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Murderlin’s Temple – Borderlands 2 S05E04 – Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep – True Vault Hunter Mode

I don’t really have much to say about this video, as I seemed to spend most of it locked behind a grate trying to futilely assist JBG as he bravely fought all manner of magic creatures alone.

The slaughter missions seem to be very ‘marmite’ moments, in that they’re either incredible fun, or just more hassle than they’re worth. Sadly, this one seemed to fall into the latter category.

All manner of high level enemies was bad enough, but that coupled with numerous floor traps, flames and a precipice all around the level that meant instant death meant that staying alive in these missions was a real feat of achievement. One which I summarily failed to achieve.

I doubt I’ll be back, sorry Murderlin.

My overriding memory of this video has little to do with the gameplay and everything to do with the slog it was to bring together as a functioning video.

We’d been using facecam for a while and noticed some issues with lipsync for videos over an hour. This video was the first time we really started to get to grips with it.

We discovered MS Camera was recording at a much lower framerate than it reported. All our gameplay is recorded 30fps @48000Khz The camera was recording 14fps @44100Khz.

The short term solution was to eventually transcode the source webcam from 14fps to 30fps and then use that in Premiere Pro. They lipsync drift was solved at the cost of 3hrs additional transcoding before we ever got to start editing the video. We immediately started seeking a quicker solution.

The answer was OBS (Open Broadcast Software) which takes the webcam footage and codes it on the fly to our required 30fps @48000Khz. It wasn’t perfect by any measure, in fact, it was a step back in the quality of the captured chroma key background, but that’s a story for another day.

In the meantime, my memory of the gameplay itself was that I kicked arse once I realised running around the level was a bad idea and holding our ground was the way forward. My high powered, movement limiting shield helped a lot.

 

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An Emotional Conclusion – Borderlands 2 S05E03 – Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep – True Vault Hunter Mode

When we started this video, we assumed we’d get the final mission wrapped up, and maybe even have time to take in one of the side missions. How wrong we were!

This turned into one of our longer videos, despite cutting out a fair portion in the middle where we found ourselves wandering around the dungeons trying to find our way out!

Tina threw the kitchen sink at us in terms of combat, and we barely had time to draw breath as we fought our way to the top of the tower to take on the Handsome Sorceror in the final battle of this story. The identity of the queen had JBG guessing right up until the end, and led to a real laugh out loud moment when she was revealed.

A very strong ending to this DLC, and one which almost made me weep the first time I played it through.

JBG touches on some of the technical challenges faced in the production and editing of this video, and I need to offer an apology for the annoying level of keyboard and mouse sound on my side. I experimented with using the microphone on my webcam for this video, not realising that it picked up much more of the clicking of keyboard and mouse. Lesson learned!

You could not accuse the developers of the Tina DLC of cutting corners for the finale. It was non-stop for nigh on 90 minutes, with wave after wave of opponents to the very top of the tall tower and the face-off with multiple incarnations of the Handsome Jack bad guy wizard. It’s full-on.

The ending is both poignant and hilarious and is worth the battle to experience it, especially if you liked the characters and story narrative of the main game play-through.

Technically this video was the first time we realised the audio sync on the webcams was drifting when tied with the gameplay. Or the webcam video was drifting from the audio. You can see it on both our videos but more noticeably on AD’s.

The drift turned out to be Microsoft’s Camera application recording at some odd FPS well below the 30fps it reported it was recording. The framerate meant the audio drifted noticeably from 1hr+ when synched with actual 30fps video.

Most issues we can resolve during the edit, sometimes we can’t as was the case here. We apologise for the lack of lipsync at the end of this video.
The short term solution will be to transcode the webcam footage including the audio to 30fps before editing, but that’s a time sink in itself.

Going forward, we will need to find an alternative to MS Camera.

 

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Befriending Dwarves – Borderlands 2 S05E02 – Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep – True Vault Hunter Mode

Tiny Tina’s DLC continues to offer up some great combat, although a few of the supposedly humorous parts of this campaign fell a little flat for us. Having to repeatedly die attempting an impossible puzzle, only for the ‘joke’ to be revealed wasn’t particularly fun.

That said, the rest of this episode was really enjoyable, offering up lots of varied combat against a good mixture of enemies of different levels.

I’m particularly pleased with the way these videos are turning out now. The newly-added facecams add a new dimension, and if anything are forcing us to be a bit more descriptive and communicative, knowing otherwise the bottom third of the video is taken up by two relatively static images of us starting slack-jawed out our monitors!

My recollection is that this DLC finishes really strongly, so I’m looking forward to continuing the series.

The second hour of our Tiny Tina adventure was great fun if you ignore the puzzle that only reveals it’s impossible to solve after you’ve killed yourself several times trying to solve it. That sort of game mechanic annoys the shit out of me.

The rest is of good quality and great fun. The setting is medieval with a dungeons and dragons flavour, and taking on bows and arrows with SMG’s and shotguns does sometimes feel a little unfair but…

On the technical front, we are starting to hit our stride now with the facecam. One of the rules we imposed on ourselves when we created the channel was that bringing the separate video feeds together as the final product should not become an industry in itself. Of course, it has been a learning curve. The goal has been to spend no more than an hour putting together each video. The first videos took three hours, but once the process was in the bag I got it down to 30 minutes, and then we introduced something else, that took it back to three hours, and then process and practice brought it sub 60 minutes again.

One of the biggest technical challenges at the beginning was synchronising two videos onto one screen. Synchronising the videos involved a lot of frame counting, subtracting frame counts, shifting timelines back and forth until I discovered you could select both sequences in Premiere Pro, right-click and select synchronise!

All hail synchronise. It doesn’t do it precisely every time; usually, it’s a couple of frames out. But adjusting those last few frames is a few minutes over the frustrating 20 minutes it was.

Hopefully, we’ll get to share more insight into the technical aspects of GreyOps over the coming weeks.

Have fun, see you soon.

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Tina in Denial – Borderlands 2 S05E01 – Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep – True Vault Hunter Mode

Tiny Tina’s DLC is a bit of a departure from the normal Borderlands fare. Instead of taking on the usual opponents, this DLC sees us fighting Orcs, trees, knights and various other fantastical creatures. Doing it with sniper rifles and rocket launchers does seem a little out of place however!

As seems fairly standard with the add-on content, the early levels are a little weak, but this DLC soon gets into its stride giving us some decent bouts of combat. Tina quickly tugs at our heart strings, seemingly unable to accept that Roland is dead. This theme continues throughout the DLC, and I remember the ending being particularly poignant.

This video also continues the evolution of our video presentation, and now sees JBG and I appearing in the videos in full HD glory, allowing you the dubious pleasure of watching us as we commentate on our various escapades.

I’m looking forward to continuing this DLC, as my recollection is that it builds to a very strong conclusion.

My first impressions of Tiny Tina’ DLC were not positive. Skeletons are one thing, but shooting walking trees are another. I’m glad we were committed to playing the DLC though because it gets a lot better once you are past the first orc village.

Throughout the campaign, there is a good blend of opponents ranging from skeletons, knights, archers, sorcerers and orcs. Throw in a dragon or two too.

Tina’s DLC has an excellent narrative on loss as well. It is very powerful, starting with the introduction of a story favourite at the end of this first episode.

If you have been watching our videos for a while (and who wouldn’t) you will notice a few changes in the layout; for a start, you can now see our faces. In just a few weeks, we have gone from having a twirling avatar beneath each of our screens to a gnarly face overlaid on the background and video.

Creating that sort of video overlay with a transparent background takes a certain level of technology; namely a greenscreen. Once we decided we were going to have our faces and then saw that we each either had a wardrobe in the background or a bookcase, it wasn’t a great leap to decide greenscreen was the future. We both bought the same fold-out green screen, which is excellent but HUUGE! Also folding it back up is an art form in itself.

Greenscreen is a challenge in every video because the screen must be well and evenly lit to remove it from the video. Currently, AD and I use bright off the shelf ceiling bulbs. If you see any static in the background or the transparent background isn’t entirely transparent, it is because we’re recording in the spare room and not in a studio. We have found recording the facecam at 1080P with a high resolution does result in a lot less static.

There have been challenges at every step creating these videos and still are, it’s one of the reasons they’re worth making. As we go forward, we’ll be discussing them and the solutions in greater detail. If you want videos demonstrating the process, let us know in the video comments.

For now, have fun. See you in the next one.

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Natural Selection Annex – Borderlands 2 S03E11 – True Vault Hunter Mode

After taking on two slaughter missions in the previous videos, we thought we’d round off the series by taking on the Creatures in the Natural Selection Annex.

This turned out to be a much bigger challenge that we though, as even in the second round we were facing Ultimate Badass level opponents in a very open arena with little cover.

After the first failure in Round 2, we probably should have taken some time to discuss tactics. The relatively open arena gave little opportunity to take cover, but we probably should have made more of an effort to do this. Ultimately I was perhaps a little gung-ho in my attitude, leading to my dropping in to ‘Fight for Life’ out in the open areas of the arena.

The jump in level between this and the last slaughter mission was somewhat of a surprise though, perhaps it’s a mission series we can come back to in the future, with a more systematic and tactical approach.

Wildlife Preservation Slaughterhouse. It’s probably not called that, now I recall it might be the Wildlife Annexe.

Regardless, there is one word of advice I can offer you if you’re in co-op playing this in True Vault Hunter, which is if your buddy gets caught in the middle of the arena fighting for their life, you will have a hard decision to make, which is to revive them and risk the very high chance of dying yourself or to just let them die.

In my opinion, if anyone is stupid enough to get caught out in the middle with no cover in fight for life, they deserve to die. Only revive them if surviving rates above 90% and then give them shit if they bitch about the lack of team play.

I’m not sure I would actually have survived this slaughterhouse in TVM playing solo, as I’ve mentioned numerous times killing anything that isn’t bipedal isn’t my thing, I certainly struggled against those ultimate insects, but you ain’t never going to do it with your arse exposed out in the open.

Nuff said.

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Ore Chasm – Borderlands 2 S03E10 – True Vault Hunter Mode

After visiting Fink’s slaughterhouse, it only seemed fair to take a trip to Ore Chasm and visit with Innuendobot 5000. While we were there he had some fun in store for us, heading down the lift to battle wave after wave of Hyperion soldiers and robots.

We’d visited here after completing the main campaign in ‘normal’ mode, and it had been pretty challenging back then. Now we were True Vault Hunters we expected things to ramp up somewhat!

We weren’t to be disappointed, although slightly surprisingly we made it all the way to the fifth and final level before dying. A lot! We’d get to a similar point only to find ourselves surrounded by Badass and Super Badass bots, and the rest, as they say, is history.

A bit of strategic thinking saw us finally realising that we should take cover instead of barelling into the middle of them all, with all guns blazing. It was very satisfying to finally beat the final wave, hopefully that comes across in the video!

Ore Chasm, I think it is called. It is the most challenging of the slaughterhouse missions we have so far completed if a challenge can be measured as a good mix of fun and gameplay.

Of course, co-op and true vault hunter make it a little more of a challenge.

If I remember correctly, which I’m prone not to when my daring exploits are recalled, we died a few times at the beginning of the video. I edited those down to the death highlights because who wants to watch extended gameplay where someone dies, it’s like watching a movie where the hero eats a rocket at the end.

Until recently I’d never completed Ore Chasm, ever. Now I’m a super badass myself I’ve completed it once in Vanilla co-op, once TVM co-op and once TVM solo. Everything is doable if you avoid:

  • Standing out in the open
  • Standing out in the open especially when the super badass flying things come into play, they dodge gunfire and are deadly powerful
  • When the super badass loaders land in-front of you and then behind you, choose one group and take them out quickly and then use their vantage to take out the other ones. Preferably start with the ones on the edge of the level which means nothing can come at you from behind.
  • When the suicide bots come for you arm yourself with a shotgun and run like fuck, jump off something high, turn fire, land run, repeat till it goes quiet

It’s a toss-up between this and Finks Slaughterhouse for favourite level but although Finks wins because you can’t beat killing bandits, this is actually more of a combat challenge. You will have to make combat choices (as above).
Great fun.

 

 

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Fink’s Slaughterhouse – Borderlands 2 S03E09 – True Vault Hunter Mode

The slaughter missions are always good fun, and playing in True Vault Hunter Mode at level 50 gave plenty of scope for taking out some high level enemies.

This was to be our first ‘real’ video with on-screen Face Cams on both JBG and I, and to be honest we probably couldn’t have picked a worse mission to do this with! For a lot of this video, expect to see both of just staring blankly into the screen, as taking on wave after wave of bad guys left little time for a running commentary!

This was a pretty challenging mission, and we both died almost simultaneously while taking on the second round of bad guys (out of a total of 5!). The remainder of the video saw us giving a much better performance however, although I did let the side down right at the end by dying in the final wave of the final round, leaving poor old JBG to fend for himself for a minute or so.

On the whole a very enjoyable mission, and hopefully we’ll both get better at providing our thoughts during future sessions!

Nobody has ever asked, but if someone ever did ask what my favourite B2 gameplay is, I’d reply ‘Roland’s Rescue’ without hesitation. The rescue is a long sequence of levels covering different environments and opponents. A mini-game in itself which importantly bonds you with Roland as a character.

But this video isn’t about that, so let’s change the question to a favourite level. To which I would immediately answer Fink’s Slaughterhouse, which isn’t so much a level but a deathmatch arena unto itself. When you’re in the arena, you have to survive to get out and if you do you can choose to go back in against tougher opponents.

The attraction is my background in deathmatch FPS gaming which dates allllll the way back to Duke Nukem 3D (it was actually 2d but there was a perspective element). Most of my deathmatch experience came with Quake 1-3 and Unreal Tournament. In those days practice was all about fighting bots. I didn’t really care much for PVP and my perspective really hasn’t much changed.

So Fink’s Slaughterhouse is my kind of fun. I could play a whole DLC based on these kinds of ‘Game of Death’ levels. It was why Torgue’s Carnage DLC boss fight was a huge disappointment for me. It actually had a deathmatch arena in the game and you never got to deathmatch in the arena save for a fixed fight at the beginning.

Anyway, Finks slaughterhouse is good. Very good.

One final point. I picked up a Tesla grenade by accident about a third of the way through this session. I’d never used one before but accidentally came across one of my now favourite gameplay styles, which is to lure baddies towards me, drop a tesla and then slag them as they run through the electric field. I just need a Tesla to now last a decent amount of time.

Have fun, catch you soon.

 

 

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A Mission for Marcus – Borderlands 2 Facecam Test – TVM

Always keen to improve our production process and add a little more to our content, we thought we’d try recording a quick test video with both of us on-screen via overlaid face cams.

We chose one of Marcus’ side missions, which took us into the Sanctuary Hole and then the Caustic Caverns to retrieve a safe.

The first thing we learned was that the side missions do seem to scale up to match our current level. There were a number of deaths for both of us at the start of this mission as we found our feet battling creatures that were a couple of levels above us.

We eventually found Marcus’ safe, and returned its prized contents to Moxxi, thinking we were protecting her honour. In the end, she decided that she was just going to publish the pictures anyway!

The face cam test was pretty successful, so expect to see us build on this in future videos.

So AD and I were in the pub, which we don’t do as often as you might think, and we were thinking about ways we could make the Grey Ops videos more interesting. For some reason, it occurred to AD that adding a live video of us while gaming might do that.

I would agree, not that we’re particularly easy on the eye but my experience as a viewer has been better when there is a person to relate to.

We did this video that night, left the pub car park, went our own ways and recorded this test. The gameplay isn’t brilliant and I got a bit grumpy I recall, but having a face beneath each video helps. I think.

Of course, things got a little out of hand in the following weeks, evolving from us windowed below the video to chroma key overlaid. You’ll have to tune into the next few blogs to hear about the pop-up greenscreen mayhem that ensued.

I hope you do.

 

 

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Borderlands 2 S04 – Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary True Vault Hunter Mode

Starting our playthrough of the Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary DLC in True Vault Hunter mode was a little bit of a disappointment.

It appears that this DLC hasn’t scaled correctly for our current level, meaning that the majority of the enemies we took on during this session were easy to take care of.

As per usual, there’s a certain amount of scene-setting at the start of this campaign, and that amounts for the majority of the content of the first video.

The initial battle in Sanctuary was fairly enjoyable but was obviously set up so as to be impossible to complete (otherwise the story would have been a little short!). From then on, we started to meet the infected enemies that will probably make up most of the content of this DLC, requiring a switch away from my corrosive sniper rifle as they were resistant to damage from it.

There was another good battle as we tried to meet up with Mordecai and his new avian companion before we headed back to our new base camp in readiness for (hopefully) starting the campaign proper. Hopefully, the challenge will increase as we get further into the story.

Meeting Tina to build a bomb in the Shooting the Moon mission was fun, and while some of the side missions we took on were a little tedious, there were some periods of enjoyable combat in the second video.

The final video had a few good sections. There were some interesting battles on our way to meet Cassius, and as we headed back to Helios again to rescue Butt Stallion.

On the whole, a fairly enjoyable DLC, only let down by the fact that its level was set around the 42 mark, and we were playing through above level 50.

We previously played Commander Lilith vanilla ahead of the B3 release and it was serviceably entertaining if laden with enough pointless side missions to make the process often border on tedious.

This time we did it in #tvm but unfortunately, the DLC didn’t scale to our level 50 characters, as such it was overly easy.

There were some highlights, the core Shooting the Moon mission was fun, and the subsequent mission to find an antidote to the DLC resolution is solid content.

What do I recall about these videos? That Vaughn is quite entertaining but an underused host to some uninspired content. It’s great to be back playing with some of our B2 favs but we also spend a fair amount of time with some we don’t care for; Ellie’s missions in B2 are some of the most tedious, as they are here, and Scooter is just Scooter. They do their best to make the content empathetic but you don’t really care.

As I’ve mentioned before I’m all in when it comes to killing bandits, robots and Hyperion soldiers but my interest wanes when killing animals and plant-life. There is, unfortunately, an excess of plant life in this DLC.

The stand-out beyond the core missions now I recall from the vanilla playthrough was some great loot, not so much this time as the loot was capped at level 40 (ish) and we were level 50

The DLC is pretty and does bridge B2 to B3. Play it if you haven’t, it’s free. If you’re above level 40, I’d only do the core story missions unless you feel compelled to wallow in the world and you love killing plant life.

If you don’t feel compelled to do it first hand then watch our videos and experience the joy vicariously.

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

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The Final Showdown – Borderlands 2 S03E08 – True Vault Hunter Mode

The road to the final confrontation with Jack and the Warrior provides for some classic Borderlands 2 combat.

Wave after wave of Hyperion soldiers and robots (some very high-powered) provide excellent opportunities for some very enjoyable sequences of death and destruction.

With some experimentation going on with weapon loadouts (primarily finding the best sniper rifle to use!) we soon cleared out everyone that had been put in our way, and headed in to the Vault of the Warrior for our final showdown with Jack and his new-found friend.

The final battle was a bit of a slog, but amazingly we both managed to make it through without a single death. I came incredibly close at one point when I found myself underneath the lava in Second Chance for a significant time, but just about managed to get a kill to revive myself.

Once the Warrior and Jack were gone, the big reveal gave us a hint as to what might be to come in Borderlands 3. So come on, get it off Epic Exclusive and on to Steam!

In the meantime, what’s next?

The final stage of the main B2 story mission comprises three stages. First, you have to fight your way through the main gates protecting the vault compound. Then you have to fight your way through several layers of security leading to the vault and then when you’re in the vault you have to kill the Warrior, which is big and mean and breathes fire.

As the first two stages are all about taking down Hyperion robots my slag sniper and the golden corrosive gun did the job nicely.

Just inside the second stage, there’s a blown-up bridge you have to jump over which for some reason I regularly fail if I’m in coop. This time was no exception. Very annoying. I think it was my only respawn.

Save for that there were some excellent moments, AD and me sniping from scaffolding as Brick tore into the robots was a highlight.

As you get nearer the vault the fighting gets tough and a fight for life is waiting around every corner. The rule of the day is don’t rush into anything.

In the actual vault having to fight Jack is a nice variation on the boss confrontation but taking down the Warrior is still about staying alive and sheer volume of damage. The only weapon that seemed to make any impact was my slag pistol, which I also used to kill the Warrior in the vanilla game.

I’m not sure if you get extra loot for letting Lilith kill Jack but it is quite a nice way to end the game.

All in all, only playing through the story missions was a great way to experience B2, especially in TVM. We were way too strong at the beginning but I’ve never been averse to a bit of demi-god mode. I’m already itching to get at it again in Ultimate Vault Hunter, which from a brief taster seems much harder.

See you there.