This might sound like a hot-take considering how many people shout out from the rooftops how much they love these games but I really need to vent a little, especially after being forced to work on a f*ing sunday...
The Borderlands games of some of the most insipid, generic and overall bad games you can get nowadays. The gunplay, and general gameplay, is anemic, the world and level design are basic and have no real identity, they all feel like painted cardboard boxes, the characters are obnoxious and have no real personality besides being "edgy" or some sort of stereotypical representation of some "badass" social group, the rpg system is pathetic and a perfect example of what the big players in the market think rpgs are about, the exploration is unrewarding since all you get are weapons with +1 damage that you'll discard 5 minutes later and a trip down generic corrider #265... And on top of all of that, the worst offense these games make are the fact that by buying and playing them you're allowing idiots like Pitchford to exist.
I really fail to see how and why people like these games.
On a brighter note, I started playing Prey (only ~1h in) and I think I've finally found a worthy successor to the original Deus Ex.
I very much agree.
But the problem is that Borderlands is not the first, but one of the big influencers on the rest of the industry, now the garbage itemization and complete lack of progression thanks to scaling and lack of variety is everywhere, from The Witcher 3 to Assassin's Creed, Skyrim to Breath of the Wild.
I pretty much lost interest in most of the AAA production because there is absolutely no reason to play them, you only get copy/paste +1 items fighting copy/paste enemies (when I see people spending hundreds of hours in games with a handful of different ennemies it's just sad), doing copy/paste quests if they're not straight up randomly generated (remember the radiant quests of Skyrim? Todd Howard didn't start serving trash with Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Blades).
Nothing is unique anymore, you don't get new abilities outside of Metroidvanias, you just get crap that you'll throw away in ten minutes. Or ten seconds with the amazing durability systems that we get today, insuring that you WILL have to equip more RNG crap on level scaled crap droping more.
Exploring question marks only to get a whooping nothing or the same thing that you have is just taking away all the feeling of wonder.
The latest Zelda might be the biggest tragedy that I've seen from that design, it's large, open, empty and meaningless. And bandit- sorry
bokoblin camps even respawn, it's the whole bingo card of bad design.
When people complain about open worlds, I think that the lack of progression and interesting new mechanics to discover is to blame. It's too bad that the two became almost synonymous, some games like Elex and Outwards are not like this at least.
But spreading new gameplay systems, enemy variety, combat skills and movement abilities over the course of games that could last a hundred of hours (or an infinite amount with RNG content) is harder.
Game design is dead in the water in the AAA space, and I'm fucking bitter that Sony can only shit out more copy/paste with extra Batman stealth of broken AI and automated takedowns and that Nintendo is jumping right in with them. Good god are their franchises getting worse with each iteration.
But at least we'll get Halo Infinite! Totally not going to be an open world coop with random ? to fill up your 487/896 counter!
Yay.
