In “Gun Metal Gaming: A 2009 Retrospective,” Wolfman Jew covers one game from 2009 a month for all of 2024. Each is one he’s either never played or played for only a few forgotten minutes well over a decade ago; he’s coming into these about as fresh as a player can. Hopefully, his experiences will give us a good view of one of gaming’s lesser years.
Thanks to Hamada for edits.
“Oh come on, let’s get down! Come on everybody check me out! I’m dancin, I’m dancin’! [ad infinitum]” – Claptrap, Borderlands
On the last day of 1997, Blizzard Entertainment released Diablo and turned several RPG standards into a singular hook. See, in Diablo, you click on monsters to kill them, which gives you points. You spend the points to make each click do more damage or let you safely click for longer. Perhaps you’ll unlock one skill in a vast array to make each click matter more. And the monsters drop items—mostly garbage, but sometimes a better clicking weapon. It’s a drip feed of constant incremental empowerment, punctuated by larger random victories. The Grind, that long-maligned trope of doing repetitive tasks to unlock the critical path, is the critical path. It took the abstractions that power role-playing games and made them comfort food.
At the time, Diablo was revolutionary. Today, it’s the standard. Seemingly every Triple-A title has at least one of these features. Most popular are skill trees, which force you through hoops to access new abilities. Multiple currencies, a great avenue for microtransactions, are also popular. You’ll often contend with tiers of loot, sometimes procedurally made to make each one a bit unique. And then there’s the missions, the gated structure, the endless menuing… These granular features can be seen across the world’s most popular and acclaimed games: Fortnite, League of Legends, Control, Red Dead Redemption 2, and almost everything Sony and Ubisoft make. Amongst its other sins, 360-era Call of Duty may be the party most responsible for this; it grafted role-playing mechanics onto online play with the idea that they give you more reason to play. Some classic RPGs from before the boom like The Elder Scrolls merely helped popularize these features. Others like Halo and Doom and Tomb Raider, series that once epitomized the maxim of “pick up and play,” have succumbed to this siren song. Though not every feature may be there, the underlying philosophy behind the inclusion of these features, that players are livestock in need of carrots to motivate them, is ubiquitous across the modern Triple-A scene. It is the standard.
Image: Microsoft. As 2K—who, let’s remember, destroyed Spec Ops: The Line earlier this year despite it being one of the most important things they’ve ever published—has seen fit to block screenshot captures of all their Xbox 360 games for vague “licensing” reasons, I once again have to get promotional images from elsewhere. This is from the Xbox storefront, showing one of the game’s skill trees.
This ubiquity has not come without some backlash. You only need to look at “Poison Ivy’s Iconic Ice Elemental Fire Axe” from this year’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (it deals +6 melee damage to grunt enemies, and it only costs five unique currencies! Just be wary, because frozen enemies take greatly reduced damage from melee!). Regardless of my own antipathy towards this trend, there seems to be a backlash every time a new IP comes out with tiny text explaining how fast your reload is. Players and critics have become vocally frustrated with the artificiality of these systems, and how they seem to exist to pad out runtime or direct how you play. But that doesn’t change the fact that the majority of the world’s most successful blockbusters follow this and are either rewarded for it or at least not punished. That it can be so easily used for financial chicanery and self-destructive live service design doesn’t help. But when even violent murder god Kratos is rifling through a Nordic crypt for a doohickey to make his flaming fishhooks slightly stronger, perhaps these mechanics have been strewn too far.
I suspect that culturally, the brand that most represents this trend—this stew of “RPG-ification” and live services and turning a game into a job you pay for—is the loot shooter. It’s the perfect example. Games like Warframe, Destiny, and The Division pair these abstract, slow role-playing features with the shooter, the most immediate video game there is. Unlike some of these other games, all those Diablo features are here. The random weapons, the skill trees, the loot you endlessly sift through, and even how it’s color-coded to tell you what’s good and what isn’t. In an industry that has spent decades building a better Skinner box, these come the closest. And that’s where today’s subject comes in, as Borderlands was arguably the first of this genre. At the very least, it was a major step in bringing RPG basics to a new frontier.
The experience of any session of Borderlands is simple. You’re a scrounger in the sandbox of a first-person shooter. You walk around, shooting bad guys or slightly gnarly monsters for experience points that level you up. It does the Halo thing for health; you have HP buttressed by a regenerating shield. Often, these enemies will drop ammo, sometimes money, and ever so rarely an item. If it’s the latter, like a gun or a new shield, you might go into the menu and compare its randomly generated stats to those of the thing you have on hand. If it’s better, you replace it. If not, you keep it around until you can pawn it off, or until you run out of your cramped inventory space and drop everything worth the least cash. There are vending machines that take them. After that, you’re flush with money you may never actually use and hopefully carrying an incrementally better shotgun or rifle than you were twenty minutes ago. Now onto… what were we doing? Clearing out an encampment? Finding a thing? Well, the waypoint on the map’ll clear that up. Rinse and repeat for twenty-seven hours.
Image: Microsoft. Any fight in Borderlands looks like this. A lot of enemies running around; a lot of numbers on the screen.
Taken not from 2024 (where it’s a cultural institution with a awful looking movie on the way) but from 2009 (where it’s the newest property of Gearbox Software, then known only for Brothers in Arms and the loathed Half-Life sequels Opposing Force and Blue Shift), this game is slightly shocking. This is pure gameplay in an era that strove for grand cinematic prestige. The art flew in the face of contemporary graphics by using something suspiciously close to cel shading; the world has this wonderfully dry, scratchy, gritty, comic look. You’re constantly opening up the menu and dryly comparing items. It’s crazy that this was big at all, let alone so big that its recent Dungeons & Dragons parody spinoff is poised to become its own franchise.
If there is a standout here, it’s the guns. Borderlands has, according to the Borderlands fan Wiki, “17,750,000” firearms thanks to the aggressive use of procedural generation. There are pistols, shotguns, SMGs… you know, guns. Branded models act as shells, and they get random effects and stats. A stash might offer a sniper rifle with fire damage, an assault rifle with a laser scope, the rare sciency energy weapon with a battery instead of bullets. There are more crazy effects out there; I stumbled onto a shotgun whose bullets fired out as rockets, only to find the aiming completely useless. Another shotgun named after Evil Dead 2 fired every clip as a continuous, slightly more reliable salvo. The luck of the draw also means you may get a weapon high above the intended level of challenge, which is fun. Past the halfway point, I found an obscenely overpowered revolver whose bullets literally dissolved enemies in acid. It was a godsend once I was up against miserable bullet sponges, and I went from ignoring an entire class of gun to giving it a dedicated shortcut, even ignoring revolvers with higher damage but no acid. This is a surprisingly hard game at times, so these boons are appreciated. As someone who tends to follow the sniper code of Garrus Vakarian and Riza Hawkeye, I kept running into a trope of finding a super-powerful rifle and waiting forever before I had a reason to replace it with something that surpassed it. Times when I had to replace my go-tos were rare, let alone times when I replaced them in quick succession. To be honest, it’s a bit frustrating being rewarded with literal hundreds of guns outclassed by the time you get them. A lot of the menuing is really just seeing what stuff you can comfortably sell. Future Borderlands games took this further; there are even more guns, even more and more wild effects, and an even more gleeful lack of balance. Very toyetic.
Unfortunately, that only alleviates the tedium a bit, and at its worst these items feel like yet more carrots coaxing you through a mire of repetition. Defeated encampments and some mini-bosses are revived like clockwork in seemingly the exact same way, at times even before you’ve left. In one cave filled with electrical crystals, Alpha Skags—giant versions of these early game dog monsters—would reappear every time I walked up to one of their dens. I’d retreat because they tanked all my gunfire, and by the time I killed them and made it back new ones would spawn in. Eventually, my clips empty, I gave up and limped back to the entrance… during which time I fought revived versions of every group on the way. It’s unbelievably grindy, without much in the way of enemy variety or decision making. Thankfully, the life system is incredibly generous, even letting you pick up schmutz dropped by bosses in the event that you both died at the same time. I know, because it happened multiple times.
Of course, that only fits the tone. That iconic Borderlands “charm.” Essentially, what we’ve got is a lowbrow Mad Max parody, the kind of thing you’ve seen in South Park or Rick & Morty. The planet Pandora is a wasteland of shanty towns, “Psycho” thugs with gas masks and a penchant for self-immolation, the detritus of corporate malfeasance, and a plethora of walking Southern American stereotypes. But its greatest resource is “wackiness.” Toilets filled with cash and clips cover the land. Every character gets a movie trailer splash screen, dutifully explaining that the first boss has three testicles. Characters always have an edgy quip or an ugly joke at the ready. The intro features “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” by Cage the Elephant, which was omnipresent at the time and always embarrassing. One enemy type is offensive on multiple levels, to the point where its name (and from what I can tell, only its name) was changed in future games. It is irreverent and snarky and painfully dated. Lemme tell you, if I never hear another redneck talk about his mother’s “girly parts,” it’ll be too soon. Things started okay when I first met Claptrap, a sort of R2-D2 / Clippy hybrid who cheerfully spouts sanitized corporate advice, up until the point when he began dancing… like, a lot, badly, because a dancing robot? How random! But by the end, he and his many, many identical models were low on my list of irritants.
Image: Microsoft. Claptrap. Soon to be voiced by Jack Black in less than a month in a movie that stars Cate Blanchett.
All of this sounds awful, and this would normally be the part where I come in and tear the gameplay in two. It’s not great. But it’s also, surprisingly, quite digestible. On my first day, I played Borderlands for five hours and twenty minutes. I don’t play anything for five hours a day (unless it stars Link, I guess). It just went by. The experience is middling outside the video game appeal of pointing at something and hitting it, but even with constant deaths—the game does not want you to fight enemies even slightly above your level—it went down smoothly. And though I did take liberties and sold stuff so quickly I sometimes had to buy a good one back, I stuck to the loot shooter of it all. Rocket launchers I never used were carefully compared; effects were judged. I put way more effort into min-maxing my gear than I did in Dragon Age, a game that at least has the dignity to justify this loot-centric nonsense by being a callback to Dungeons & Dragons.
I’m unconvinced there’s such a thing as a “turn your brain off” video game in the way people talk about CSI and James Patterson novels, at least other than idle games, but this comes close. It’s a great way to pass the time during a long phone call, which is not the world’s greatest compliment but was probably central in its rise to glory. It certainly goes hand in hand with another beloved feature: its co-op—and not just online, as Borderlands has for its whole history supported local multiplayer. At a time when I bemoaned the abandonment of playing in person, this championed it and continues to do so to this day. That makes this yet another entry of “Gun Metal Gaming” where I’m missing out, but I can easily imagine the fun of shooting rockets in the gunner’s nest while a friend pilots our awful car to the next sandbox. The downside is that some moments are clearly made for two players and unforgiving to anyone going stag. Twice I fought my way through Old Haven, a massive Halo-esque urban map full of alleyways and robotic turrets, and the lack of another person was keenly felt both times.
Another major, recurring feature? DLC. Unlike pretty much every other loot shooter, Borderlands isn’t structured as a live service beyond the conceit of post-launch support. Without the need to keep people playing daily, it instead focused only on the trope of sizable expansions, all of which were appreciably open to me once I booted up my used 2009 copy and finished the tutorial. There’s a zombie one, a battle royale one, a gimmick one where you shoot Claptraps, and The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, which is actually held in higher regard than the main game thanks to its wild level design. Some are explicitly presented as non-canonical, but they have influenced later games. The eponymous star of Mad Moxxi’s Underground Riot only became a staple of the cast after she debuted here. The aforementioned fantasy spinoff Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands was built off a Borderlands 2 expansion. While I didn’t explore these beyond around a casual half hour apiece, the dedication to making additive, complementary content is respectable. Each expansion felt distinct. Not good, really, but distinct.
Image: Steam. Mad Moxxi’s arena in Borderlands Game of the Year Enhanced, an edition that added all the DLC, added mild graphical touchups, and has fully replaced the original game. Like, 2K has taken the original game off Steam’s search engine so only this version is around.
I mentioned Dragon Age earlier, and it’s fascinating playing this half a year after plowing through Fereldan. That openly acted as something of an heir apparent to the legacy of Western RPGs. I called BioWare’s blockbuster a “dead end,” a triumph of design that had nowhere to go on its own. Borderlands is presumably by accident almost a twisted funhouse mirror image, because it created a new genre by stealing the mechanical tentpoles of RPGs like Dragon Age and leaving the soul behind. For instance, instead of playing as a carefully written hero or a silent protagonist or someone built wholesale by the player, you start by choosing one of four characters. They’re called “classes,” but with specific names, designs, and those movie trailer introductions, they have to be more than just a class. My choice, Mordecai, is a sniper with a wonderful attack bird and banal, self-serious quips. But that’s it for dialogue; you don’t even have the text-only responses a Joker or Byleth might have. So you’re not “playing a role.” One of the genre’s greatest tools is its cast, yet only a few are even slightly memorable. What I consider the two defining aspects of RPGs, their use of abstraction to express complex ideas and the threat of choice and consequence, are limited to the guns. And of course, there’s never a sense that you’re changing this world. No matter how many Skags I killed, they’d keep coming out of those dens. No matter how much cash I stole from someone in front of their face, they always thanked me for my service. When they did, were they thanking Mordecai, or me? This game co-opts the mechanics in such a way as to subvert their meaning.
As a film noir fan, I find this fascinating. This is very similar to neo-noirs, the collective term for all noirs made after the 1950s. A few recognize the themes of horror, instability, surreality, trauma, and anxiety that made that genre great, but most take only surface level iconography and subvert the paranoia or institutional fear. “Tough guys and dangerous dames” and not an America spinning out of control. In that sense, Borderlands is the… I dunno, LA Confidential of classic RPGs. But it’s not even that, because it’s not trying to draw from the surface level. It fully ignores that, instead appropriating the core for its own, diametrically opposed purposes. And it ran with that so well that we got a whole new genre. These systems may not be for me, but the success of Borderlands and all that came after it shows that they always had a wider audience.
But I do think removing that heart of storytelling or character does leave this game as truly, deeply hollow. Your character has less personality than some of those silent protagonists. Your hunt for a mythical Vault filled allegedly with treasure and actually with a tentacle monster is meaningless. Pandora is a bore of a setting, devoid of the intrigue it desperately needs. What you’re left with is an endless stream of gunfights set to an oddly haunting score, in a land replete with Skags and Scythids and ammo-filled toilets. The implicit video game offer of endless accumulation and little else. And the thing is that most Borderlands fans would probably not dispute this. This game is generally considered among the weakest, jankiest, least captivating of the series. My colleague Hamada, Source Gaming’s avowed Borderlands fan, generally dismisses it. ‘Cause he’s a Borderlands 2 fan, like everyone else.
Image: Steam. The even more absurdist Borderlands 2.
I started by discussing Borderlands’ role in the proliferation of RPG elements. Of how it created the “looter shooter.” It’s very different from the games that followed it in function and form. But it’s also remarkably different from Borderlands itself, which has evolved in many strange ways. Most famously, Borderlands 2 leaned into story, sidequests, and NPCs—a crew that included this game’s nondescript protagonists. Instead of being boring skill trees, they were people with story arcs. Mordecai appears to be the least popular, but he and his counterparts Roland, Brick, and Lilith became mainstays of this universe. This has become a constant; each set of vacuous protagonists get promoted into NPCs in the next game and somehow gain far more agency than when they were playable. And that’s gone alongside writing that has remained needlessly edgy but has, apparently, become more thoughtful in fits and spurts. These games are still full of grind, chaff, and obnoxiousness. They’re also kind of more.
You would not expect such a development from Gearbox. You know, the studio who helped save Duke Nukem Forever. The studio partially run by Borderlands co-writer Randy Pitchford, blowhard magician who allegedly assaulted Claptrap’s original actor and left a drive of underage porn at a Medieval Times. The studio that kept Chris Hardwick after the Tales from the Borderlands actor had been exposed as an abuser. The primary studio behind Aliens: Colonial Marines, that stepping stone in the history of video game false advertising. The studio—okay, one of the admittedly many studios who found themselves caught up in the dystopian nonsense of the Embracer Group, before being sold to 2K (who had published most of their games, this one included) for half its purchasing price three years later. Borderlands is their rock; it’s the guiding star and the battery keeping the lights flickering amid poor investments and layoffs. They are not a healthy company, they are not run and have never been run by a healthy company, and it’s almost a testament to this series’ appeal that they’re existent at all.
The reason I chose Borderlands for this series is that well over a decade ago, someone gave me a used copy from a Gamestop, and I liked the idea of finally getting something out of it. That’s why Dragon Age is here, coincidentally, as well as Chinatown Wars and 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. I’ve never found the IP particularly compelling, though the idea of seeing where the loot shooter came from had appeal. As it turned out, both were true. This was a bit of a slog, just one that was relatively painless and with a lot to teach us about game design and history. I certainly didn’t expect to come into this and conclude that it was some kind of epochal “anti-RPG.” And I can’t deny that my research has made Borderlands 2 intriguing as something I’d like to eventually try for its own sake. But most of all, I’m just happy I had some fun with what’s still a bad game, spitting acid bullets and calling my bird and getting those dumb numbers up. Low pleasures, perhaps, but pleasures nonetheless.
Next game: Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.
Read all of “Gun Metal Gaming” here.
- Indie World & Partner Showcase August 27, 2024: Information and Reactions - August 27, 2024
- Gun Metal Gaming Chapter 8: Tom Clancy’s U.B.I Soft - August 26, 2024
- Center Stage: Blighttown (Dark Souls) - August 17, 2024
