Borderlands 2: AtomicGamer’s Wishlist

Now that we know for a fact that Borderlands 2 is in development, the editors over at AtomicGamer have put together a lengthy, two-page list of tweaks, modifications, and additions that they’d like to see in the co-op shooter/RPG sequel. The two I agree most with:

Full Armor

The only armor you really wore in Borderlands was your shield generator, which could have randomized properties on it. Your character, whether it was Brick, Roland, Lilith, or Mordecai, always looked the same with only a couple of basic color choices. I’d love to see separate armor pieces modeled on to your character, along with all the stats that each bit of armor actually entails. It’s likely that female characters would do some stereotypical steel bikinis and the like for female characters, and for a game like Borderlands 2 that’s probably fine, but either way I’d love to see not only a full range of armor pieces, but also more stats for us to play with.

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Better PC Version

Borderlands worked fine on PC, but there were a few issues that kept it from being embraced entirely by the PC gaming audience. The interface wasn’t entirely mouse-friendly but little additions like field of view adjustments, toggle-to-aim (or crouch) toggles, things like that would make a big difference for many gamers. The more recent iterations of Unreal Engine (which the first Borderlands runs on) have been notorious for a lack of close-to-the-metal options, as they also have iffy support for things like antialiasing and the like. I’m not advocating swtiching game engines, but we have seen a few games on UE3 start to support these things properly; Borderlands 2 should follow suit.

Having none (or at least relaxed) DRM policies will help, too – we’ve already seen that heavy DRM or always-online requirements can do a lot to hurt a game’s chances on PC, and while it’s probably reasonable to include DRM to block playing the game before the release day, promising a first-week patch to remove all DRM (as a few games have had great success doing) is helpful, too. Or just go with the basic protection Steam offers, because even though that’s actually more restrictive than what I’ve just described, people at least know what they’re getting with Steam’s content protection.

Online play could use a little work; GameSpy middleware was a pretty crappy system to use in the first Borderlands, and while I really do appreciate that the game included direct LAN play – something many shooters refuse to even consider nowadays – internet play was difficult through GameSpy. It created client-hosted games anyway, and the service can throw off errors and other issues pretty often. In general, PC gamers only want to sign into one account at most in order to play, so if that’s Steam or some other direct-download service, that’s fine – just try to make that the only thing someone has to log into.

Even after all that, PC gamers can be a fickle bunch, and it’s certainly possible that in today’s climate – where announcing a simple pre-order bonus can spark off hundreds posts of bitter hatred and calls of boycotts – it’s impossible to please every PC gamer. But I think that a range of improvements as mentioned above could please most, and it could help bring the game’s PC sales up into the range of either the PS3 or 360. (Hey, it’s happened before!)