Destiny looks a bit mediocre

Before anyone starts raging in a comment or sending me emails I've not played Destiny so I don't think it's a shit a game, I just think it LOOKS a bit shitty.  I'm going to have to tell my friends why I'm not really all that interested in Destiny so I'm making this post as a way of just linking them something fast instead of having to type out the same thing over and over again to different people.

Now in all fairness, I've not been following the production of Destiny so I have seen very little.  Before making this post I checked out the launch trailer and it didn't really change my impressions of the game.  I also checked out the Wikipedia entry but that didn't really sway me either.

So as far as I understand it, in Destiny you pick a race and a class (of which there are only like 3 or so, I think) and then you go on some kind of adventure to protect Earths last city or something.  The one thing that stuck out in my mind when I saw a few snippits of information from the E3 coverage was that it reminded me of Borderlands. 

This is not a good thing because it's basically the entire reason that I have 0 interest in the game.  Borderlands is bloody awful with its terrible writing, metric fucktons of useless weaponry, shitty open world game play and repetitive questing and I can't shake the feeling that Destiny will be just that but made to look like Halo.

That doesn't mean that I think Destiny is a bad game, because Bungie are a talented group of people, they can probably take a concept like Borderlands and un-shit it but that doesn't make me want to jump on the hype train and buy a PS4 just to play it.  I think in a sense that Destiny is very lucky to be released at this time because right now I can't think of any other decent game for the PS4 or Xbone so I guess people are excited just to have SOMETHING to play on their next gen paperweights.

I'm totally open to the idea of giving Destiny a go, I just don't want to pay for it.  You never know, I might play Destiny on my buddies PS4 and be completely blown away by it.  Then again I might play it, be completely right about it being crap and maybe come back here to say even nastier things, only time will tell.

I don't take much stock in things such as Metacritic but I gave it just a quick glance to get a general opinion and the user score was clocking in at 6.3.  This means that people have played it and have found it to be a little disappointing I guess and these people are way more versed with it than I am.

Right now I'm being nice without expecting anything but I have a feeling I'm going to be rather upset in the end.

Copy-Pasted levels are bullshit!

Do I really need to start with a definition of the term this time?  If you can't already get the gist of whats going on from the title then you've not been using a computer long enough (i.e. more than 5 minutes)  but just in case, I'm referring to when game developers reuse the same levels in a game but try to pass them off as something new.

The picture in featured in this post, which I will be using as an example is from the zombie DLC for Borderlands.  What you are looking at is a place called Dead Heaven, a compound filled with zombies trying to impede your progress as you do quests.  This would be fine if this area wasn't featured as a big quest in the main goddamn campaign, completely unchanged.  Sure, the enemies are different and its got a few extra walls in it to make navigating even more annoying but this is NOT a new level, this is bullshit laziness.

The reason it's so annoying in this case, is that its supposed to be a whole new bit of the game world, it's not the same stronghold so why is it built EXACTLY the same?!  It baffles me because they spent so much time making all this new stuff and then got lazy here, and you really feel the effect of the laziness because this is one of the most boring, unfun segments in the whole DLC campaign.

But Borderlands isn't the only offender, and there is a title way more well known for its copy paste bullshittery, and that's!

People already had problems with this damn thing in it's game play, inventory system, the whole room fucking you up thing but this is the issue that I think really gets to people.  The game has something like 5 worlds, it's been a while since I played it, and halfway through the game makes you play them all again, but you lose your safe haven and you gain an annoying escort quest.  I mean goddamn, if you're going to remove my safe zone and give me a braindead bag of shit to protect, the least you could do is give me something new to look at while I'm putting up with your crap!

THIS was the point that made me want to force feed the dev team cactus for a week, this shit should be fucking illegal.  If you're too lazy to make new levels for a new section, then don't fucking put the section in at all, and if you're game is too short without the copy pasted section, then the project is probably a load of crap and you should scrap it anyway.  Don't charge me full price for half-assed bullshit.

Borderlands: The Zombie Island of Dr Ned

Wow, I beat this thing ages ago and didn't blog about it! Well better late than never!

The Zombie Island of Dr Ned is DLC for the first Borderlands game and something I didn't play when it was new because my computer was crap and I was too busy playing other things to give a shit about it when it appeared on Xbox Live.  Many years later I have got round to playing the damn thing and I actually thought it was better than the main game.

The story for this bit of extra stuff is that Dr Ned has gone and filled an island full of zombies and you have to go and end him, nice and straightfoward stuff.  Aside from the main story there are a couple of little quests to go on that flesh out the goings on that flesh out what happened before the zombie attacks, but like most plot related things in Borderlands you probably don't care.

The island itself is quite an interesting place to explore, with lots of forest and beach environments to run around which are dotted with a few caves, a nice change of pace from the main games open expanses with nothing in it.  It also keeps itself nice and short, clocking in at only a few hours of play but long enough to qualify as DLC done right.  It's also packed filled full of references to various horror franchises like one of the quests being called "House of the Ned", or Shaggy from Scooby Doo leaving an audio log.

A fun little expansion so if you didn't get the chance to play it when it was new, go grab it and give it a spin, you've been missing out!

Borderlands Cartoon!?

So if you've been paying attention to the Now Playing bar on the blog, you may have noticed I've been playing Borderlands recently.  While I was digging around the internet I came across a certain video.

This video is called Codehunters and was released in 2006 and if you watch the full thing all the way through it has a striking resemblance to Borderlands.  Now I'm not sure the full story behind this and Borderlands, but it's safe to say that the artists took quite a few "inspirations" from this little animated short.  Hell, the bus intro and the ass shot are basically unchanged from Codehunters.

What makes this whole thing even more perplexing to me, is that I discovered that Borderlands has a completely different look and feel while it was in development.

Still, rip-off or not, I'm glad they went with the Codehunters art style in the end, we don't need any more "realistic" looking shooters nowadays anyway.

A look back at Borderlands

A while ago Borderlands 2 came out, but I can't play it because of silly Japan release dates on Steam, and I'm too lazy to get myself a VPN to play it early, so I thought I'd just go replay the first one instead. 

Borderlands is a game I played the shit out of back when it launched, and then beat it and never touched it again, so part of the reason I came back to it was because I'd forgotten what most of it was even like.  I also blasted through most of it so I wanted to go back and see if there was any cool Borderlands lore that I'd missed out on.

Well admittedly in this playthrough I'm not that far but so far there is basically no big juicy bits of lore to discover, just the main plot of "find the fault etc etc."  But the game itself, despite being World of Warcraft in space with more guns, is still really enjoyable.  Plus the co-op feature in this game is something that makes it even more enjoyable, although I've not had a chance to drop on some co-op with a buddy in this run yet.

RIVETING STUFF

One thing I still really like about this game is the way it looks just in general.  I really like the HUD and the design for the major characters like Ned or the 4 player characters.  The world is a little bland and the enemies are a bit samey where I am so far, but exploring is still fun, and I'm a big sucker for games with plenty of nooks and crannys for me to get into.  Also when I played Borderlands at release, I was on Xbox360 (due to shit PC) and never bothered with any of the DLC, so with the PC version that I got on the cheap (thanks steam!) I can now go experience all that extra goodness I missed out on.

Also, before I stop doing this post and go play it some more, fucking look at this.

I actually can't think of all that many games that I have played that do that with sniper scopes, it's pretty good. So the first Borderlands game still holds up pretty well I think, it'll be interesting to compare it to the second one once I eventually get to play the fucking thing.