Burgers and Killavolt – Borderlands 3 S01E07 – First Playthrough
Another odd session this one. We just carried out two side missions, but the second one turned in to a bit of an odyssey!
After getting good old Lorelei a burger, Moxxi wanted us to kill Killavolt. This involved us first of all tracking down some tokens and batteries, but had the added benefit of a lot of fun combat along the way.
JBG and I are still finding our way with Borderlands 3’s weapons to some extent, meaning we are often taking on bad guys equipped with sub-optimal weapons. That said, as usual the combat is great fun, and in particular the level design of this mission was worthy of note.
Sadly it all had to end with a fairly typically frustrating boss battle against Killavolt himself. We managed to slog through this without dying though, which is always a positive!
Gigamind and Coffee – Borderlands 3 S01E06 – First Playthrough
A pretty enjoyable session here, even though it still seems to be rather lacking in any kind of story.
We ran into our old friend Zer0 as we explored Promethea, and the mission to capture Gigamind’s brain provided some fairly tricky combat. The enemy counterattack was particularly troublesome!
Once we found Gigamind however, he was fairly straightforward to kill off. We took his brain back and handed it over to Rhys, before Lorelei announced she needed coffee, so we headed off on a fairly standard Borderlands style side mission!
Like Gigamind, defeating Core Daddy was relatively straightforward also. This time it was his cohorts that provided the main challenge. Some more random running around and killing of enemies procured Lorelei her coffee and provoked yet another battle! Returning home to Sanctuary was a bit of a relief, and next time we head to Athenas to meet up with Maya!
Taking Back Promethea – Borderlands 3 S01E05 – First Playthrough
Our first experience of a new non-Pandora planet took us to Promethea, where we had to meet up with Atlas corporation to find our way to the vault.
This led to the now fairly standard series of missions, exploring the new planet and generally killing stuff in varied and interesting ways. We at least did get our hands on a new vehicle to play with!
Nothing particularly stands out in this episode, and we don’t even complete a whole story mission to have something interesting to talk about! That said, the side missions did keep us entertained as usual.
Meeting the Twins – Borderlands 3 – S01E04 – First Playthrough
In what turned out to be (presumably) our last jaunt around Pandora, this session was another relatively bitty one.
After finding Sanctuary III, we carried out a typicaly ‘Borderlands’ mission to get the ship fuelled up and ready to leave. On our return we were met by the Calypso Twins, and we learned a little more about their powers.
Once off-planet in Sanctuary III, we were treated to a fairly obvious (and equally tedious) ‘tutorial’ style mission, which was obviously designed to help us find our way around the Sanctuary III for future reference. Sadly, all it seemed to do was confuse me on the whole!
We ended the session on Promethea, in readiness for our next mission. This wasn’t a great session sadly, the only real highlight being the firefight outside the Sanctuary III as we tried to protect Lillith. Hopefully our adventures on Promethea will make up for this in the next session!
Mouthpiece – Borderlands 3 – S01E03 – First Playthrough
Making some progress with the story in this session, and the various missions provided some more very enjoyable combat to distract us from the fact that there doesn’t seem to be much going on story-wise just yet!
We’re gradually getting to grips with our characters and also finding some decent weapons as we head through. Hopefully things will continue in the same vein in the next video!
Levelling Up – Borderlands 3 – S01E02 – First Playthrough
Another session of side missions primarily. The usual mix of ‘go here, kill this person, pick this stuff up’, followed by a rinse and repeat of the same again!
At least the combat is starting to pick up, and we’re getting to grips a bit more with the general mechanics of the game. There were some fairly fun and intense battles in this session, and I’m starting to enjoy things a little more.
We’ve now emptied our mission list of side missions for the moment, so the next video will start with us taking on a story mission, and hopefully things will start to progress a little more!
Foot in the Door – Borderlands 3 – S01E01 – First Playthrough
When we read the announcement of Borderland’s 3 being released on Steam, JBG and I both pre-ordered in readiness to finally get our hands on it. Sadly, the day before we were due to record our first session, Virgin Media decided to upgrade the firmware in by Super Hub, and promptly added huge latency issues to my previously stable connection!
Fast-forward several weeks later, and we finally got thing stable enough to start playing through together. As expected the first hour or so of the game re-introduces all the various gameplay elements, leading to a slightly frustrating experience.
By the end of this video, we’d met up with Claptrap, Vaughn, Marcus and Lillith, before setting up camp and doing various ‘busy-work’ missions to keep our companions happy. Despite being a bit slow, all the familiar Borderlands elements seem to be present, together with some new game mechanics and skills trees to get our heads around.
Hopefully things will start to ramp up as we continue our playthrough. I’m sure the long wait will turn out to be well worth it after all!
Poisoning Turkeys – Borderlands 2 S06E02 – Headhunter 2
Playing as the familiar Mechromancer at least meant I wasn’t all at sea at the start of this video. The opening sequences provided some fairly intense combat, and again it took both JBG and I a little while to find our feet and stop dropping into Fight for Life mode.
Sadly the ‘story’ didn’t really develop, and once we headed outside things started to go a little downhill. The final confrontation with the giant turkey was almost laughable, but once we realised what we had to do (slag the turkey!) we started to make some progress.
However, once the turkey was dead, things really took a turn for the worse. I’m sure someone thought it was amusing to listen to Torgue’s grannie’s story for minutes, but it really didn’t do it for me. Plus the fact that when JBG inadvertently went too far from grannie she started the whole story over again. Ah well. I don’t think we even completed the second of her ‘story’ missions.
Torgue’s Headhunter DLC started kinda well despite the premise of first poisoning then killing a giant unkillable turkey for prime time TV entertainment. There were initially a bunch of bad guys inside Torgue kitchens that were pretty tough, which was briefly fun.
The theme of these headhunter missions is to play a character we’re not playing in the main game and to start with only one weapon. Ahead of the first headhunter, I’d only briefly played as Axton. For this headhunter, I played as Zero who I’ve got a lot of history with. I like to max the killing blow melee skill and mix it with a high powered shotgun, one blast and a swish of my blade would take out most, except here I didn’t have a shotgun.
The gameplay stepped up visually as we got outside but stepped down the fun with the introduction of the annoying flying bugs and then the turkey itself. It took us a while despite a number of slag references and being given a slag gun as part of the mission, to realise we needed to slag the turkey (there might be a joke in there). Once we twigged the need for slag it was just another boss, lots of running around avoiding deadly barrages while shooting back from cover. After the turkey, we got the grannie conversation. I guess someone at Gearbox thinks they’re funny.
From a technical aspect, the only real issue was the appalling quality of my mic audio. I was using the Bluetooth headset that crashed out mid-game a few weeks ago but otherwise has performed admirably through over 40 gameplay videos, except I had noise cancelling turned on by mistake, which overlaid my voice with a robotic compression effect, which is difficult when your default voice sounds a little robotic in the first place.
Otherwise apart from editing out an eternity of the grannie chat and a small audio sync discrepancy, there wasn’t much to fret about.
Exploring Hallowed Hollow – Borderlands 2 S06E01 – Headhunter 1
I’d never played through the Headhunter content before, somehow missing them in my single player escapades. JBG came up with a couple of interesting twists to spice things up: starting afresh with a new character, and limiting ourselves to a single weapon.
The gameplay was relatively uninspiring, but given the original $2.99 price tag I guess you can’t really expect too much. We were given an interesting mix of bad guys to fight off, and our level 30 characters ran into a bit of trouble a couple of times.
We had a few technical issues during the recording of this video (not least JBG managing to turn off recording when he meant to mute his microphone!) but I think the edit actually comes out pretty well. We plan to continue with some of the other Headhunter missions in the future, so we’ll see how they go.
When AD asked me at the end of this video what I thought of the gameplay my immediate answer was rubbish; I’m never going to rate shooting pumpkins as a pleasurable pastime. The game restrictions we forced on ourselves were interesting entertainment though, especially as it was the first time we’d done something beyond straight gameplay.
For a start we played as each other’s Avatar, in that I was using a level 30 Axton and AD was using a level 30 Siren. On top of that, we had to allocate skill points and only carry one gun going into the level.
So, while I didn’t enjoy the gameplay and we DIED (once – a fire breathing flying pumpkin got us), it is actually quite entertaining to watch.
On the technical front, this was the first video we used OBS to record webcam. As ever we messed it up royally by only specifying 2.5Mbs data rate for the 720P video, which means our greenscreens had a lot of compression artefacts in the background. For once AD’s looked better than mine after it was chroma keyed.
We live and learn. We have since tested 720P @5Mbs and the chroma key works well. You’ll see that in the next headhunter video.
For now, have fun.