Fear & Loathing in the Borderlands

At some point, without ever trying or agreeing to any of this, I became an old gamer. Not one of the wizened ancients who chased blinking dots on 2600s, but I’ve lived long enough to see most of the games I grew up playing relegated to retro classic collections. How is this even possible? Who allowed such a thing to happen? It must be the steep price of progress one must pay to get 4K graphics and net code that actually works. I suppose it is worth it to no longer get kicked from your game whenever you receive a phone call.

For reasons far too dull to include here, I missed everything in the three generations between the NES and the Xbox 360. Gaming was barely recognizable by the time I picked up a controller again. It was a strange landscape—you could barely even see the pixels anymore! Tons of unique new genres with wildly creative mechanics had been invented in my absence, things you just couldn’t handle with only a D-pad and two buttons. It wasn’t long before I realized I was going to have to pick a new favorite game, and that was when my journey into 2009’s Borderlands began.

A colleague and I rented a copy and killed a long weekend with that game, fueled by booze and pizza. As soon as we arrived in the cel-shaded wasteland of Pandora, it was obvious that we had signed up for an ominous quest with overtones of extreme danger, a gross physical salute to all the insane possibilities of life on this crazy hostile rock. This planet of bandits and monsters hid a giant vault full of priceless alien technology, and we vault hunters would blaze a trail of blood from one pole to the other and back again to find it and claim the unimaginable prizes inside. 

Borderlands is a first-person shooter with some light RPG elements stapled on. Most of the action is shooting. Players have a choice of four distinct classes, each with their own unique skill trees and abilities. Although incremental boosts provided by leveling up made no significant changes to gameplay, it does provide a sense of progression and character growth as you work your way through the main story.

We were somewhere around New Haven, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. An annoying robot named Claptrap greeted us with an almost threatening amount of enthusiasm, and pointed toward an office. Suddenly it all made sense. We must be here to talk to that lady with a question mark over her head—she definitely had a quest for us. Most of the locals just need us to fetch this or that, but this woman has a litany of barbarians to be slain. Goons with names like Krom, Sledge, and Bonehead. She then refers us to another woman, a scientist named Tannis, who has another list of names in need of some red marks.

With pockets full of blood money, we go shopping for new gear. No more picking “slightly used” body armor off the dead. For the first time we purchased new guns fresh off the rack, never been fired. They were sold to us by Marcus Kincaid, the Russian arms dealer who owns and operates the ammunition vending machines you see all over Pandora. Even in the middle of nowhere, you’re never far from a Marcus Munitions machine! He was the latest stage capitalist, a ruthless businessman who sold guns to wannabe adventurers and then took his wares back from their corpses to be polished up and sold again. As morally repugnant as that is, you can’t help but like the guy.

A plethora of guns was the big selling point of Borderlands when it was first released. A bespoke procedural generation engine assembles weapons and gear from randomized parts, meaning this game has somewhere between 16-17 million possible guns in it. A world record at the time, which was also added to the hype. While the system is still impressive, it is clearly in its infancy compared to later implementations. Weapons from different manufacturers have their quirks—Vladof shoots a little faster and Jakobs fires slow and powerful, but most of them aren’t all that distinct. The only thing that sets Tediore apart is that their guns are cheap, which ceases to be relevant by level 30. Most of the legendary weapons don’t even do anything all that crazy; they just inflict more damage. All of the guns will get a glow-up in the upcoming sequels, but for now it’s a promising proof of concept. 

Marcus glared at me and said “What the hell are you talking about? Buy something, or leave my store.”

Oh well. Everything moves according to the will of the Great Magnet. Nothing anybody can do about that.

Despite that cosmic truth, Commandant Steele keeps scolding me over the radio like I’m some kid she caught tearing up her lawn. Who told her she was in charge? I don’t see any KEEP OFF THE SAND signs down here. Just a bunch of heavily armed drunks digging for alien treasure all over the planet. How disruptive could we really be? If anything, my colleague and I were performing a public service by culling the herds of bloodthirsty psychos running around. Something ugly was always about to happen. Folks could feel it lurking in the near future, just out of sight.

These psychos weren’t some pesky bandit clan that took a “tax” from every trade caravan that crossed their turf. No, these were the hopelessly insane, people who no longer care about anything but violence. Freaks that will cut your head off with a hand-crafted buzz axe, and then finger paint with your blood. Way back when the Dahl Corporation made its failed attempt to tame Pandora into a revenue stream, they saved on costs by using prisoners with life sentences as cheap, disposable labor. After their whole operation went belly up, the Dahl executives cut their losses and fled, but not before releasing their workforce of violent, angry criminals into the wild wastelands of Pandora. Most of them lost whatever was left of their minds and became the psychos that scream terrible gibberish as they try to murder you. Now they are one of the largest populations on the planet, providing yet another obstacle for any future corporations to overcome. But the corps are all so focused on alien treasure that they can’t see the opportunity in front of them.

The real untapped resource of Pandora is cannon fodder. Need a battalion of bonebreakers between you and your enemy? Maybe a gang of goons to grind your foes to dust? Or perhaps just a moat of madmen to surround your fortress to deter visitors? A surfeit of psychos is the low-budget security solution for you! They will not be deterred by the low pay, high risk, and no benefits. Toss them some raw meat once a day, and you’ve got a limitless supply of cannon fodder. It doesn’t matter if some vault hunter shows up and kills half of them—more will appear, crawling out from every rock, hovel and footlocker within earshot, eager to join the fun. And no one beats the psychos when it comes to enthusiasm. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing, but they’re so damned excited about it they could just stab someone in the face. And they will, if some foolish adventurer gets close enough.

There are vanishingly few decent people left on Pandora. A conscience rarely survives the brutal realities of living on such a savagely hostile planet, so it is a thing to be treasured—not exploited. Those that are still sane in this place all abide by one rule: do not abuse the decent. There is always someone willing to avenge them. Poor TK Baha was one of them, but that didn’t stop some psychos from stringing him up from the ceiling fan in his own home—what the locals call a “Pandoran Piñata.” And nobody shed a tear when the nearby bandit camp burned to the ground in the middle of the night without leaving a single survivor.

According to Tannis, who qualifies as marginally decent, the trinkets we’ve been plucking from the hands of dead bandits are all actually pieces of the vault key. But even with the key, the mythical vault is still on a time lock. It can only open once every 200 years, and if we miss our chance, we’ll all be deceased before there’s another one. Now that we are saddled with a ticking clock, it becomes an all-out sprint to reach the vault first and claim the prize within.

We have to fight our way through Old Haven, which is occupied by Crimson Lance troops in full tactical armor—the Atlas Corporation’s most elite henchmen. The deserted town full of burning homes looked like a war zone before we arrived, and it didn’t look any better once the shooting started. If I turned around too fast in a frenzied firefight with lots of enemies around there was noticeable screen tearing and frame-rate drops, which are not problems you expect to have in a remastered GOTY edition of a classic game. Of course, most of our foes remain blissfully ignorant of such impediments. Their aim is terrible enough that it doesn’t really matter how well they can see.

Now it’s time for a final confrontation with Commandant Steele to determine the fate of the fabled Vault of Pandora. She can’t help gloating as she turns her stolen key, so sure she has won. I tell her that despite its age and many, many flaws, the first Borderlands remains a surprisingly enjoyable experience. The series will improve upon almost everything with future iterations, but there’s no denying Gearbox put down a solid foundation with this game.

Commandant Steele shakes her head and asks what nonsense I’m spewing. So I explain that the only reason I remembered the original Borderlands as such a disappointment was because of the lackluster final boss fight. Just when we think we’re about to exchange bullets with our corporate nemesis, Steele gets skewered and tossed aside by the “real” final boss: a one-eyed blob of tentacles that does nothing to justify its placement. It’s just an underwhelming “twist.”

“Wait… what did you say?” Steele asked. She was impaled by a tentacle before I could answer her. Hard to imagine a more ignominious way to go. Steele deserved the dignity of a proper boss fight, but I guess that’s life on Pandora for you. That one final disappointment had overshadowed all of the fun memories I had with this game for years, and I’m glad I had this chance to reappraise it. That bullshit bait-and-switch final boss fight pissed me off so much the first time around that I completely ignored all of the endgame content, most of which turned out to be pretty good. But of course, none of that matters to the Atlas Corporation, which has decided to accept their losses and move on to a world a little less resistant to exploitation.

Dr. Ned, who is totally not the same person as Dr. Zed, provides the zombie mode all shooters of the era were obliged to include, lest they seem incomplete. Don’t get me wrong—setting hordes of zombies aflame is tons of fun. But the lack of fast travel points in Jakobs Cove means we will be going from one end of the map to the other for almost every quest. By the time Jakobs sends its classy-lookin wood robot to hire me to wrap this whole mess up, I’m just running around the zombies rather than waste my time and ammo dropping them. Never a good sign for a zombie game (or related DLC) when killing zombies becomes a rote chore you’d rather avoid.

Mad Moxxi’s Underdome was more headache than it was worth. While we were up for an endgame challenge, completing even one five-round quest in her gladiatorial arena is an hourlong undertaking that offers no XP for the hundreds of enemies slain and not even the promise of decent loot at the end. On top of all of that, if you leave in the middle of a quest and return later, you have to start over from the beginning. While I’m certainly grateful that this piece of DLC introduced us to Miss Mad Moxxi, the best bartender on Pandora, the sad truth is the Underdome is where fun goes to die. No respawn. Game over for fun.

The Secret Armory of General Knoxx provided more value than either of its predecessors. This DLC extended the story of Atlas’ second failed venture and the fallout that accompanied it, basically picking up right after Commandant Steele’s unexpected demise. During our time driving back and forth down the overly long highway of doom, we learned the humiliating tale of General Knoxx’s fall from grace and descent into manic depression. A highly decorated officer of the highest caliber, easily one of Atlas’ finest soldiers, forced to fight an impossible war while hamstrung by nepotism and corporate politics. Once literal children were being promoted above him, the General completely ran out of fucks to give and started running the pacification of Pandora his way—with extreme force. But this miserable rock and all the freaks and weirdos on it refused to bend beneath the General’s oppression. The locals were thoroughly unimpressed with his despot act. The one fruit that grows in abundance from the sands of Pandora is tyrants, and they always end up cut down in one way or another. It’s never a good idea to pick a fight with an entire planet of crazy people with sharp objects, but many corporations would repeat this mistake over and over with puzzling accuracy. The Atlas Corporation already failed once and is trying again without changing anything about their approach or procedures. Unlike his employers, Knoxx eventually learned, but he foolishly insisted on doing it all the hard way.

By the time we reach his boss fight chamber, the General is completely over all of it. He’s one button away from vaporizing himself in a spectacular display of fireworks and lasers. But since we’re already here with all our guns and shit, Knoxx decides it would be preferable to fall in battle rather than by his own hand. We obliged him with every last bullet in our possession. He died with a smile on his face, no doubt relieved to finally be departing from Pandora.

And then we had to deal with Claptrap’s robot uprising! We made the grave error of underestimating the threat posed by these silly little robots. What was this “Interplanetary Ninja Assassin Claptrap” going to do? Close doors on us?

As is often the case, things were much worse than we thought. In their unceasing quest for ever greater profit, the Hyperion Corporation had manufactured an army that was ready and waiting for a reason to go to war. While melting hordes of annoying bots is a great deal of fun, things were quickly getting out of hand. The Claptraps started reproducing and upgrading themselves at a geometric rate, until they started fully assimilating animals, people, soldiers—even dead boss characters get exhumed for one last gauntlet. At least Commandant Steele finally got herself a real boss battle. Without exaggeration, those dopey little robots were just a few days shy of conquering the whole planet. If the revolution had spread beyond Pandora, well… “catastrophic” would be an understatement. Fortunately, after we poured a few boxes of bullets into it, INAC crashed like a dope fiend with an empty bag. The Interplanetary Ninja Assassin Claptrap responsible for all this was sentenced to forced obsolescence, tossed into the junkyard of history, never to return.

Just when we thought it was time to roll credits on this adventure and drink to our victory, the local bounty board receives a new job with the headline “You. Will. Die.” Which certainly sounds promising. Looks like they were having a serious pest control problem way down in the Deep Fathoms, so we loaded up with all of our best gear and went off to bag us a raid boss. Unfortunately, we quickly learned that Crawmerax the Invincible wasn’t just a cool nickname. This colossal crustacean had a shell that was utterly impervious to any weapon you could find on Pandora. Lucky for us, Crawmerax had a few brightly glowing weak points where he could be hurt. We also discovered a ledge within the boss lair that put us entirely out of his range while allowing us to take potshots from safety. It would almost feel like cheating if we weren’t using this strategy against a literal giant monster. After we’ve finally changed his name to Crawmerax the Vincible, we are rewarded with an insane amount of loot of all kinds: money, weapons, XP. It’s just too bad that it’s all completely useless now that we’ve killed the most powerful thing in the entire game.

Now that we’ve finally run out of things to shoot at, it’s time to depart. As Pandora recedes into the rearview mirror, I find myself reflecting on my strange adventure. Playing through this 15 year old title wasn’t nearly as much of a chore as I had expected. While it certainly could benefit from some improvements (like more fast travel points and a comprehensive map) it is still packed with hours of playable fun. No wonder I and millions of other fans can’t keep ourselves from returning to the Borderlands time and again, just to see if there’s anybody different to shoot or if there’s anything new to shoot them with. Spoiler: there always is!

But for now, our long treasure hunt is at an end. Time to go home, lick our wounds, and count our loot. When Pandora beckons once again, we will be ready and eager to answer.