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Earlier I wrote about the perils of adult life in regards of video games and the apparent sense of guilt of spending time playing them. I have now succesfully -- depending on the perspective, I suppose -- managed to relax enough to to lose the track of time while gaming, which was refreshing. Certain things had to move forward before I could start playing Borderlands, but last weekend I started a campaign with a buddy. My friend lives in the Netherlands and games have always been our preferred way of spending time together, yet there hasn't been anything in a while that we have been playing so I'm very happy to jump into Borderlands now.
Gearbox Software's Borderlands, the first installation in the series, just recently celebrated its 9th anniversary on the 20th of October. I remember when it came out I was mildly curious about it but that was when I felt claustrophobia when playing FPS's -- and that feeling persisted for a long time -- so I passed it by. For years my only source of what Borderlands was about has been this comic.
Can't go wrong though. But for nine years this comic was the only thing what I knew of the game(s), up until playing Battleborn in 2016, also from Gearbox, which was my first proper touch to an FPS as well as a touch to a game made by the studio. Long story short, it became my favorite game, making me forget my dislike for FPS's among several other positive effects. (I'm aware of the unfortunate stigma on Battleborn, but if you know it too, I hope you will not judge it too harshly solely based on that.)
Point is, a lot of people that I played Battleborn with said they had picked it up because it was a Gearbox game. I, not having any prior knowledge of their games, was just enjoying Battleborn for what it was and exploring a new territory. However, I grew fond of Gearbox's style of humor and the way their game was constructed, so I grew curious of Borderlands. Eventually I bought a bundle containing the three games of the main series -- Borderlands, Borderlands 2, and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.
With a few hours in the first game under my belt I saw a lot of similarities between Borderlands and Battleborn, two games that were released 7 years apart from each other, similarities that can only be described as Gearbox's particular style. The first thing I noticed was how much the UI elements were alike, right from the start up screen. In gameplay the HUD elements were slightly in different places on the screen but essentially being the same.
So I thought how strange it was to be familiar with everything else except the story only through UI design. It was like meeting a friend whose face you know so well but just can't for some reason remember anything about them.
That being said, the age on the game shows. The menus are clunky and a bit cumbersome to use, and were missing a setting that I personally would have appreciated; the FOV slider, but I suppose it wasn't very trendy in 2009. My favorite thing, however, is the awkward way the quest objectives are displayed on the HUD which I assume was just coding limitations and having to work around that (which makes it doubly hilarious).
This extends to the quest displays, creating strange but golden examples.
Quest: Meet T.K. Baha
Questlog: T.K. Baha met zero out of one
I can't believe they let this lack of grammar and common sense to pass. Maybe it's safe to assume this was fixed in later Borderlands games, because at least in Battleborn my brain didn't collapse on itself trying to deal with the grammar.
The HUD elements and menus were done very intuitively in Battleborn so I was happy to see the style was consistent across Gearbox's other games. There's few things worse than god awful UI design in games, which is a whole another topic in itself. If the screen is crowded and/or the menus confusing, or maybe even malfunctioning, there's little enjoyment to be had in that game.
While I don't have any examples of particularly horrendous UI designs in games in mind (although I do find myself annoyed by a lot of the design choices in the games I play) there's one that I just can't, even 14 years later, stop laughing about.
The amazing, Windows-esque design of the menu screens in Fable (2004). Granted, the game was published by Microsoft Game Studios but...
C'mon, guys. This isn't the type of familiarity you would want to implement 😂
