bullet hose. As in most RPG's, the guns can contain elemental damage types. There are four different character classes, each with 22 skills. Each class has an action skill that the first skill point (gained at level 5) is automatically placed into. This is the only skill the player manually activates. The rest of the skills are passive, are activated by some sort of action (killing an enemy), or affect the action skills themselves. They are varied and make a lot of sense for what the game is. The soldier, for instance, has a skill that increases the clip size of all assault rifles. Each character has their own melee attack. There are no melee weapons, but some guns have blades attached to them. In that case, the player swings the bladed gun instead of performing their standard melee attack.
In addition to guns, the player can find energy shields that offer varying amounts of protection, recharge rates, and special attributes, such as extra protection against fire/corrosive/explosive/electric attacks. There are also artifacts, grenade mods (they determine the behavior of your grenades, and are very interesting), and character mods. The player has twelve inventory slots (to start with), and two (eventually four) quick-weapon slots. Borderlands is not cell shaded. I'll say it again. Borderlands is not cell shaded. The textures were all hand-drawn by the game's artists and then UV-mapped to the objects the same way objects are textured in any other game. Cell shading is much easier, is a much different process, and ends with a much lower level of detail. I hated the new art style when I first saw it, but then I realized what Gearbox was trying to do. They wanted to bring fun back into gaming, and they have. Other than friendly duels (which have no real consequences other than losing some ammo and some health), the game is not really competitive. In a sea of games populated by uber-nerds and snot nosed kids screaming into their headsets about pwning and getting pwnd, Borderlands allows you and up to three other people to work together, and just have fun. Having trouble with a quest? No problem. Run around and kill some lower-level enemies until you level up. You don't feel the pressure that is present in other games.
The enemies, the NPC's, the dialogue, and even the world of Pandora itself help display the intentions of Gearbox to create a fun game. There are pop-culture references out the yin-yang, mutant midgets with shotguns that fall over every time they fire, and little dancing robots called clap-traps that make me smile like a kid every time I see one of them.
That's not to say that fun equals a lack of content, and adult content, for that matter. Blood sprays, limbs fly, heads explode, and adult jokes are made. There are plenty of areas to explore, lots of things to kill, and many ways to kill them.
There are no dice rolls for hitting enemies, so what you see is what you get. If you attempt to shoot an enemy 30 feet away with a shotgun, you probably will miss. Weapon proficiencies do help with this. Consider proficiencies to be another form of experience to be gained. If you use pistols, you will eventually level up the proficiency with them, gaining accuracy, recoil, and damage bonuses. Any character can use any weapon type. Each character has a few skills that are tailored to certain weapon types, but the player could skip over them entirely and still have a powerful character capable of effectively utilizing any gun they lay their hands on. Critical hits are also determined by where you shoot enemies, not by chance.
No game is perfect. The AI has the occasional idiotic moment (twice that I can remember in 20 hours, so not too bad), and it sometimes sucks to have enemies respawn behind you, especially when you just want to get from point A to point B. I just activated the fast-travel system as part of a quest, though, so it should help with the latter. The rest of the complaints, while fair, don't really affect me. The loot system is free for all, but since I only play with my girlfriend or friends, that doesn't bother me. There is no trading system, but I'm OK with just dropping items on the ground in front of the recipient. I would like to see a storage location for items you wish to hand onto. Perhaps it will be implemented in future DLC. Speaking of DLC, the first has already been announced, and it will contain zombies! I never get tired of killing zombies. Now, contrary to popular belief, the "DLC already? Why didn't they include it in the game" argument is usually crap. Developers spend the last months of a game's development cycle bug testing and putting the game through certification. This leaves pretty much everyone besides the coders with nothing to do for a few months, so they start working on DLC for the future. Adding that content to the release of the base game would only extend the bug squashing and delay certification.
The plot, I have to say, is pretty rail thin. There is text for each quest, and a few minor conversations, but I'm not playing this game for the plot. If I wanted to talk all day I'd play Mass Effect. But hey, I believe I read a quote from Randy Pitchford saying "Dialogue trees are boring as **** He didn't want them. He wanted to focus on gameplay. That's what his company did, and I think they did the right thing.
Borderlands is quickly becoming my Diablo 3, and will probably stay that way until the Blizzard team in charge of Diablo 3 (they previously developed WOW, yikes!) proves they are going to give me something worthy of the title.
Come to think of it, Borderlands won't be my Diablo 3. It will be my Borderlands. Yeah. I like the sound of that.
If you like looting, or shooting, or both, be sure to check Borderlands out. Leave your preconceived notions of games at the door, please.