Unwinding on Pandora

For about a month now, I’ve been telling myself that I want to pick up a new free-to-play MMO. I knew most of the usual suspects, and that they wouldn’t really do what I wanted. I did download the fan-service MMO known as TERA, and I was showing Diana each of the characters and classes you could be while laughing my ass off. She, however, was the most pissed I’ve ever seen her about a video game.

I had another abortive search yesterday, not ready to go into the clunky mess that is EQ1. Landmark is dead, never having made it out of Early Access. I was getting a bit irritated, honestly. So I decided to deconstruct what it was that I was after. Interesting combat, not too grindy, good progression, lots of loot.

Probably just as important, I had to consider what I didn’t actually want from an MMO. I can’t play anything that needs a daily, or even weekly, commitment. Simply not enough hours in the day right now. I’m not actually doing this for the social aspect. Or, more precisely, I’d rather be social when I feel like it, and solo the rest of the time.

It turns out, the game I was looking for was Borderlands 2.

It really does scratch the particular itch I had. For being one of the go-to examples of the “loot grind,” there’s actually pretty much no grinding required, you can outpace the main story just by doing the side quests in a timely manner. It’s got nearly unlimited replayability, with lots of New Game Plus options. Multiplayer is opt-in for drop-in play. And it’s ready for me whenever I get back to it. It’s not free, but I’ve had it for ages and it never really stuck before. This time it stuck, like I knew it could. And the story is actually pretty good so far! Not getting that out of a lot of the F2P offerings.

As one minor irritation, it will occasionally drag major ass graphically. Even my GTX 970, rendering a three year old game, would have times where it would drop below 5 FPS. No idea, it seems to happen with some shock weapons and lots of enemies, which is most of the game right now. But that’s less than 1% of the time, normally it will chug right along.

 I gotta say, the feeling of progression through BL2 is quite rewarding. Each level is meaningful. At the same time, the loot is quite diverse. I had a Level 4 legendary grenade do well for me all the way to Level 21. I had a Level 14 legendary pistol only stay viable for about five levels.

There’s a lot more I like about the game that I haven’t gone into. I’m very glad it occurred to me to pick it back up.

This probably isn’t entirely coherent. I wrote it at 6:30 in the morning, and on my phone, no less. Normally this is my Pokémon Alpha Sapphire time on the train but I wasn’t feeling up for it today.