What Needs to Happen in Borderlands 2

Gearbox and 2K Games just officially announced what everybody's long assumed, that Borderlands 2 is in development.  Of the four people who might see this blog entry, two have already played the original, but for posterity I'll attempt to summarize Borderlands: Fallout meets Diablo meets Firefly.  It's a lighthearted RPG-shooter hybrid with random loot generation and skill trees, set on a western-styled colony planet in an otherwise advanced spacefaring world.

This is the list of improvments that would help make Borderlands 2 one of the greatest games of all time.

1: Drop Gamespy as the multiplayer manager.

If a dinky little game like Magicka can whip up its own in-game server browser and manage its own connections, Borderlands should be able to coordinate co-op without having to sign up for a shitty external service.

2: Fix the level scaling and multiplayer scaling issues.

The original Borderlands is composed of two and a half playthroughs, incorporating three different level-scaling schemes, which may have worked for just the vanilla game.  It immediately became broken with the DLC, which itself had its own level scaling issues, but then threw off the vanilla game balance between playthroughs, forcing you to essentially abandon a full vanilla playthrough the second time around.  This can probably be simplified to two schemes:  Zone-based level ranges during the first PT, level-based scaling during the second, for all content.  The end.

Also, while I appreciate that adding more players dramatically increases the game difficulty, some things were overlooked.  Enemy vehicles scaled up in damage and defense, but player vehicles didn't, which often resulted in frustrating 1-shot deaths.  Enemy gun damage scaled up multiplicatively with the number of PCs, resulting in frequent 1-shot deaths because your shield and HP pool were scaled for single-player content.  These things can be smoothed for better balance.

3: AA

Borderlands had no anti-aliasing options.  While you could trick the game into it via advanced Nvidia or ATI control tools, that's an unnecessary step.  Just put it in the damn game.  Other things that would be nice to have in the game options without having to tweak the configuration files directly:  FOV adjustments, mouse smoothing disable, microphone disable, advanced keybinds, VSync, lighting and shadow quality.

4: More story, more storytelling.

Borderlands was light on the plot, which to a degree worked in its breezy favor.  I still feel that there's room for a more aggressive plot with more moments of voice-acted storytelling, cutscenes, or other Mass-Effect-inspired moments of storytelling that don't involve dialogue trees.  Even a simple step such as having NPCs voice-act quest text would go a long way towards establishing a more effective plot, since it's something you could absorb while on the move.

5: Fix Brick

The four original class types scale very differently as you level up.  Brick is a beast in the first playthrough but eventually his melee and rocket damage output curve falls off in comparison to the raw death Mordecai and Lilith put out, especially in multiplayer with the beefed up difficulty and enemy HP pools.

6: Armor slots

There was only one non-weapon equipment slot, for class mods, which were generally super-duper powerful and had four or five different effects in eight different distribution types per class.  Why can't those five bonuses be given out over multiple armor pieces?  This is precisely the kind of game where more loot is ok, so I'd be happy to see helmet/chest/glove/boot slots with the same kind of variability and quality options of the weapons.  Given the meticulous graphical detail afforded the five different components of each gun, individually modeled, it shouldn't be hard to whip up a system for changing other aspects of character appearance to match equipment choices.

And here's the list of additions that should definitely not happen:

Weapon crafting
Weapon durability
Mutliple ammo types within one gun-type
Dialogue trees
Armor
Equipment enchantment
MP
Consumables