Borderlands, or "Guns, Guns and More Guns"
 

So I finally got a new ps3 that actually works (the old one has been written off, so Game sent me a £300 gift voucher to go buy another), and I bought myself Borderlands, a game I've been wanting to play for a very long time.

I can safely say, it was worth the wait. I've been playing only a few hours so far and just hit level 10 as Mordaci and the game world is beginning to open up some more. The combat is spot on, the vehicles work nicely, the world and the graphics look fantastic and the guns, welll..... the guns are awesome!

I currently use 3 guns; an awesome looking sniper rifle that sets things on fire and one shots most non human enemies at this point (my favourite weapon so far), a really cool scoped SMG I took off a particularly powerful bandit (the scope looks like a miniture monitor) and a beast of a shotgun that reloads in about a split second (replaced the wave shotgun due to accuracy and power issues).

Of course, I ideally want a sniper that makes people explode, so I'll have to keep searching, but my current one works for now.

So yeah, who else has this? How're you finding the Borderlands of Pandora? Any cool weapons anyone found yet?

I've been playing this on the 360 and I've been having a hard time putting it down. I currently have a lvl 43 Skirmisher (woo class mods) Brick and I'm on my second playthrough. While I've been getting awesome weapons in the earlier parts of the game, I'm finding my luck with drops has greatly declined recently. So far I'm getting squat all that's useful to me, so I mostly rely on my action skill. Lvl4 eplosive punches with bonus explosive and melee dmg thanks to other skills means pretty much anything I encounter meets a bloody death. Also my Berserk cools down in about 20 seconds, so I'm a force to be reckoned with.

My main weapons while not punching people though, is an accurate shotgun with a scope, a high dmg and high ammo machine gun, a shock-dmg Helix rocket launcher (800 dmg per rocket, though I wish it weren't shock dmg), and whatever Eridian weapon I feel like using (I have like 6 different ones).

As for your desire for an explosive sniper rifle Hawk, fret not. You'll find one eventually, just keep opening the red or white weapon crates.

How do the class mods work anyway dude? I've heard about them, but not sure what they are exactly. But yeah I've been finding really good drops already, mostly greens and blues, and 1 purple (my current SMG). Unforrtunately I've needed to clear space in my inventory so I've ended up selling most of them, even the high power sniper rifles, in order to make space. I really need to find those claptraps so I can get more space.

Only guns I've not been impressed with so far is the combat rifles, they seem to have really crap accuracy and terrible recoil. Granted they were all whites but still, not the best weapons ever. Also I haven't found Mords bloodwing to be particularly useful yet, but I haven't put many points down that road yet, mostly been focusing on making my weapons more accurate and buffing up snipers. Hopefully once I can make him leach health and attack multiple targets he'll be more useful.


Oh and don't worry, I will find an explosive sniper rifle! It is my destiny to possess such a weapon! But yeah the weapon chests are pretty good, that's where my flame sniper came from.

A class mod is an item that you equip (goes in the slot that's below your grenade mod) that changes the name of your class and gives you bonuses. For example, I have a purple 560 Skirmisher mod. It gives me +48% team melee dmg, and + 4 to three different skills. Lower level class mods, like the ones you will run into, will only give like +1 to one skill and +2 to another, or something like that.

I'm not sure if you've been running into Assault Rifles or Machine Guns, because those are both considered Combat Rifles but have different attributes. Assault Rifles are more accurate, and fire in bursts, whereas Machine Guns have less accuracy, go full auto, and normally deal more dmg.

It's the same with every weapon type where there are sub-types within. The ones I know of are Thumper SMGs (slow rate of fire, high power), Matador or Shredder Shotguns (more bullets per spread, a lot less accuracy), Helix launchers (fires three rockets that spiral around eachother), Spread launchers (fire's all shots in the clip in a horizontal spread), Machine Guns, Assault Rifles.

Those are most of the sub-types I've noticed. I might be forgetting some though.

I have it on the PC so I guess that completes the triad.

And it's frickin' awesome so far. I have actually envisioned games like this for years. Someone with a similar vision and lots of money managed to pull it off.

I will say the skill system is a bit anemic. That so far is holding it back from ridiculous greatness.

I'm very much interested in the game, but then when I look it up again I'm reminded that this is for the greater part a FPS.
And I suck at FPS'.

EDIT: Incidentally, no mini- or microguns?
For some reason, I'm beyond disappointment. Imagine the insanity.
Eight spinning barrels firing shot? Or explosive shells?

Aha, I see! Wondered what that extra slot was. Nice. And yeah it must be machine guns I've found so far, full auto, terrible accuracy. What about artifacts by the way, what do they do?

Unfortunately there are no miniguns. Basic weapon classed are; repeater pistols, revolvers, combat rifles, rocket launchers, sniper rifles, sub-machineguns and grenades.

However, I do know of certain classes that can have multiple barrels on their guns. One guy I saw had an SMG with 4 barrels, all of which fired at once. Yes, this is an actual thing that exists.


In other news, I just got myself some longbow mods. I love teleporting grenades!

Elemental Artifacts give your action skill an elemental effect. They follow the four standard elements in the game of Explosive, Shock, Fire, and Corrosive. Every time you "use" an artifact, it boosts it's element by one level, with lvl4 being the max of any element. There are quests that grant you elemental artifacts (such as Shock Crystal Harvest, Corrosive Crystal Harvest, Eridian Dig Site (or something like that, it's in the Dahl Headlands), and the Moe and Marley quest). However later on in the game there are certain badass enemies that will drop artifacts.

Also, I'm loving the little homages they managed to sneak into the game (though I've only noticed/remember two). These might be considered spoilers so I'll show the area they are in then spoiler the actual homage, so don't click unless you've gotten to that area!

Rust Commons West
If you go north to where the map ends in a cliff, there's a hut near the edge. Once you approach that area, a fire-spitting Rakk will fly up from beyond the cliff and start attacking you. The Rakk's name is Rakinishu, the same name as a Champion-level Carver in Diablo 2 (he's always near those stones that lead to Tristram). And on top of the name, when you kill him he always drops a Cracked Sash, basically the name of a low-level diablo 2 item.

Rust Commons East
This is my favorite, they managed an homage to Firefly. It's actually part of the main quest too. Jaynistown, owned and run by Jaynis Kobb (i.e. Jayne Cobb). Now if only they had the bandits singing a catchy song before you went in there guns blazing. That would have been perfect.

Well the PC version has some annoying multiplayer issues. Mostly ports having to be forwarded and then not working regardless. Even if I made a DMZ.

Eventually got a public game going though with 3 other friends and wooo good times.

Yeah I heard about the PC multiplayer problems. Must suck for those who aren't too sure on how to forward ports.

Most of my co-op playtime has been with only 1 other friend, but that will change by next week. See I've been technically playing my brother's copy on my 360 because I bought it for him for his birthday. I was planning on getting myself a copy too (so then him, our friend, and I could all play together) but it was the last copy on the shelf (it was actually some guy's preorder but it was a few days after launch and he would never answer when they called him). So my brother finally ordered my copy off of Amazon (so he could get that $40 credit) and like I said, should be coming next week.

I've been too afraid to go into random matches because I don't want to lose all my progression from that one bug that wipes your stats.