Lego Voyagers is great. I heard it was three or so hours total, but I clocked in at just about five. Some of the coolest parts of it were not "gameplay" but just being there in the world. It's very impressionistic; there are actual lego pieces that look like scorpions, or fish, but Light Brick would rather evoke them with even simpler shapes. It also made my computer run so hot that it shut completely off and wouldn't turn back on. And that made me think about Borderlands.
Voyagers is a game where the simplest, most primordial shapes make up a very tiny gameworld. I haven't heard anything in the review apparatus or from the community about technical issues, but then I suspect fewer people bought Voyagers than Borderlands. I have, of course, read about performance issues on PC for Borderlands, but everything in my machine is about five years old and it seems to be running fine. I had roasted some beans for my Writer Friend Sam, and when he came by to pick it up he said it wasn't running right on his Forty fucking Ninety.
First of all, it's like… Hey, Big Spender. Spend a little time with me.
Second, that's way, way more card than I have. Which makes me think that something is just fucky deep down, but if it plays good enough on my machine to find the game they made and invest something like twenty one blissful hours so far, it stands to reason that dutiful labors on the part of Gearbox should at least get him where I'm at. There's work to do. I don't know how else to say it. But it doesn't fall to us.
This intro, though. Dear God. I think this is something even the most cosplay'd stalwart of the franchise can agree with: that this intro feels like it's from some other, unrelated game.
From a performance perspective, the gray angles of the first part of the game aren't just uninteresting - by far it's one of the worst performing yet also boring areas I've been to, and it does nothing to sell the promise of the game that comes after it.
Talking with a developer friend last week, the way he put it is that your intro is either made too early and thus becomes unrepresentative of the game it's spearheading, or it gets made too late and you don't have time to polish. Is it possible for a game to do… both? The loot table is so squat and miserly that you're picking up duplicates right from the jump. You're fighting the enemy in its home - it should be like a candy shootout in Willy Wonka's factory. You should be getting guns that fire other guns, rainbow sparks should be shooting out of your dickhole. It's the biggest launch ever for Borderlands, which in the best case means brand new players finally dragged over into customers - but there's no help for that player when it comes to actually parsing how to read a piece of loot, there's no real welcome for them at all.
An awesome game is right there for you after you escape this part - but I think the game would have been better if you literally just woke up on a beach. It was good enough for Larian, and they seem to be doing pretty okay.
Clock is ticking on the PAX West Garb and other Sacred Raiments:
(CW)TB out.
