Borderlands is releasing next Friday. I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but I’ve got my preorder in, my weekend schedule cleared of vile people that I hate and never want to see again anyway (anyone not playing Borderlands with me, in other words), and a bottle of Jameson to keep my vocal cords in prime shouting order.
Now, I’m a sucker for co-operative multiplayer. I love the sense of enterprise, the camaraderie, the friendly fire. The trouble here, of course, is the delicate issue of resource distribution. In a game said to churn out something like 84 trillion different procedurally generated guns, that’s a whole lot of cool stuff you might not get if you’re not fast/huge/sly enough. So here’s a crib list of strategies to ensure you get all the XP and purple drops. Remember, the first person in the game to reach level cap is obviously the winner, and winning (like Gamerscore) is everything.
Winning at Borderlands is all about min maxing. This is the subtle art of creating and maintaining a character that’s more or less a person-shaped Abrams tank, by discarding dump stats and loading all your points into skills that end planets. You might feel naturally inclined, therefore, towards the berserker class in Borderlands, but that’s just an obvious decoy. You want to be the sniper, because you can kill everything else into chunks before anyone else can, because you can see four miles into the future. This also has the added benefit of tactical subterfuge – you can blag kills your teammates will never know about.
On top of this, the sniper class has some sort of pet raptor (bird raptor, not raptor raptor) that devours multiple targets at a time (because it’s still a raptor), which is also obviously way better than a rubbish deployable shield or something lame called a “Phase Walk”. Remember, teammates who are still alive are stealing your XP and loot, so any skills you’re using that protect or prolong their extorting existence are necessarily self-defeating. Besides, everyone hates paladins – all the thorns auras in the universe aren’t going to make up for being a sanctimonious, do-gooding career virgin.
Borderlands also uses a gameplay mechanic much like in Gears of War or Left 4 Dead, where players who are down but not yet dead have a last ditch chance to save themselves by shooting enemies (logically) or being hauled back to their dogs by a magnanimous comrade. Don’t be that magnanimous comrade (see: Paladins) – use this time to shove all the cash and good stuff in your pockets instead. Borderlands has a convenient comparison feature built-in (with colour coding, natch), which lets you see quickly and conclusively what’s worth picking up and what’s not. Leaving a couple of crummy items laying around also makes you look like a magnanimous comrade, especially if you can say (without laughing) that, “Hey, I found something here you might like”.
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