I'm in a poor mood right now and that is definitely colouring my outlook about this whole thing. Grr. I've also been up all night and it's now about 7am EST. There's an excellent chance that I've made horrific grammatical errors all over the place and, possibly, left out some points I wanted to make. Any future changes made to this post will be noted as such.
The tl;dr version -> glitched achievements still drive me up the wall. After recommending the game to everyone and praising the co-op, specifically, I feel bad for not noting earlier how the co-op can break achievements for some people. Many of my friends have played co-op with no adverse affect on their achievements so I want to stress that this is not a problem for 100% of the playerbase. I still have no idea why this has plagued my entire experience, through different characters and online and off. Sadly, forum crawling has shown me that I am not alone with my woes :(
I bought the first Borderlands DLC pack, The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, early on Monday in anticipation of my brother coming back to give it a go. I went into more detail about our adventures in a three part series. I realize I am going to totally come of as an achievement whore here and I’m cool with that. After I spent 20 minutes with Borderlands off the top I knew I was going to do everything within the game, every mission, use every weapon type, aaaaaaaaaaaaaand get every achievement. That was the plan, anyway.
DLC SPOILERS AHOY
I have my primary paid Live account, LadyGuardian, and the OpenAlpha one for a player two. If you look at the Borderlands achievements for each of these account, you’ll notice something odd.
He was hosting the game, which I had been told was not a problem in terms of achievements anymore, but things got a little weird. He got the 1 point for Killed Ned… sort of (Night of the Living Ned) but not the 49 for Killing Ned. Again (Ned’s Undead, Baby). I got the latter and not the former. This should be impossible. He and I were together the entire game, from playthrough 1 to the end of the DLC. The DLC was even done in a single sitting! We took a short break for dinner but only left it on pause. We are exactly the same level so it’s not like it’s a case of either of us carrying the other one through tough hauls or trying to cheat the system in any way. I don’t understand why completing the quests doesn’t trigger your achievement no matter who hosts and whether you are playing split-screen or online.
You cannot repeat quests within a playthrough in Borderlands. From playthrough 1 to 2, everything resets. From 2 to 2.5(3) only the quests you didn’t complete will still be available. Missing the Pandora-Dog Millionaire achievement with my Siren — by hitting the mark while playing online co-op with a friend — was not horribly painful since I knew I was going to play the game again with a different character. When my Hunter’s money counter got stuck around 200k no matter how much I picked up or sold, that was really trying. I did not want to go through the game a third time with a new character! I had turned off notifications before we started to avoid all the popups when my friends log in and out. I’m lucky with a large friends list but my brother does not need to see all their comings and goings. Unfortunately, this led to me missing that he got the House of the Ned and Jakobs Fodder achievements for completing the missions whereas I did not. That was my own fault for not checking sooner but the two of us just wanted to be done with the DLC as fast as possible. Our expectations may have been too high from the main game since the ‘humour’ of the writing just didn’t hit us the right way. Every Jakobs employee announcement was completely predictable and repeated much too often. I’m a fan of dry and absurd humour but the charm quickly vanishes when being beaten over the head with it. I do want to take a second to praise the island intro. Marcus is a fun character/guide and Bruce DuBose did an excellent job bringing out his personality with great tone and delivery.
I always looked forward to new ECHO recorders throughout the game since the delivery was often as strong as, if not better than, the writing. Even with that plus working well for the game, a problem that we had noticed in the main campaign became even more annoying in the DLC. Within Jakobs Cove the ammo and merchant vending machines are in close proximity to the local Claptrap and bounty board. This is not a slight against the level designers. Hard to complain about the convenience of having everything within a few steps of each other! But we lost count of how many times all of these vocals would overlap one another and then the Jakobs’ employee announcements only added to the cacophony. Subtitles are important to me. I am still stunned that Assassin’s Creed (the first one), the other game I am presently playing, does not even have the option for them! Borderlands give me the choice and I thank them for it. Subtitles are rarely timed perfectly but here they do a solid job and, as another bonus, they actually match up with what is being said! This is often a rare thing. Go ahead and put on English subtitles when you watch a DVD next time and lol at the changes. If you speak another language there is often extra hilarity to be found when you know what they are saying in French or Japanese and what it ends up coming out as in English. Good times. Bad times start when the subtitles being shown are the least important part of the four people talking to you at once. I think Claptraps are great. My brother wants them in itty bitty pieces scattered across the universe, not just Pandora. He was not thrilled that he missed the local claptrap getting schooled with all the other noises going on. Why not mute the unimportant vendor and town noises when a story bit is going on? When thinking back to the original beginning in Fyrestone I realized that this vocal crossover was near impossible off the top since there were no machines nearby. Hopefully this will be addressed in a sequel. We had some vocal collisions during some ECHO playbacks but the subtitles thankfully stuck with the recorder in those instances.
Now it’s time for more achievement griping: A whole list of the game and DLC achievements can be seen here and it’s the one called Braaaaaaaaaaaaains! that has caused me such heartache. The quest line, Brains, leads to this achievement and is not something that can be quickly banged out. My brother and I planned carefully to headshot zombies as much as possible… when we weren’t too busy setting them on fire or making them explode. Standard operating procedure, you understand. These headshots bring out zombie brains (zombies have brains?) that you need to collect for the quests. We went through just about the whole island never picking up a brain so that we could get the quest and just run around collecting them off the floor when we needed them. Oh, what a difference that makes in terms of speed! We grabbed our 10, then the 25, the next 50, now another 100 and, finally, 250 more to polish off the line. We were now aware of the achievement discrepancy and thought that we might have better luck if we turn this in as single players. Ding! He gets the achievement, I do not. I am pissed and say so on twitter. Much to my surprise two Gearbox devs respond! I’d also like to publicly state I promise not to kick any Gearbox people in the head, even if they ask me to. Perhaps I’ll just glare at the QA team instead ;)
I still don’t know the best way around this. Do I go through the whole DLC with my Siren? That should trigger House of the Ned and Jakobs Fodder. It wouldn’t kill me to play on to ‘kill’ Ned the first time for the 1 point. It’s the brains that give me pause. You can’t just jump ahead to the final step. I’ll have to collect all of those brains again and run them back and forth. As much as I enjoyed seeing some new greens on Pandora I’m not excited about traipsing through the island again. My brother and I want to get to playthrough 2 and try to find better gear and pwn some Crimson Lance. There are no guarantees that a second go here will fix the achievements and I didn’t enjoy the DLC that much the first time around, even with my brother’s wit mocking my play the whole way through. I’d like to point out that I didn’t get us blown up. Not even once! Well, almost once. I’m still me :)
{ 1 comment }
Damn that sucks :( to bad to seen how they fucked this up.
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