Don’t get me wrong, I like “Borderlands 2” a great deal, but the thing glitches like it’s its job. Lately it seems like QT standards are dropping across the board for AAA titles, maybe because post-release patching has made developers and publishers lazy. And the bigger the game, the more acceptable the developer seems to think it is (cough Skyrim cough). It’s like they think they get a pass cause their world is so huge or something. Well, they don’t.
In an attempt to counter that attitude, I’d like to discuss some of the glitches I’ve already encountered in the otherwise fantastic “Borderlands 2.” Some of these are returning offenders from the original as well, so…yeah. I’m not happy about that either.
Arena Purgatory. This one happened in the original too. The game offers you gladiatorial matches against wave after wave of progressively more difficult A.I. as a way of leveling up and earning some cash. The problem is, on more than one occasion, the game has simply stopped progressing me at the end of a wave. The angry music keeps playing, but no more bad guys come out for me to kill. It’s like “Borderlands 2” forgot its next line.
This is infuriating for several reasons: 1) The doors are all locked once an arena match starts, so you can’t leave. Suicide or re-loading are your only recourses. 2) Whichever of those outs you take, the game will discard all your progress and treat you like you lost the match. And because Satan is real, it’s always after a really hard-fought victory that you’re not sure you can replicate. Thanks a bunch, Gearbox.
Involuntary Reset. This one happened to a friend of mine I’ve been playing with (at the risk of sounding un-Christian, thank God it didn’t happen to me). He booted up his character so we could begin our war against Slag-kind, only to discover that his Badass Points had been completely reset. He no longer had any of his perks, and was left with only a fraction of the Tokens he had earned.
These are the glitches that are truly unacceptable. An NPC stuck in a wall is whatever, but this kind of thing undercuts the entire point of a shoot-n-loot RPG. If I can’t trust you geniuses to hold onto my progression through the game, why should I invest hours into it? “Infinity Blade II” also temporarily suffered from a character reset problem, and it marred the entire experience for me, even after they fixed it. This is just not acceptable, guys.
Tardiness. This one is like a cousin of the first glitch listed here, which suggests the problem is actually getting worse from game to game. On several occasions when I’m required to kill a certain number of enemies and acquire certain objects, said enemies will simply stop spawning. This is especially true with bandit technicals on the mission “Positive Self Image.” Myself and my party spent twenty fruitless minutes leaving and returning to the mission area, trying to make more technicals spawn. Nothing short of turning off the game and re-loading would do it.
Texture Pop In. A minor one, but I feel the need to point it out: texture pop-in—a rampant problem in the original—has only marginally improved here, and frankly I’m disappointed. I really expected them to get on top of that one.
What annoys me about most of these glitches is that they impede the player from enjoying the game the way they’re meant to. And even though I’m certain Gearbox will be patching up a storm soon, it annoys me that a AAA game can ship with these kinds of problems. We’re becoming increasingly tolerant of this kind of thing, especially in sandbox games, and I think the time has come to put our foot down as a community. Even if they do fix these problems, a first impression leaves a permanent mark.
_AA
it’s not just all physical
