Current Events > Playing Borderlands 1 again for the sixth time

(+) Yeah! (+)

I played it to death on PC back in the day, even solo'd the Moxxi DLC with Roland because I thought there would be more of a reward than there was. I played both playthroughs. Then I played it on PS3, played as Brick. Played the first playthrough but only a bit of the second. Then I played it on Xbone with a friend.

I just bought the Borderlands collection on the Switch, making this my sixth playthrough if you count the partial second playthrough on PS3.

I like this game more than Borderlands 2, partially because it has a simplicity to it that makes it fairly low-stakes and easygoing to just sit down and play and partially because the gameplay loop is consistent enough that it's still engaging to play through a campaign.

In a way I think it's aged way better than Borderlands 2 - not as far as gameplay and story goes, I think each Borderlands game has really upped the gun mechanics and made the story a lot more involved, but in the sense that it isn't burdened by the era it was made in. Like yeah, the combat's repetitive and it can be grindy and all that, but it's that casual loop of combat, experience and loot that makes it easy to come back to - to start a new save file and go at it again.

Borderlands 2 has an okay story with some cool moments, but I don't care about Handsome Jack. I don't need this high-stakes narrative about saving the world, I don't need a hateable villain. All I need is loot and humor. And the game's stupidly dated in certain aspects, like how the Sanctuary townspeople walk around making dubstep noises with their mouths.

It's a perfectly fine game, I liked it a lot - hopefully on my next playthrough with all the DLC, I'll like it a lot more and it will be something of a "forever game". But there's no real baggage to going back to Borderlands 1, starting from nothing and getting to the Vault, so it's easier to come back to. Borderlands 2 is baggage from beginning to end, and I've had so many false starts because it's more of a commitment to get to the good stuff (which is legitimately pretty good when you get to it).

This will be my first Lilith playthrough. I can already see why this character is such a gamebreaker by looking at her upgrade tree. Like fuck, right off the bat you can increase your shields by 25%? That's insane.