johncox88's blog

Late to the party…

All the sausage rolls are gone and the attractive people have paired up on the dancefloor; All that remains now are the fatties, the ugo’s and a tray full of tuna sandwiches… on brown bread.

Touted by the developers as a ‘funner’ alternative to Fallout 3, Borderlands was fairly well hyped, and received favourable reviews.

I really like both games, Fallout 3 for it’s storytelling and fictional world, borderlands for its mindless violence and co-op.

But upon completing Borderlands I realised that Fallout 3 wipes the floor with it in almost every respect.

Now although both games require you to run around the respective game worlds, each game has some quick-travel features. Fallout 3 lets you warp to any previously discovered waypoint on the map as long as there are no enemies nearby and Borderlands has cars and warp points. The addition of cars is nice but the physics on them is ropey at best, poor collision detection, the handling isn’t great and they just don’t feel as fun to drive as they should. Also the warping isn’t very well thought out, some locations have more than one warp-point but it’s hard to remember which one is closer to where you need to get to. Fallout 3 shows you on the map where you actually need to go (rather than where the transition zone to the next area is) and lets you warp to the nearest waypoint. A much better, more intuitive system.

On the subject of transition zones, Fallout 3 seems like one large play area. The only times you have to sit through loading screens are when you enter a town area or dungeon. Borderlands doesn’t have one contiguous overworld, it’s split into areas connected by what are essentially big warp pipes. It makes the game world seem a lot less immersive.

The ‘gazillions’ of weapons in Borderlands was a massive exaggeration. It seems like there’s a lot but in reality there’s only the elemental/levelled versions of each of the weapon types. Fallout 3 has less weapons overall but they’re a lot more varied and are a bit more satisfying to use thanks to the VATS targeting system. Although, getting headshots with the revolvers in Borderlands is a lot of fun.

The main issue I have with Borderlands is how it handles the story. i.e. it doesn’t. A lot of it is told via audio recordings that you collect in various missions. But I found myself not listening to them most of the time while I made my way to the next one or I would get distracted by enemies. I got the gist of the plot but there’s absolutely nothing to help the player engage with or be interested in the story. And the arbitrary  way the bulletin boards dole out missions isn’t that fun, you start to think “why should I do these missions for some random person that I never see?” and what’s worse is getting missions from the actual  non-playable characters, the missions are only displayed as text that I never read. You see “kill so-and-so” and close the mission window and go and kill them. The NPC’s just seem so static, you’ll see them stood around but they’ll only say one line to you unless they have a mission and it pops up with the block of text.

Fallout 3 always kept me engrossed in the story, perhaps it was because it used scripted sequences more and showed your avatar as a baby and child. Perhaps it’s the better interaction with the NPC’s; actual voice-acted dialogue with a good choice of dialogue trees. Perhaps it was just better. The characters were a lot more thoroughly developed and I actually cared if some of them lived or died. The voice acting definitely keeps you more involved than textboxes, and when you enter a conversation the camera view changes and you can’t move till you’ve ended the conversation which, while inconvenient some of the time, means you actually pay attention to what’s going on.

Most of all, it was the ending to Borderlands that disappointed me. I was fighting my way through what I assumed was near the end then all of a sudden there was a really short cutscene (bearing in mind there hadn’t been a cutscene since the beginning of the game) and an ensuing boss battle. I Killed the boss far too easily, there was none of the ARGHAHRA FINAL BOSS fear that I usually have in a game, it wasn’t even as nerve-wracking as some of the earlier bosses in the game.

Perhaps it was because I hadn’t followed the story properly but the final boss seemed to come from nowhere and was a massive anticlimax, literally. You’re sat there getting hot and heavy with some armoured soldiers and aliens then all of a sudden you’re at the final leg. But the game can’t take the pace and blows its pixellated load all over the place.

It just sits there; pants round ankles, covered in cum, cock rapidly diminishing. The feelings of hopefulness and exhilaration now replaced with disappointment and regret.

Another cocktease of a cutscene plays and you’re rewarded with one tiny extraneous dribble of a mission that requires you to take an item to someone AND THAT’S IT. Game Over man, game over. Nothing left to do but play it again. CBA TBH TTYL

SO YEAH, overall I much prefer Fallout 3. That’s not to say Borderlands is a bad game, it’s just not as great as it could have easily been. I’ll assume some of its shortcomings were because it was a new title and perhaps wasn’t afforded as big a budget as Fallout 3, (the follow-up to Bethesda’s massively successful Oblivion and the 3rd in a well established franchise)

Tags: borderlands, compare, comparison, fallout 3, review