Dirigible of Pain

So I recently picked up Borderlands. I know, I know, it’s been out for some time now. I’ve been playing Champions Online with Lady Vandermore of late, and while I have wanted to play Borderlands, I didn’t have anyone consistent to play it with and I wanted to play it with a full four players.

So when the latest weekend sale on Steam came out with it for half off, I went on a crusade to find those people. I was able to get three others from one of my face shooting gaming groups to go in on the four pack with me. So all told, it was about $19 each to get the game. Not bad for a nearly new game to share with three friends.

So one of the Overlords, Kris, from The Secret Lair and KJToo.com, and I were the first to fire it up. He had already been playing in single player, since he evidently has faster internet speeds than I do for the Steam downloads. We both jumped into a multiplayer game proceeded along the mini tutorial with the Claptrap robot leading us into town. I was playing the Tank character, and he was playing the Siren, iirc. We had just gotten into town and hadn’t even met the first human NPC yet, when I needed to sign off and do some things in the physical world.

Overall, the experience though brief, was so far shaping up very well. Getting the hang of moving and shooting wasn’t hard since I have played FPSes before. The trick was getting used to the reduced accuracy since I was level 1 and my guns sucked. That would change as I played more.

Later that afternoon, the other two players were able to play and all four of us got together for some good face shooting. Shooting bandits, usually mutated, and skags, creatures that look sort of like dogs with bark for skin, is what you start out doing. We didn’t get very far during our first two sessions, still getting used to the game. Our most recent session has unlocked the vehicles for our use, and those of course for me have become my weapon of choice, running over various mutants and skags.

We’re still playing, and I look forward to our next session. I recommend getting it if you have some friends to play it with, though the leveling and quests can quickly get out of sync if you have a player or two keep playing their group character as a single player. Since the leader of the party is the only one who can select the quests, and if they have already done the quest they can’t do it again, if they out level you and finish quests you haven’t gotten then you are out of luck. That’s so far the only real down side of the game that I have seen. I’d be cool to have more of a free-form leveling mechanic, or at least the ability to redo older quests if you have a character who hasn’t done them in the group.

The game is definitely for me and fits the minorly multiplayer online role playing game niche that I always crave. This game and Left 4 Dead feels really good to me, but Borderlands also fills my need for computer role playing game with a leveling mechanic. If any of my perceptions change, I’ll be sure to let you all know in a future post.

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