Author Archives: Azuriel
Megaserver
In the recent The Elder Scrolls Online preview video, the part that piqued my interest was when they started talking about the “megaserver,” e.g. going serverless. Incidentally, this topic was something I wrote about just over a year ago:
- Eliminate named, permanent servers entirely.
Essentially, set up the servers like an ice-cube tray and as each server fills up, it spills over into the next server, and divide it all into game regions. One huge benefit of this would be to allow there to always be a steady population of people leveling in every zone for group questing, etc.
Example: if I went to Borean Tundra right now, there may be 1 person questing there on Auchindoun, and maybe 5 on Maeiv, and 50 on Tichondrius. Under this methodology, there would be 56, up until an arbitrary cut-off. And if the cut-off is 100, I would have it start transferring people to a second zone instance at around ~70 so the 101st guy isn’t off by himself. The key would be to make it subtle, with no load-screen or anything. With phasing technology it should not be a problem.
Obviously, my Nostradamus-like predicting skills failed to account for the very real structural problems WoW has with Cross-Realm Zones (people = competition, etc). But as is demonstrated with games like Guild Wars 2, it is quite possible to foster a more-is-merrier environment with a few tweaks to the formula. And, indeed, the TESO video goes on to say a lot of GW2-esque things in terms of everyone getting equal credit for kills, no competition between players, and so on.
With the formula issue settled, and provided there are methods available to get into the same “instance” as your friends, are there really any good arguments against going serverless?
Keen’s soft criticism of TESO likely being all “instancing and lobbying” falls a bit flat to me when he graded GW2’s “Presentation of a MMORPG World” a B+; not only is GW2 pretty heavily instanced already (plus Overflow servers), there is literally an in-game PvP lobby as well. As long as the frequency of load screens is kept to a minimum, I don’t think many people will be able to tell any difference. And, hell, if the TESO programmers can engineer some WoW-level seamless map transitions instead, it will be a major design coup.
In any case, the Megaserver deal was the only actual thing that piqued my interest with the TESO gamble thus far. Some people are flogging the “real game begins at endgame” statement, but that is arguably true in any MMO with finite levels.¹ Design musings aside, I am much more concerned about whether it would be fun to play, which is something we will not be able to see until the inevitable beta buy-in.
¹ Yes, including GW2. Unless you managed to complete your Story or jump to Orr straightaway, content was gated by your level. To say nothing about how one’s behavior² likely changes at the cap in regards to farming explorable dungeons, legendaries, and vanity gear in general.
² Bhagpuss notwithstanding, of course.
Cynical Dynamism
No, really, I was not going to bring it up again. Through a series of coincidences though, I read this post by Bhagpuss (referring to GW2’s upcoming Sea of Sorrows event):
The press release is fascinating, showing, I think, just how extraordinarily difficult it is going to be to balance a genuinely “dynamic” virtual world with customer expectations of a commercial product. Taking ANet’s description of the event at face value, there’s an intrinsic and apparently insoluble problem and in just three-paragraphs they hammer home relentlessly precisely what it is :
“we want to make sure that you are not missing out”
“an Event in Lion’s Arch that you don’t want to miss”
“make sure you will not miss it”
“this will only run once, so make sure you will be there!”
Whether the event will live up to the hype, whether it will be truly world-changing, that doesn’t matter. What does matter is the insistence that this is something all Guild Wars 2 players must not miss. That raises expectations that simply cannot be met in full. A lot of people aren’t going to be there, no matter how much they’d like to be. The balancing act between building excitement and fostering resentment is a high wire to walk, that’s for sure, and the fall is steep on either side.
Then I received an email notification about this comment from João Carlos:
I am sure Azuriel will go crazy bitching mode when she knows about the one time events at 16-18th…
But I am sure GW2 at XFire will go up that weekend.
As an aside, if I were not actually a dude, I think I might have been offended by the “crazy bitching mode” characterization.
Anyway, mere minutes later, I browse down to NoizyGamer’s latest Digital Dozen post:
Event Aftermath – Another trend is that following in-game events interest in a game tends to decline. Two games that held in-game events on 28 October saw the Xfire community spend over 20% less time playing those games on Sunday. Vindictus fell out of The Digital Dozen after a nine-week run with a 22.1% decline following the celebration of the Nexon game’s second anniversary 27-28 October. The second game, Guild Wars 2, experienced a 21.2% decline with the end of its Halloween event.
So, I would respond to Senor Carlos by saying: I would hope GW2’s XFire numbers go up the weekend of the 16th. Because, ultimately, I think that is sort of the entire point of having these Dynamic Events By Appointment, vis-a-vis to drive engagement and capitalize on gaming news-cycles.
Even if they really are being earnest when they say it is all about making the world feel alive, it begs the question of “what is the world missing, that it needs one-time events to feel alive?”
In any case, this is not an ArenaNet-only thing – every seasonal event in MMOs basically amounts to the same deal – and I am not even saying developers spicing things up is necessarily bad. These sort of events simply hold zero interest to me, even if they were not starting at 3pm EST (are they timing it for the schoolchildren?). I never considered showing up for a raid at 9pm on a Tuesday evening particularly dynamic, and I have to wonder how many scheduled one-time events someone can consume before the suspension on their disbelief finally gives out.
If you made it past 1, you are doing better than me.
Seen in the 5.1 Mists PTR Notes
I still occasionally browse Blue posts. I spied the following in the latest ones:
- Several classic Raid bosses now have a chance to drop new Battle Pets. The new pets can be obtained from bosses in Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Ahn’Qiraj, and Naxxramas. […]
- Raid groups are no longer necessary to enter pre-Mists of Pandara raid dungeons.
Of course, the game loses nothing had these old raids been removed.
*whistles*
In other news, I have no idea how to feel about this entire section:
Brawler’s Guild
- Underground fighting rings have sprung up in Stormwind and Orgrimmar that will give brawlers who have their mitts on an invitation a chance to earn bragging rights by testing their solo PvE mettle against some of the toughest creatures found in World of Warcraft.
- Players will prove their skill, and increase their rank with the Brawler’s Guild, as they win matches against some of the most difficult solo encounters in World of Warcraft.
- Entry into the brawler’s guild is by invitation only. Invitations can be found on the black market auction house or by invitation from somebody within the guild.
- As their Brawler’s Guild rank increases, players will unlock additional rewards and activities within the Brawler’s Guild.
- Brawlers on a realm will gather together into the blood spattered ring to watch as their peers face down their own opponents. They can watch the battles in progress to learn from hardened Brawler’s Guild veterans as they wait for their own turn to fight.
- If this is your first night at Brawler’s Guild, you have to fight.
Obviously, more details are needed. Will gear be normalized? How will this be balanced across all the classes? Can one dude just send out a bunch of invites or is it capped somehow? I will find it amusing if the bolded section actually makes it Live though. Reading it reminded me of those heady days of the internet when people were auctioning GMail invites on eBay for $200+. I can see it now: “WTS Brawler Guild invite 50k pst.”
Once More, With Feeling
Allow me to revise my previous post a bit. The fundamental question I was asking was:
“Is it a good use of designer resources to specifically construct one-time events (in MMOs)?”
The traditional sort of knee-jerk response would probably be “Yes.” My answer is No.
A one-time event is essentially the most extreme example of planned obsolescence in MMOs. If you get upset at the idea that nobody does Tier N content when Tier N+1 is released, then you should be grabbing pitchforks at the very mention of one-time events. Were you upset when ToC made Ulduar irrelevant? Were you sad when Cataclysm redesigned the entire leveling experience, including removing your favorite quests? Do you support attunements as a means to make all raids relevant through the duration of an expansion? Are you sad about how fast leveling has gotten in WoW, or how many dungeons are being “wasted?” If you answered Yes to any of those questions and yet still enjoy the idea of the AQ gate opening just the one time ever, then you have some serious cognitive dissonance going on.
A raid being rendered moot by the next patch’s 5m heroics is just another form of planned obsolescence; it is another form of one-time events, same as the leveling speed changing, dungeons becoming empty, and so on. The only difference is one of duration, e.g. months/years versus an hour on a Sunday afternoon.
There is, however, an important distinction to make here.
When ToC made Ulduar irrelevant, Ulduar still existed. In fact, you can still zone into Ulduar today and go have fun. Will it be the same experience as it was when it was the new hotness? Of course not – you can never cross the same river twice. The difficulty changed quite a bit following the months of its release, to say nothing of the changing abilities of players, the higher level cap, and so on. But fundamentally the place is still there and still capable of generating new memories. The planned obsolescence was social in nature, not structural. Blizzard did not simply remove the raid portal, or leave all the bosses dead. Few people wanted to do Ulduar after ToC was released because better gear was available elsewhere, they had gotten their fill of Ulduar content, they wanted to tackle new challenges, or whatever.
This brings me to a smaller point I was trying to make yesterday: social obsolescence happens naturally, automatically, and inevitably. If ToC was released with just sidegrades available, there still would have been fewer people raiding Ulduar; the exodus might not have been as abrupt, but it still would have occurred. Even in horizontal-progression games, you do not see an evenly distributed population. People generally crave novelty, and will mob whatever new content is introduced, leaving barren ghost towns in their wake. Nobody cares that you have got the Kingslayer title yesterday.
And so now we have arrived at my larger assertion: making events only occur once adds little to nothing to the experience.
Liore and Syl in the previous comments said that the AQ opening would have been less epic/less people would have showed up if it were repeatable. Based on what? Did those people know, for sure, that the gong would never be struck again? Would the significance of the first opening have been diminished in any real way if the event was available the very next year? Or weeks later? I have a hard time believing that could be the case, because Firsts are always special. Neil Armstrong is the first human to step on the moon; his accomplishment is in no way diminished by the fact eleven other dudes have also stepped on the moon. Have you heard of Eugene Cernan or Harrison Schmitt? Those are the last two people to have rung the gong on the moon, so to speak, but no one really cares. Neil still is/was the man.
Ultimately, to me, it comes down to a question of where best to utilize limited designer resources. When new raids and dungeons are released, there is always a special moment attached to it. A camaraderie that exists as thousands and thousands of players try something for the first time, race to the top, and otherwise share an experience. Undoubtedly that is the same goal of one-time events, to evoke those same feelings and perhaps pretend that this is a game world that is always changing (at 12:00 PM Pacific Time/19:00 GMT this Sunday only). The difference is that with the latter, the content is thereafter removed, generating no new experiences, no new memories, and no lasting history beyond the recollections of an ever-dwindling veteran playerbase.
I want game worlds to get bigger by having more things in them, not less, and not temporary things. Designers should stick with making the tools and toys; let the players bring the dynamic themselves.
And if you need something to only happen once to enjoy it the most, 1) I feel bad for you, and 2) the first time only happens once already. Enjoy the feeling as it lasts… don’t just take the ball and go home.
Every Moment is a One-Time Event
Is something you never experience special to you?
Is something you experience only special when few other people experience it?
I have seen a lot of praise for ArenaNet’s one-time Halloween event. I cannot be sure whether said praise is coming from the same individuals that lament the obsolescence of last year’s raids, but nevermind. ArenaNet’s tortured logic is pretty well deconstructed elsewhere, so let us set that aside as well. What I am curious about is this fanciful notion that it is a good use of designer manpower to specifically construct one-off events.
To me, it’s redundant.
When I think about one-off content, I remember back to the plague event that lead into Wrath’s release. Players could get infected, eventually turn into zombies, and the go infect other players. The griefing in Shat was immense. As paladins, a friend and I decided to roleplay/grief the players actually trying to infect themselves and/or start those zombie raids against Stormwind. Never before has someone raged so hard at being targeted with Cleanse. “The power of the Light compels you!” Turn Evil was also liberally applied. Around this same time, there was a special boss in Kara that dropped the Arcanite Ripper, and I believe there was only the one reset where it was available. In any case, I was the only person to get it in my guild. I busted it out pretty regularly all the way up until I unsubbed.
Here’s the thing though: how different was any of that from, say, completing Ulduar when it was current?
The Wrath lead-up event was fun because it was fun, not because it was never going to happen again. Similarly, it would not bother me one iota if the Arcanite Ripper was mailed to every player that logged in once in the last four years – nor, incidentally, does it bother me that the Arcanite Ripper is now on the Black Market AH. In many ways, I consider Ulduar (or any raid) to be more “rare,” because while these places still exist, it will never been the same as when it was newly released. Even if Ulduar was still relevant to current endgame progression somehow, it would not be the same as it was when it was new.
It is not the item or the event that matters, it is the zeitgeist. And the people. ArenaNet could have looped the Mad King event like they loop everything else and it still would have been exactly as meaningful for those first players as it is now. Every moment is a one-time event. Ergo, I see little reason to layer artificial scarcity on top of temporal scarcity. The devs could have safely shared their work with a wider audience with no lack of impact to anyone worth caring about.
But, whatever. If you consider content you never see as content, then GW2 has enough content to keep you busy for quite some time.
Minecraft Beats CoD
As reported by Kotaku:
[…] Since Major Nelson has publicized the numbers, the most popular game on Xbox Live—this is according to unique users playing the game while logging into the service, not just those playing multiplayer—has always been a first person shooter. Gears of War. Halo. And, for more than two years running, something from the Call of Duty series.
That came to an end this past week, when Minecraft‘s Xbox 360 edition emerged as the most played game on the Xbox 360. Back in May, the title—a console adaptation of the PC game, sold over Xbox Live Marketplace, now—finally broke Call of Duty‘s stranglehold on the top two of Xbox Live’s most active chart, something not even FIFA, the world’s most popular sports video game, could do.
In the week of Oct 15, Minecraft took No. 1.
And, of course, one of the very first comments is “One overrated game tops another.”
I have not booted up Minecraft since the beta ended – not out of hipster snobbery, but due to having gotten my 100+ hour fill already – so I cannot really speak to the game as it exists currently. But let me just say: good goddamn job. Although there have undoubtedly been indie game successes before this one, I think the gaming historians of the future will look back and catalog indie games as being BM (Before Minecraft) and AM (After Minecraft).
Going from 1-2 programmers to knocking Call of fucking Duty out of the number one slot on Xbox Live is a success story for the ages.
Kinda makes me wonder whether this topical (MMO) sandbox debate has some traction. Is Minecraft just an Angry Birds, e.g. hugely popular in a self-contained way with few derivatives? Or is it more of an iPad phenomenon, e.g indicative of consumers being introduced to something they did not realize they wanted (like tablet computers)?
Start your betting here.
Low-Information Gaming
Logged onto Guild Wars 2 today after about 2+ weeks of not playing. Decided to be lazy authentic and not read anything, to better simulate the Joe Q Casual experience.
After a 500mb download, I appeared to be on an island near Mount Something-or-Other, five feet from a Personal Story portal. What was I doing again? Oh, right. I had spent a number of missions getting extra-special explosives to destroy one of those bone ships. I guess no one can be bothered to bring a cannon or trebuchet up in here? It worked last time. Whatever. All I need to do is… swim underwater… past a whole bunch of mines… with Risen all over the place… as an Elementalist.
Heavy sigh.
I am downed almost immediately, surrounded by the most banal MMO mobs ever created, and oscillating rapidly between my ineffectual real attacks, ineffectual downed abilities, and having no abilities being so close to the surface.
By the way, has anyone actually used Water Ability #5 as an Elementalist in anything approaching a useful manner? Even if you aim correctly, it always seems like you hit them 1-2 times and pass through them, dealing less damage overall than you would have just auto-attacking. Oh, good, that Water #5 launched me into a mine. Christ, this gameplay is worse than I remember.
Next step: clear the area of undead.
Err… looks clear to me.
I am not trying to be cute with the picture – there is literally zero mobs of any sort within the green circle. After trying fruitlessly to climb aboard the bone ship and then determine if there are mobs underneath the weird coral formation, I eventually encounter a Risen shark on my way back to the island. Apparently satisfied that a stationary shark 1000 meters from the boat was killed, Tonn decided to plant the bomb. We swam back without much incident.
At this point, the detonator does not appear to be working, and the murlocs naga krait are attacking. Tonn says he will repair the connections, give us the signal, and then says to push the button when the detonator goes green. Now, I am no explosive expert, but won’t the detonator go green the instant the connections are repaired? Nevermind. I kill some extremely small waves of mobs with the help of four other NPCs. “That’s the signal, hit the detonator now!” After a lame explosion, the following happens:
It’s not a spoiler if it’s dumb.
Did my game bug out, or did they literally just show me a bunch of water and haphazardly say that the dude died? No body? No explanation of how or why? I get that the “impact” was probably lessened by the time between I last played GW2 and today, but come on. This is exactly like when What’s-His-Face died at the Place “defending” the Thing (if you played GW2, you know what I’m talking about). There is simply no sense in it. I do not find pointless, off-screen deaths particularly compelling.
Enough of that nonsense.
I use the HotM Express to get to Lion’s Arch to check out the Halloween stuff. There are decorations and… an orange circle. I go there. I click on some NPCs, and suddenly I am a bird. I click on some people and get “points.” Okay. I finally find the NPC that gives you an item that runs on Candy Corn. As far as I can tell, I am supposed to find six people/things that can correspond to the four different buttons on my new hotbar. I talk to the first ghost nearby like I am instructed to. The dialog is pretty incoherent, but maybe that is the point? I keep getting feared away from the NPC by what I imagine to be another player still doing the costume brawl thing. Am I still “flagged?” I dunno.
I successfully talk to the ghost by clicking really fast before I get feared away. Not sure if I “completed” this step so I use the device to see if it marks anything in the quest area. Oops, out of Candy Corn. I watch the player grief people at the ghost for a solid three minutes before I head to a strange icon labeled Commander So-n-So, thinking perhaps this is some new NPC to explain what exactly the fuck is going on.
Talk to a Pumpkin-Carving NPC that says I need to carve an unspecified number of pumpkins before I can get a title or join his order, or possibly both. On my way to the Commander icon I see a toilet paper roll go flying through the air. After clicking on a table, it looks like a Candy Corn monster appears, but I keep walking. Ah, okay. The Commander is simply one of those players who bought the Commander book for 100g; this person is simply AFK at the bank, in somewhat cool gear. I right-click them trying to Inspect and… that’s right. ArenaNet built a game with a Vanity-based economy, and included no way to Inspect other players.
About to log off, then decide to take a screenshot with some random person nearby:
The end (?)
Funny story about that armor I’m wearing. You see, I actually got to level 67 and went the rest of the way to 80 by crafting in town. Afterwards, I sort of arbitrarily chose a set of gear off the AH based on stats that might potentially be good for a support character in dungeon runs. As I equipped everything, I noticed that the color was off; this happens occasionally when you equip gear that has three color zones when you had been using gear with only two up to that point. I was having a surprisingly hard time figuring out which zone was not colored right though, so I changed everything to the same color to figure it out.
Not a bug, but a feature! Well… maybe not so much.
The silver bit that refused to be colored correctly ended up being… the boob window. Or underboob window, I suppose. Or just “window,” on Asura.
In any event, pretty sure I am done with Guild Wars 2. It was probably not fair to make a half-hearted attempt to jump back in to check out the Halloween event while so acutely aware of how much fun I could be having with Borderlands 2 instead. Then again, maybe that is a perfectly fair scenario given the realities of gaming today: it is not enough to be a good game, you have better than every other game someone could be playing at that moment.
Counter-Intuitive Insights
While providing a very similar experience, what Rift has going for it is a smaller community.
—Keen
At first, I could not help but laugh. There is context for the quote, sure, but it struck me as funny regardless to take what would normally be a negative quality (few people are playing your game) and spin it as a positive. Especially when it is an MMO one is talking about, where the whole idea is the “a lot of people” part.
But… hmm.
It is undoubtedly true that an MMO “community,” such as it is, has an impact on one’s enjoyment of a game. I read threads like these on the Guild Wars 2 forums, and the sort of hyper-competitiveness inherent to the dungeon-running culture presented there makes me not want to bother at all. The people running these dungeons are getting them done in 20 minutes, whereas it will take me hours to get a similar level of competency all while I slow them down (assuming I am not kicked to begin with).
Incidentally, this is why you have LFD tools: there will always be abrasive social encounters when grouping with strangers, but at least with LFD you are not dependent on their goodwill to zone in at all. As long as you have reasonable expectations (i.e. not expect four strangers to wait while you soak up the atmosphere), you will be fine.
I believe that Keen is probably correct that Rift’s smaller community is a positive, assuming you are into that sort of thing. Fewer people means less of an audience for trolling, more reliance on social contacts to get things done, which probably all contributes to a Cheers-esque atmosphere. Or at least a “we’re in this foxhole together” atmosphere. So… yeah. The fewer people that like your MMO, the more you will like it. And the converse – the more popular your MMO gets, the less you enjoy it – is probably true for many as well.
All of which means you can never say bad things about hipsters ever again.
Badass
I have been playing Borderlands 2 quite a bit lately.
At one point, I had a mission to rescue a dude at the top of this dam. I fought my way through several rooms, saw some interesting stuff, solved some pseudo-puzzles, killed all the things. As I bust out of the final door onto the dam proper, everything goes to hell: the orbiting space station starts launching artillery shells, armed robots start landing, bullets start flying everywhere in this now-three-way battle royale. I take down a few more enemies with my corrosive sniper rifle, and then crouch behind some cover while I reload.
Then this music started playing.
I emerge from cover while tossing a holographic decoy out, stealthing to the first robot and meleeing it in the goddamn face. As robotic limbs fly everywhere, I switch to a ridiculously large shotgun, aim, and fire at a second robot. The shotgun shoots 17 pellets that each individually explode on contact, and firing it sounds like God slamming a car door shut.
Whump. Chik-Chik. Whump. Chik-Chik.
As I stroll down the middle of the ramparts like I own the place (and I do), I am suffused with a feeling of Badass. This whole sequence is staged, minus the explosive shotgun; the designers specifically put this music, with these enemies, in this order. It is the definition of themepark content, as single-player games are wont to be. But that doesn’t matter. I had been having fun before, but this was on its own elevated level. And after the sequence is over and I move on to the next (decidedly less cool) quest it occurs to me to ask: when was the last time I felt this way while playing a game?
I had to go back, waaaay back to my guild’s first Mimiron kill¹ in WoW. Like I said, I have had fun in plenty of games in the past three years. I have done some crazy moves in Deus Ex, there are some epic moments in the Mass Effect trilogy, and double-dagger Elementalist in GW2 was great fun originally. But the specific feeling I had owning faces up on Bloodshot Ramparts? Very fleeting, very rare, but much appreciated.
If you guys have experienced something similar in a game lately, feel free to share below.
¹ Please excuse the editing and the decidedly non-epic music accompaniment. 2009 was a long time ago.
In An Age 
Character Select Screen
Nov 12
Posted by Azuriel
It sometimes depresses me to think about how different a game experience can be depending on the singular decision you make at the character select screen.
As you might have seen down in the Now Playing sidebar, I have playing Borderlands 2 (BL2) for the past couple of weeks. While it might be easy to think that the character select problem would be worse in MMOs – by virtue of spending 100+ hours instead of 30-70 hours – I actually think it can be more important in shorter, single-player games given you are less likely to replay them.
Right now, I am level 40 in the New Game+ Mode as Zer0, the assassin character that can basically focus either on sniper rifles or melee attacks. While my power to go invisible while projecting a holographic decoy has been useful (I have literally one-shot a few boss fights with a melee attack), I am finding it significantly less useful when all the enemies seem to have 10x more health this time around. Also, the power is pretty useless against the larger bosses with their instant-kill melee attacks¹.
I could technically respec to a more sniper rifle-focused build to get around this problem, but it occurs to me that BL2 characters sans their special move are basically all the same. In other words, a sniper-built Zer0 that doesn’t use the Deception skill regularly is just a gimped version of a sniper-built Axton/etc. Plus, it really annoys me that Zer0 is the only character without a passive health regen talent, meaning one of my equipment slots is permanently taken up with a health regen relic.
In other words, I have a pretty big case of Other Class Envy at the moment.
Does it really matter all that much? No. But that is kinda the problem, too. I went ahead and created new characters for all the “classes” and leveled them up enough to unlock their special abilities. But the thought of plowing through the entire game on normal again, which I have already started via Zer0 with New Game+, was just too much to bear. The gameplay would be different with a different class, but not that different. Hence the unlikelihood of ever seeing how the other classes play out. The waveform has collapsed, and there is just the one timeline.
Which got me to thinking: does anyone else worry about picking the “wrong” class at the character select screen in a new game? And the followup question: how do you end up picking a character?
For me, I try to do a little research on how a class is supposed to function by the end of the game before I even start, including looking at every talent tree. Then, I usually get over my inevitable decision paralysis by just picking whatever sounds interesting to me at that moment. My first WoW character was a warlock because I heard they were rare but prized members, crushing their enemies under the weight of a thousand DoTs; I abandoned it somewhere in the Hinterlands, and rerolled my namesake paladin on the basis of always liking D&D paladins but chaffing at the Lawful Good requirement. With BL2, I chose Zer0 because Lilith’s special ability in the original Borderlands was handy in escaping otherwise certain death, and Zer0’s sounded the closest to that.
Around 70 hours into BL2, I kinda wish I would have just picked Maya. Or Axton. Or… yeah.
I would settle for being allowed to start new alts out at level 20ish. Gearbox, make it happen.
¹ I am aware that a level 50 Zer0 with a few specialized pieces of equipment can solo the 4-player raid bosses. Unfortunately, that does not particularly help my enthusiasm gap right now.
Posted in Commentary
2 Comments
Tags: Borderlands 2, Character Select Screen, Decisions, New Game+, Other Class Envy, Zer0