Borderlands

[Garple]

I picked this up on a lark and It's better made than I expected. Having said that, I'm having less fun than I expected because I just find it really tough. I mean I already knew I'm pretty awful at shooters, but I figured the rpg aspect of it would help me out, but it really doesn't as you can't grind on stuff way below you in level. Maybe I just picked the wrong class. I went with Mordecai. What is everyone else using and how easy/hard a time are y'all having with it?

I have *not* run into the boss-just-standing-around phenomenon described in the podcast. To the contrary, every boss completely rapes me. I've died at least twice on every boss I've encountered.

It's tempting to aim down your sights all the time because it's the logical thing to do and ensures greater accuracy. However, in this game, I highly recommend shooting from the hip most of the time. That will allow you to strafe and move around in the open while shooting, thus decreasing the amount of damage you'll take. I use the zoom when I'm going for my last shot or two on a particular enemy, am far away, or am just in good position for taking my time to line up a shot. At the very least, you should alternate often between the two types of shooting. This is especially important if you're playing alone because you'll be so highly outnumbered all the time. As soon as I started doing this, I noticed my shield wasn't dropping so rapidly and I was able to advance to a new position without having to clear the area first. Also...take cover and wait for your shield to recharge. The enemies will either stay where they are and you can bide your time, or they'll advance on you (which you can see on your radar) and you can be ready to pop up and take the first shot, catching them off guard.

[juv3nal]

I'm starting to have a bit of a better time of it. As a matter of (admittedly stupid) principle, I was trying to get by sticking with my class weapons (sniper rifle, pistol) when I had a much better option in the smg I picked up off of bonehead(?) I think it was. Deciding to give that a try has helped a bit.

[Irishjohn]

I'm starting to have a bit of a better time of it. As a matter of (admittedly stupid) principle, I was trying to get by sticking with my class weapons (sniper rifle, pistol) when I had a much better option in the smg I picked up off of bonehead(?) I think it was. Deciding to give that a try has helped a bit.

That's good to hear, mate. It can be a bit tricky if they start swarming you, alright. Hope you keep having fun with the game. I know what you mean about class weapons, I'm playing Brick and putting all his talents in Tank but still using a sniper rifle as often as I can get away with!

[Murdoc]

Was I totally wrong in thinking Nick(or Jakes? I can tell them apart, I just don't remember which one was playing it) comments in one of the podcasts, it kind of sounded like a turd he didn't want to rip into it.

But then last night 90% of my steam friends list is playing it, I wake up and a few of them are still playing it. Combine that with good reviews and comments in this thread, I guess this is something I should totally check out?

[Irishjohn]

Was I totally wrong in thinking Nick(or Jakes? I can tell them apart, I just don't remember which one was playing it) comments in one of the podcasts, it kind of sounded like a turd he didn't want to rip into it.

But then last night 90% of my steam friends list is playing it, I wake up and a few of them are still playing it. Combine that with good reviews and comments in this thread, I guess this is something I should totally check out?

Yeah, Nick pooped on the game. His two big complaints seemed to be that the loot wasn't quite up to it, and that a couple of the bosses were too easy. Well, I've only beaten two bosses, but so far it's been a lot of fun. The loot isn't going to blow you away ign.com but it becomes a bit of a compulsion to keep picking stuff up and shooting things.

I had been super excited, then lukewarm, and finally completely won over by this game. The big thing I would say is that the shooting action feels pretty good. It's true that the enemies more or less charge you constantly, but it makes for an exciting shooter.

[juv3nal]

I will say that the random nature of the loot can make for an uneven experience. Playing as a hunter class, of the drops I've gotten, my worst weapon right now is my sniper rifle. On the other hand, I've got a totally badass shotgun (actually I'm hanging on to a shotgun even better than that, but I'm about 5 levels away from being able to use that one).

My advice would be to not worry too much about your class (or pick class abilities that are as equipment independent as possible) and just roll with whatever the random number generator gods give you in terms of weapon drops.

I will also ditto what GrouchoClub said about firing from the hip. Unless the weapon you're using has a scope, I find I'm *more* accurate firing from the hip. I may just be delusional, but it seems like there's a bit of aim assist there that isn't present when you're zoomed in.

[miffy495]

I was rather interested in picking up this game on Steam, but the GiantBomb PC version quicklook shows me that the game uses Gamespy for its matchmaking. In 2009. Really? Anybody playing on PC who can tell me how/if this is impacting your play experience?

[JonCole]

So, I got the PC version and I can safely say that getting into the multiplayer has really been an unpleasant experience. I literally cannot remember the last time that I've needed to do port forwarding, but maybe I'm just spoiled from more recent offerings through Steam and whatnot.

Beyond that, in the ~8 hours that I've been playing today with my girlfriend, our connection broke twice. Neither of us have spotty/poor internet connections, so I feel like it has to be in the system. Once you actually get the game connected, though, I imagine the game plays just like anywhere else.

I'd go ahead and say that if you can get this game on the 360 and you're really interested in multiplayer, that'd be the place to get that experience right now. Unfortunately, my girlfriend only has a PC/PS2, so we have to make do with what we have.

[Denial]

This is the first game I've played as a 360 owner, and I'm trying to get the hang of the gamepad before opening up to multiplayer. I'm rather liking the stylised graphics, possibly because at least in the early stages it would, if grittily realistic, have looked a lot like Fallout 3. I mean, a lot a lot.

That said, I would like to state for the record that games designers should decide fairly early on if their game is going to have jumping puzzles, and if it does further decide not to make everything brown. It's usually not a huge problem, but some of the scavenging missions are really irksomely lengthened by this.

[miffy495]

Man am I happy I bought this game. It's fucking awesome. I'm doing all the sidequests that I can, and am at level 15 having

just got the key to the mines from that giant 'roid freak guy.

That was a hard damn battle, considering I went into it at level 13. Somewhere along the way I picked up an astoundingly good electro-shock shotgun, which I just kept blasting at the baddie's head with. It was such a rush when I took him down.

Doubters, this game is excellent. Awesome loot drops, dripping with style, and the leveling system makes you feel legitimately powerful. Things that I was terrified of earlier I can now take out with a single melee swipe, and it feels great to do so. The most rewarding moment so far came right after the fight in the spoiler tags. In order to get to that fight in the first place, I had to fight my way through a huge gauntlet of enemies, clinging to my hitpoints as I went. Three times on my approach I was downed and had to kill an enemy to get my second wind. Three damn times. After fighting through that gaunlet, I had to go through a mini-dungeon, and then finally the crazy hard boss fight. During that progression, I leveled twice due to my fighting enemies significantly stronger than me. With my new strength, despite the fact that the enemies had respawned while I was in the dungeon, my emergence back into daylight was something from the crescendo of a Tarantino film. I walked into the light, headshotting enemy after enemy and taking each down in a single blast. I felt invincible after my ordeal in the dungeon. Best feeling I've gotten from a game so far this year.

If the rest of the journey to level 50 is packed with situations like that, I think I may be forced to call Borderlands my 2009 goty. God damn.

That said, I'm on PC (thank you, Steam sale!) and anyone from the Thumb who'd like to co-op with me should let me know. I'm playing as Mordecai, and have most of my points so far invested into things that give me crazy powerful crits. My Gamespy name is the same as my forum name, so look me up. I'll be playing as much as I am able for what will probably be a while.

[Sinkwater]

That said, I'm on PC (thank you, Steam sale!) and anyone from the Thumb who'd like to co-op with me should let me know. I'm playing as Mordecai, and have most of my points so far invested into things that give me crazy powerful crits. My Gamespy name is the same as my forum name, so look me up. I'll be playing as much as I am able for what will probably be a while.

I will definitely hit you up. I'll be under my forum name as well.

edit: also add me on steam - hob0cop

Edited December 1, 2009 by Sinkwater

[miffy495]

I'm now level 19. According to Steam, I have played Borderlands for 7.6 hours since buying it three days ago. I have had a paper due in the mean time, as well as more than 2 hours of GTA today with Thumbs, and spent yesterday afternoon with my girlfriend. How in the hell I've spent 7.6 hours with this game I have no idea, but I love it. I still haven't made it out of the first zone (Badlands) for god's sake. In 7.6 hours, I would have beaten another game. This is insane. Crazy ass game is eating my life. It's so damn good. For reals.

So that this is not an entirely slavering account of how much I love every part of this game, I will add a negative here. The menu system feels ported directly from consoles, to the point where you need to use the arrow keys to scroll down because the scroll wheel does fuck all. Ugh. Despite this, I still want to have the game's babies. So, y'know, it's not a deal-breaker.

[brkl]

I'll probably buy this so I can play the co-op with my brother. I like the visuals a lot.

[brkl]

I almost always play games on Normal. I chose Hardcore for Far Cry 2, and I'm happy that I did, but that's a very rare exception.

[twmac]

I too very much enjoyed Borderlands, what I've liked the most is the crazy builds for the soldier class.

Everyone pretty much plays Brick and Mordecai the same way (tank and sniper respectively) but Roland the Soldier is all over the place. Some play him as a healer type who helps buff and regen everyone. Others play him as an unstoppable force who regenerates his own health so quickly that bosses can hardly put a dent in him. There are other variations and genuinely changes the experience in Co-Op.

What has been the most joy is that I have 4-5 friends who all have this game; their playing style is so different to mine that replaying areas is no big deal as the experience is different each time.

On the negative side, this suffers from what all RPG Co-op games/MMOs suffer from. If you aren't playing alongside someone at the same speed they are, you will get left behind or level to far to make it enjoyable for your buddy.

Edited December 11, 2009 by twmac
Terrible spelling, I swear I have keyboard dyslexia

[JonCole]

Yeah, I totally agree with the whole pacing issue. And there are a couple of annoying aspects to the multiplayer that further complicate the process, like having to follow the host's quest log rather than anyone else's. When you're really far ahead, sometimes you have a little more insight into the order that you should complete sidequests, but if the host is a little new it's hard to have them keep up.

[Murdoc]

(And that said, "cel-shading" doesn't even refer to comic books, it refers to actual cel animation, as seen in 2D Disney films and the like. It's not hard to remember what cel-shading means if you think of it in those terms. That flat-shaded, non-gradient look is necessary in 2D animation for efficiency and consistency reasons.)

I really, really hate to bring up this old discussion, but was reading through this thread and just after examining Pop I have a bit to say on the subject.

The problem with 3d art and game art in general is terminology, each program will use different terms for nearly the same thing, so various terms will get merged or be interchangable even if it isn't 100% correct. We take that one step further when we go into a real time engine, because a lot of the time the shader set ups are doing fakes based on the look of an a more sophisticated algorithm in processed rendering.

(Unreal 3 is horrible for this, by not only using different names for common processes, even if they are simplified hacks to achieve the same thing, but they go on to use terms that mean other things for their shaders, making it very confusing at first glance)

edit: Funny thought too, is that most of this stuff is made by a math programmer wiz, then they name it; but hand it off to some idiot kid who likes to make pictures; so we tend to either forget the terms and make our own up, or do a micheal bay style description of what we're trying to do (reference southpark mb pitches a movie solution)

3D art has been around for maybe 50 years, which has extremely distinct eras that make previous ones fairly obsolete (meaning, methods used are no longer applied and it's essentially a dead language that has little to no applicable merit in modern work). However, the terminology has kind of stuck through the whole thing, so it isn't out of the question that a term can have a lot of different meanings attached to it as the art evolves (and it has extremely rapidly).

Anyway, to bring this back around to cel shading; the same thing is happening here. The origin is like what Chris mentioned; trying to simulate cel-shaded art, but that doesn't mean the old definition should still apply today.

Essentially, other modern methods are being created, don't have definitions, or the artists can't be bothered adding more to their dictionary. Since they use the similar methods of achieving a goal and the output of that goal is pretty much the same; they get lumped into a single definition.

I agree that there is a difference between using ink lines and and classic cel shading. You can have cell shading without ink lines, and you can have traditional lambert/blinn shading with ink lines.

Also, just because Pop and possibly Borderlands (I haven't seen it in motion, but from the look of screenshots, I'll include it in this example) aren't trying to match the visual style of their ink to tradition 2d animation doesn't mean it should be excluded from the term cel shading.

That wasn't Chris' point (but it may be others'), his, instead, was that the traditional blinn/lambert shading with ink lines isn't Cel Shading. Somewhat true, but I have to disagree with the example of Pop(and again, maybe borderlands, I need to play it to know for sure) but I'm pretty sure there are some shaders in Pop that would be considered "cell shading".

To get the look of "Cel shading" (We're ignoring the ink lines remember) is basically just a way of clamping how light values react with a surface and how the diffuse texture (yes texture, even if your texture is one rgb value to simulate Disney's 2d look, there is still a texture technically be considered; with obvious memory benefits) is displayed.

Probably coupled with something similiar to some fresenel effects (like an incidence(rim light?) or really however the hell the rendering programer/shader artist work it out, you can play with the look quite a bit.

Anyway, this type of effect is totally going on in Prince of Persia on some objects and, for necessity of cost performance or visual style (like many modern anime movies, contains super simple shaded characters and amazing painted backgrounds), probably not on others.

Also I just need to throw in this tidbit, because someone mentioned something about other shader attributes not working on "cel shading" which isn't necessarily true either. The whole cartoony look is strictly diffuse; depending on how hard you clamp certain values you can totally still have specular, normal, and reflection work with it.

Notibly, TF2 is cell shaded(well their characters and weapons are) under the terms I just described, they even have a paper on the net about it that describes some crazy intelligent stuff using the same methodology of what I described. It's also using bump/normal, spec, and possibly reflections on these shaders; but like pop(and maybe borderlands) it's using a mix ( I assume the world art in TF is using their standard shaders in a lot of parts)

Also once you set up one of these shaders you can't expect your other maps(spec, bump, reflec) to react like they normally would, so theres a chance they need to be manipulated differently to work properly.

Also, in my limited experience on the topic; 3d packages may have a specific cel shader you can use, either offered by the package or rendering system (in the case of max, mental ray has one across all platforms)

I find most of these offerings are just derived from blinn or lambert (or a phong instead of a blinn, one of these is just a mild rip off of the other, I'm pretty sure its phong) and stripped down; so the cel shader in these packages are just restricted, easy to access shaders for people, but a more controllable result can be made on your own to get a better more specific look (like what game programmer/artists usually do)

Anyway, sorry to bring it up, but there seemed to be a lot of talk without a lot of technical backup, and I have like zero experience using these shaders, I just happen to have some info/opinions about it.

edit: as pirate pointed out I'm a shitty writer but I hope some of it made sense

Edited December 11, 2009 by Murdoc

[Lu]

If you spoke it the way you typed it, I would've stopped you half-way and told you to breath in first. Wouldn't want you to faint.

[Garple]

Wow...that's really interesting, Murdoc. Did/do you go to art school? And thanks for this, because it's always bothered me that people won't let me call something like POP cell-shaded. They know what I mean, and what else do they expect me to call it? I've always felt that the prominent colloquial usage should (in most cases) supersede the technical definition, so that we can all be closer to being on the same page in our discussions.

[syntheticgerbil]

Okay, fine, I'll bite. I didn't want to get into it, but it's really easy to understand without throwing out the blinn, lambert, anistrophic, and phong shading choices that regular forum members or people who haven't created anything in 3D will not grasp.

It's as Chris explained much earlier, it's about what look they are going for and not the technical aspect. Outlines alone also do not equal cel shading. Intense contrast alone does not equal cel shading even though it may use the same kind of specular map with intense shading contrast or falloff to achieve the same effect.

So just because Prince of Persia has black outlines and the texture has intense lighting contrast, does not mean it's cel shaded. No traditional cel animation has looked like that, so therefore it would not be a look they are trying to achieve.

Anyway, to bring this back around to cel shading; the same thing is happening here. The origin is like what Chris mentioned; trying to simulate cel-shaded art, but that doesn't mean the old definition should still apply today.

For many to just collectively take it upon themselves to redefine what cel shading means would make even less sense. If you want to include Team Fortress 2 and Prince of Persia in the definition, it's going to create confusion of what is a very clearcut look that is achieved by certain shading processes. As stated earlier, if an art director told a texturer to cel shade a model, it would be bizarre if the texturer brought back something with heavy texture but with high contrast shades. There's a big difference between Fear Effect and Prince of Persia or Wacky Races and Team Fortress 2. But the differences between Fear Effect and Wacky Races is much, much smaller.

Essentially, other modern methods are being created, don't have definitions, or the artists can't be bothered adding more to their dictionary. Since they use the similar methods of achieving a goal and the output of that goal is pretty much the same; they get lumped into a single definition.

I don't understand why you are justifying making blanket definitions because artists can't be bothered to create new ones? How is even true to say artists can't be bothered as the reason? Just because we don't have a definition for the painterly/comic book style color that incorporates high contrast with heavy texture and detail, doesn't mean it should just be called cel shaded since there is no other term available. If anything, I would say to give these new combo 3D looks emerging a new term that doesn't incorporate references to cel animation at all.

To get the look of "Cel shading" (We're ignoring the ink lines remember) is basically just a way of clamping how light values react with a surface and how the diffuse texture (yes texture, even if your texture is one rgb value to simulate Disney's 2d look, there is still a texture technically be considered; with obvious memory benefits) is displayed.

First, it kind of pisses me off you are saying, "Disney's 2D look," when the shrewd businessman Walt Disney had nothing to do with the invention of how cartoons were to be drawn and shaded to efficiently create characters and their movements for the big screen. If anything, it would be more correct of you to say "Winsor McCay's 2D look," while in reality outlines and simple shades were and have been since conducive and easy to work with for anyone making a cartoon when the industry started.

The rest is true, and that's why I don't understand why it has to be considered cel shading if someone were to use that technique on anything. You can use it on glass or an intense reflective surface within your realistic 3D landscape and no one would really ever know you adjusted the specularity similar to how you would with something you cel shaded. You also would point out those objects as cel-shaded within a 3D realistic environment. It's intention, the rest is just tools.

Anyway, this type of effect is totally going on in Prince of Persia on some objects and, for necessity of cost performance or visual style (like many modern anime movies, contains super simple shaded characters and amazing painted backgrounds), probably not on others.

So what if someone created a 3D environment where half the world was textured one way with hard flat lighting and the other half was textured traditionally and realistically? Would you call it cel shading just because some elements are in there? If a painter incorporated comic book style panels on his large canvas illustration, would you call it a comic book?

I know what you are saying here, that if someone goes about shading 3D object similar to how they would if they were setting up a whole flat 3D world that was trying to achieve the look of 2D animation, it should be called cel shading as well. But the truth is, in all 3D programs, the same methods can be used to achieve very different results just by changing a value. All that comprises the cel shaded look is a harsh value that is changed to make the lighting have little gradient between the extremes, as opposed to what the program would normally default to.

Also I just need to throw in this tidbit, because someone mentioned something about other shader attributes not working on "cel shading" which isn't necessarily true either. The whole cartoony look is strictly diffuse; depending on how hard you clamp certain values you can totally still have specular, normal, and reflection work with it.

While this is all completely true, again I think you are contradicting your overall point here.

It's true you can incorporate other shading effects within a cel shaded look, but you can start to lose the look of something traditionally animated really quick when you have gradient lighting or bump mapping going on. Cartoons just don't look like that.

It's the same if you start adding hard contrasting lighting properties to something photo-realistic in 3D, because of course you can do by adjusting the same values that help you create the realism, you are going to mar your look, which we would coin as, "photo-realistic."

Anyway, sorry to bring it up, but there seemed to be a lot of talk without a lot of technical backup, and I have like zero experience using these shaders, I just happen to have some info/opinions about it.

Because the technical backup is unnecessary. I could go into 3DSMax right now and explain every technical detail describing my cel shading method and it wouldn't make a world of difference difference. I could sit here and argue with you that phong is not a good setting for cel shading at all, because it's more accustomed to shiny surfaces, and it would not make a difference to what defines cel shading. There is of course an Ink and Paint preset in Max that you can use for a cel shaded look or you could mess with the settings and create it yourself, but it's all about the cohesiveness of a look in the end.

3D of course can get way more complicated and technical than creating a traditional flat animation or painting a picture, but that doesn't mean it necessarily has to when achieving certain styles. If I somehow created a realistic duck in 3D with many shades all with certain high contrast lighting settings,

I mean for Team Fortress 2, they explain all of their passes here, and they do say they are using sharp falloff, but all of this stuff is not how you would achieve the traditional 3D cel shaded look like Fear Effect or anime like Freedom, or Tokyo Metro Explorers.

Edited December 22, 2009 by syntheticgerbil

[JonCole]

Since this art discussion is sorta just going over my head, I'm just gonna point out that Giant Bomb just recently put up a quick look for the next piece of DLC, which got me back into the game. Pretty eager to finish up the campaign, too.

[twmac]

Yeah, both those posts were epic. Good read though.

Eurogamer just wrote a piece on it (it even mentions Leave Home).

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/games-of-2009-borderlands-article

[toblix]

Holy shit this game is unpolished. Just played a couple of hours of co-op, and, while fun, parts of it seems like what you'd find in a amateur freeware game, shoddy Xbox 360 ports, or something made by a bunch of open source developers just adding shit wherever.

What the hell is the deal with comparing items? Who do I have to fuck in order to unlock the mode that lets me just compare items in the store with whatever I'm currently carrying without having to click and scroll like the mouse was just invented?

And the sound? Did they just use them directly from a horrible library of shitty sounds? I keep turning around in panic because I think the lady on my team is being raped, but every time it's just her jumping sound.

And the combat feeling takes me back to Rainbow 6. Shooting an enemy and then not knowing if I hit it, if I killed it, or if it even noticed me.

And the looting sucks. Shit is just everywhere and I have to run around and look at all the stuff.

Also, what is this, the year intro movie clips were invented? Were the developers too busy removing anti-aliasing from the in-game text to enable me to skip their stupid intro clips with the annoying-as-shit robot fucking around with the Nvidia logo? A robot that dances and is goofy? BRILLIANT!

[JonCole]

Well, I guess I'm gonna have to do an ugly, multi-part response. I apologize in advance.

Holy shit this game is unpolished. Just played a couple of hours of co-op, and, while fun, parts of it seems like what you'd find in a amateur freeware game, shoddy Xbox 360 ports, or something made by a bunch of open source developers just adding shit wherever.

I would say that the co-op would probably make the game look far more unpolished than the single player campaign. They really dropped the ball with how players interact with each other and how quest logs work in tandem.

What the hell is the deal with comparing items? Who do I have to fuck in order to unlock the mode that lets me just compare items in the store with whatever I'm currently carrying without having to click and scroll like the mouse was just invented?

Comparing items is one of the most broken features in the game. Fortunately, I never really have too much of a problem with this because my main is a loot/money machine and I usually just buy what I want and figure out what's better through experience. Also, the interface is pretty much an untouched port of the console version, which I've personally remedied by actually plugging in a 360 controller to my PC.

And the sound? Did they just use them directly from a horrible library of shitty sounds? I keep turning around in panic because I think the lady on my team is being raped, but every time it's just her jumping sound.

Probably. The enemy sounds are particularly grating, I wish I could silence every single midget thing in the game.

And the combat feeling takes me back to Rainbow 6. Shooting an enemy and then not knowing if I hit it, if I killed it, or if it even noticed me.

I honestly haven't experienced this, because numbers pour out of an enemy if you hit them.

And the looting sucks. Shit is just everywhere and I have to run around and look at all the stuff.

I think that I take issue from this most... because I don't really know of a loot-driven game that doesn't just have "shit everywhere" and required you to "run around and look at all the stuff". Now, there's plenty of room for improvement, like... why do I have to manually pick up money and ammo? Would there be any reason I wouldn't want that if I'm in a single player game? Now, if that's what you're talking about, I'm with you, but having to run around to check out weapons and shit seems pretty... standard in a loot game.

Also, what is this, the year intro movie clips were invented? Were the developers too busy removing anti-aliasing from the in-game text to enable me to skip their stupid intro clips with the annoying-as-shit robot fucking around with the Nvidia logo? A robot that dances and is goofy? BRILLIANT!

This is the worst fucking thing in the game. Fuck that intro scene.

[Patters]

I think that I take issue from this most... because I don't really know of a loot-driven game that doesn't just have "shit everywhere" and required you to "run around and look at all the stuff". Now, there's plenty of room for improvement, like... why do I have to manually pick up money and ammo? Would there be any reason I wouldn't want that if I'm in a single player game? Now, if that's what you're talking about, I'm with you, but having to run around to check out weapons and shit seems pretty... standard in a loot game.

Money and ammo should automatically pick up, looting bodies is different. Weapons would probably be best if they did a quick pop up mentioning: value strength etc. I know not how it works in Borderlands and Don't feel the need to, with my hatred of the small amount of time I have played it.