The last two nights Razorburn, Chestar, DrSmooth, and myself have been playing the new Borderlands DLC The Secret Armory of General Knoxx. After playing smooth games like Modern Warfare 2, Uncharted 2, Bayonetta, and Mass Effect 2, it is a little odd going back to Borderlands. I'm amazed how janky that game is and that I still really enjoy it. I play a Siren teched up for elemental effects, so I'm always lighting things up, and the frame rate starts going all over the place. There are so many little bugs and polish issues with the game it is an astounding testament to the pull of loot and coop gaming.
Anyway, so we jump in to the new DLC, most all our characters are level 48 and we ran into the same infuriating problem that we ran into with the Zombie Island DLC. If you are four levels below an enemy the damage you do to them is so dramatically reduced that it turns every enemy into a five minute boss battle. It is fun for a little while, and they did it much better than Zombie Island, where we spent probably 20 minutes and 30 deaths trying to kill our first few zombies and our great reward, 3xp points (thanks for tell me up front that zombie kills are worth little to no xp)! I couldn't believe it, I still rage thinking about how they balanced the level differences. I digress, this time around it is a little better, at least the enemies in this new area give decent xp 1000-4000 for a kill.
The first night we didn't do much other than die, again, and again losing more and more money while we tried to kill these damn flying probes that came in pairs with shields that the U.S.S. Enterprise would be jealous of. We were really grinding but somehow having a good time, plenty of slowly whittling away at the enemies shields mixed with tons of "Hey DrSmooth, come save me" (DrSmooth is our item Santa Claus and healer extraordinaire). Some tense, funny, and frustrating moments have come out of this. When we started I had around $9 million on my character, every time you die you lose about 5%, by the time we started getting to a point where we were killing more than dying I think I was down to $2.5 million, you do the math, we died A LOT! After finally grinding up to level 49 the difficulty started to ramp down quite a bit and we started getting some goodtimes rolling with it.
We have had some funny things happen playing coop with this crew, but the standout moment for these sessions has to be Razorburn's figurative and literal crash and burn. There are new vehicles in the game, and you spend most of the time in the early sections rolling on freeways and being harassed by the previously mentioned flying probes of death. We had more than a few collisions, unintentional and intentional, go bad ending in deaths and long walks. We were all raging on how much we hate these probes and how much money we have lost because we kept dying. So Razorburn, riding shotgun in the vehicle I'm driving throws out "They're like Madden franchise updates, THEY JUST KEEP COMING". There was a noticeable pause... Razorburn realized the horrible bomb he had just dropped and committed seppuku by jumping out of the moving vehicle and off the freeway edge to his death. It almost made up for it.
I know I'm hating more than I should on Borderlands, let's just leave it at there is no way we're going to finish our coop gaming goal this month because all I want to play online is Borderlands DLC, jank and all.
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