What made the first Borderlands so good?

Story elements only showed up when they needed to. In other words, the VAs knew when to shut the fuck up and let you play.

It was space Mad Max with light humor, instead of a (failed) comedy with light Mad Max inspiration

It was never good

Yea, so much this. This is part of what I mean by atmosphere. You really felt like a treasure hunter on a barren, weird planet inhabited by just the weirdest shit. No attempt at dumb humor constantly

Man replaying the first game made me really appreciate how quiet it was. Everything beyond the first game is just constant chatter made worse by the awful writing. I miss the dry humor of the first game as well before it went to shit with the dlc.

I thought it looked pretty unique at the time and the gameplay was fun. 2 is alright but it just seems so try hard in comparison that it really loses the atmosphere and looks like a parody instead. 3 is peak soulless.

Being able to steal an idea from someone and eject them from any and all conversation really helped Randy

Brevity. Minimal voice acting and less desperate feeling writing. 2 was profoundly disappointing because instead of improving gameplay in any meaningful way they spent all of their efforts on tripling down on the "humor", VA and bullshit that did nothing but detract from the experience.

In the sequels they ruined it by having someone yell at you at all times. Boot up a game of BL3 at any point in the story but the end and you'll find that the second you load in there us already somebody talking at you. In the first game there were times where nobody talked for a long time, just you and the borderlands.

not to mention the gravity, there were so many spots you could jump to for loot that you would not expect usually while in BL2 there is just ladders and certain spots you would have to fall to.

At the time it was released it was a more unique game. Even though the comedy was already a bit dated the variety of weapons, weapon effects, and the talent system it had were all not really seen combined into one game.

Everybody should have payed attention to how things would turn out when we all finally reached the Vault and got fucking nothing for our efforts. It was an indication of the bullshit game companies would be shoving down our throats for the next few decades.

This. BL3 is endless fucking noise. Constant quips from characters breaking up the atmosphere, people screaming dialogue down your Echo, even garden variety quest NPCs have to have some wacky kooky dialogue that lasts for minutes at a time. It's so obnoxious I just turned the sound off.

There was not much co-ops on steam at the time, it also alloved quite a lot of people to play at once.

Non-gameplay wise it was superior to the sequels in every way.
Gameplay wise I feel it was way more interesting to have each class specialise in certain weapons, and have unique bonuses for them. As a result there was much more incentive for team play, rather than everyone being a one man army who happened to play with other people. Also the sequels went way overboard on the MMO vibes which sucks out all of the fun, particularly in the long run

>appreciate how quiet it was
Jesus Christ games need to shut up already. Just give me a world I can enjoy without screaming at me. Death Stranding also does this very well

There was some tonal balance and not characters spewing memes 24/7.

This and this. The protags were some silent no-names with no agenda behind them.

What is amazing is this was actually a criticism when Borderlands 1 came out. Everyone was like "great game, but barren". Now ppl finally see how nice it was

It was an interesting new idea but it was boring

To be fair the fact that it was barren fitted with the setting, it felt like a bitchy complaint with no logic behind it outside of MUH Variety.
but i genuinely loved the first game and when the second game came out i could not play it for more than 2 hours without just closing the game than taking years to force my self to get past the first 8 hours of tutorial grind.

>Borderlands 1=Tech demo
>Borderlands 2=Actual game
Remember this meme? This makes me rage so hard

They need to remove all the writers. We thought the writing would HAVE to be better in 3 because burch left, turns out it was somehow even fucking worse. It's like they try to make characters as insufferable as possible.

It wasn't. Having RPG mechanics in a shooter doesn't work. My skill is literally handicapped by factors outside my control making the gameplay frustrating. Looking for loot is pointless as simply playing the game will eventually give a better gun to work with. This makes having a large open world pointless as there's no incentive to explore it. Leveling just gatekeeps whether or not you can tackle a sidequest or mission as your damage is literally halfed every level below you are the enemy. The different classes are all homogenized as the only difference between them as their active ability, which barely differentiates them, and passive stat bonuses and perks. Needing a vehicle to drive around the vast empty nothing is annoying. There's barely any enemy variety. Almost all sidequest are fetchquest or go-kill-guy. Visuals get very repetitive and dull as the entire game is generic desert. And the map sucks as it doesn't even tell you anything or what areas or even connected. At least it doesn't have bulletsponge enemies, excessive amounts of overpriced low-effort DLC, and awful unfunny dialogue like the sequel does.

All and all the entire series sucks as it's nothing but shallow, repetitive Skinnerbox garbage that stretches its content into hours of paper thin content.

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>in a shooter
it seems just as bad in diablo

>simply playing the game will eventually give a better gun to work with
I know, it's amazing, right? What an incredible concept! THE GAME REWARDS ME FOR PLAYING THE GAME

/Thread

>zoomers are now nostalgic for Borderlands
pathetic

Writing was ok and the gameplay was good. Don't know why it was so hard for the future games.

2 is better

this