TA Playlist Wrap-Up — Borderlands

To honor the end of Games With Gold, September's TA Playlist featured one of the highest rated GWG titles, Borderlands! Check out all the stats and community feedback for this classic.

The TA Playlist Team

Published 27 Oct 2023

There was a legend… Many people tell it. The legend of the Vault.

September saw the end of an era as the Xbox Live Gold subscription was officially changed to Xbox Game Pass Core, with a curated selection of Game Pass games on offer instead of the monthly free games from the Games With Gold program.

More than 400 games were given away through Games With Gold between June 2013 and August 31, 2023 (maybe up to 450, including all the various regional substitutions in various months), and while there’s no arguing that the games offered in the last year or so were… well, let’s just say, not quite as 'high profile' as they were in the past, there were still a great many excellent games given away to Xbox Live Gold subscribers over the past decade.

For the September TA Playlist poll, we took the List of Games With Gold games, sorted it by TA User rating, and offered up four of the highest-rated titles that hadn’t yet been featured in our monthly gaming discussion club. Portal 2, Assassin's Creed II, and Resident Evil each received hundreds of votes, but the winner, with 28.43% of the vote, was Borderlands.

We’ve looked at a lot of big games over the years on the TA Playlist, but very few that were bigger or more influential than Borderlands. Published in 2009 by 2K Games, Borderlands was an attempt by developer Gearbox Software to offer up something different from the standard first-person shooters prevalent at the time. The studio’s co-founder and CEO Randy Pitchford described it as “Halo meets Diablo,” taking FPS mechanics and adding in RPG elements to launch what would become known as the “looter-shooter” subgenre.

DeaDLy HuNTsMaN said:

I was blown away when I first played this game! Got me addicted to the game and franchise instantly.

GrimaceTheGrey said:

Classic game that initially sort of came out of nowhere. Anyone who hasn't played this one yet is in for a treat!

“But what is a looter shooter?” you might ask (if you’ve just woken up from a 15-year coma). Well, Gearbox’s previous work had focused largely on the FPS genre, porting Halo: Combat Evolved to PC and then working on their own World War II shooter, Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, and its sequels. The gameplay loop in those sorts of games was focused on very short-term goals: enter an area, clear out enemies, move on to the next area, etc.

Pitchford was also a fan of role-playing games like Ultima and Diablo and roguelikes such as NetHack, where the core gameplay loop is focused on a longer timescale. While there are immediate quests and short-term objectives, the “goal” in RPGs is to level up characters and equipment to become more powerful over the full course of the game. Believing that these were two great tastes that would taste great together, they went about creating a solid FPS experience sprinkled with RPG elements like skill trees, open-world quests, and of course, “loot coming out of every orifice,” as Gearbox’s creative director Mikey Neumann put it in a 2010 interview with Gamespot.

Borderlands takes place on a planet called Pandora, a harsh wasteland inhabited by dangerous wildlife and even more dangerous people. Human corporations had set up mining operations on the planet in the past, using convicts and mental patients as cheap labor, but abandoned the planet (and the workers) after finding the environment too inhospitable to be profitable.

There is one thing still of interest on Pandora, however… the almost mythical Vault, which, according to legend, contains riches and power beyond imagination. Four Vault Hunters have arrived on Pandora in search of the fabled treasure, each with their own skills and abilities. Brick is a Berserker with a powerful rage attack, Lilith is a Siren who can phasewalk past enemies, Roland is a Soldier who can spawn a turret to assist in battle, and Mordecai is a Hunter with a robotic flying companion called Bloodwing, who can swoop in to damage enemies.

II Loadsman said:

One thing that astounds me is how people treat the vault hunters themselves - to begin with there's really no character or personality to them, each one gets their intro video and then has 10-20 voice lines that you hear repeated constantly, there's almost no real interaction between the players and the NPCs but they are so beloved they get fully fleshed out and play a central role in the story of the second game.

Already, the RPG vibes are strong, as these four characters bear a striking resemblance to the standard four-person Fighter/Wizard/Cleric/Rogue party. Each character has their own skill tree to advance through gaining XP, and I asked people to drop a post in the forums about which Vault Hunter was their favorite, with Lilith getting the most mentions:
Allgorhythm said:

Lilith followed by Mordecai because I like rogue-type assassins, preferably with stealth skills.

Spa1h said:

Clearly Lilith, because she is the fastest.

HappyTheDevil said:

Lilith was the only character I truly enjoyed playing in the series. The insane speed she had ruined every character afterward.

snake42069 said:

I think in my very first run-through, I played as Brick, but switched to Roland when i accidentally deleted all my saves (was trying to transfer to cloud when it came out). In the GOTY edition, I started a Roland again.

xuxicroptop said:

I much prefer in a group (not the best at shooters, lol), and I prefer Hunter. Have to give it to Borderlands; I struggle with a lot of shooters due to the havoc on screen - processing issues make reacting quickly to it all a nightmare - but the Hunter is great to hang back, process, and handle it all without getting overloaded. Also, it's a very good sniping role; not many games give their Snipers great movement or ammo retention and co. It's the most fun I've had playing long-distance support for a group.

I highlighted that last sentence in the above comment because it echoes a sentiment that came up over and over again in this month’s forums. While each character brings a unique set of skills to the game, and it’s certainly possible to play through Borderlands solo as any of the Vault Hunters, pretty much everyone agrees that the best experience comes from gathering up a friend or two and tackling the game in co-op.
Spa1h said:

The game is really okay in solo, but the full potential is only reached in coop with friends. That's the way I got to know and got to like it.

Clutch Rino said:

I remember first playing this game and never got into it. Never understood the hype. I wanted to like it. Didn’t touch it for over a year and had an old co-worker who played it and said he would play it with me and then fell in love with the game. Playing it in coop makes me like the game. Loved the humor, and the story was great. Dlc too

AbyssalOrc33 said:

IMO, playing with others is a lot more fun than playing any of the Borderlands games by yourself. Some of the enemies (and bosses) are kind of rough by yourself, and if you have someone nearby, at least you have a chance to be revived.

It is important to get the right group together, though…
SilentExiledOne said:

This game is a lot more fun when played with friends until you realize they aren't as interested in achievement hunting as you, and you have to do the rest alone because you're too tight to buy games when they are first released. Thank god for TrueAchievements and gaming sessions.

Whether you’re playing solo or in a group, your Vault Hunter’s mission is the same. A mysterious vision from a woman known as the “Guardian Angel” directs you to the town of Fyrestone, where you’re welcomed by a quirky little robot called Claptrap before the town is suddenly overrun by bandits.

After dispatching the immediate threat, Fyrestone’s town physician, Dr. Zed, tasks you with helping nearby residents with their problems as well as clearing out nearby strongholds. You’ll exterminate dangerous animals like skags and rakks, and blast your way through hordes of midgets and psychos, taking down bosses and eventually leading you to a showdown with the bandit king, Sledge, who possesses a mysterious shard that turns out to be a fragment of the Vault Key.

Afterward, the Vault Hunters are contacted by Patricia Tannis, an archaeologist formerly employed by the Dahl Corporation, to ask for their help in collecting the remaining Vault Key fragments. Tannis has gone just a little bit insane in her time on Pandora, but her information is valuable if you want to find the rest of the fragments and open the Vault, an event that can only occur every 200 years. Unfortunately, a military group called the Crimson Lance, led by Commandant Steele, also wants to claim the Key on behalf of the Atlas Corporation, leaving the Vault Hunters caught between these two factions.

The story missions and side quests all feed back into the idea of making the player feel rewarded by taking on enemies and collecting loot, and that’s by design. In a 2017 interview with Glixel.com, Pitchford explained that the plotline was developed specifically to give meaning to the “looter shooter” concept the team was developing:

Heck, we weren't even sure what the universe was going to be. The universe followed. It's like, if this game's going to be about shooting a lot of things, destroying them, and stealing their shit, we're going to have to create a universe where you can somehow feel good about yourself. So we created a universe where this behavior was kind of virtuous, where the "vault hunter" is kind of a celebrated idea.

Combining that positive feedback loop with a unique style and irreverent humor seems to have been a pretty good formula for Borderlands, and most of our commenters were full of praise for the game:
Ivan610 said:

I thought this was a great game when I found it. Loved the humor.

Cylon 118 said:

I have played through this one a couple of times, so not joining in this month but a very enjoyable game that is def more fun with friends but ok on your own as long as u find some powerful guns, which you will eventually. Not knowing what weapon u will get is half the fun for me.

In order to make the experience of picking up loot and feeling rewarded with unique gear as interesting as possible, Gearbox developed a weapon customization system for Borderlands that would allow guns to be procedurally generated, taking a basic rifle or pistol and customizing various aspects like sights, ammo, rate of fire, elemental ammo and other bonuses. All told, the system can create something on the order of 17 million different weapons from these combinations of components.

As usual, with a game in a popular series like this, much of the forum discussion focused on comparing the games of the series to each other. Borderlands has spawned two mainline sequels (Borderlands 2 in 2012 and Borderlands 3 in 2019), along with Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel in 2014 and a spin-off, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, released in 2022. Tales from the Borderlands: A Telltale Series added new stories to the Borderlands universe in 2014, with a follow-up, New Tales from the Borderlands, developed by Gearbox Quebec, released in 2022. Setting the “Tales” titles off to the side, opinion was split between the first two games for the best of the series so far:
TobyLinn said:

The first game is the best for me. Played most of it on my 360 and started the One version as well.

ShinUkyo said:

There's definitely so much that the first game did best! Going back to it always felt good. From the environments to the loot, the dry and subdued humor, everything kinda hit right. And while I consider the second game my fave in the series, there are things I prefer about the first. While the second game can feel very drawn out, especially when you're expected to replay it loads of times, the first BL felt like just the right length in a lot of ways. Aside from, as everyone mentioned, the nightmare that was the Moxxi DLC.

Legohead 1977 said:

Not a fan of the game personally, I enjoyed it for a while, but it very quickly became repetitive, maybe if I enjoyed the humor I would have fonder memories. The DLC was pretty bad too, far too grindy. I must say, I enjoyed BL2 a bit more as I played it in a group, and the Tiny Tina DLC was probably the highlight.
All said, there are multiplayer co-op games I enjoy much more than this series, but it's not a terrible game by any stretch.

Gortus said:

I suppose I agree with the general consensus that BL2 is the best of the series. But, none of them can take BL1's place in my heart.
The cel-shaded graphics, the blending of the shooter and looter genres, the astoundingly good (and beefy) DLC, the huge increase in how much fun co-op brought to an already awesome game... All of these things had surely been done elsewhere, but most were firsts or near-first for me. And to bring them all together... Dang I love this game.

The cel-shaded art style is one of the defining characteristics of Borderlands, but surprisingly, that was a late addition to the game. The original concept was to have a much more realistic art style, as shown in the original E3 2008 trailer for the game:

However, internal reviews showed that playtesters felt this drab wasteland style was too similar to other recent releases like Fallout 3 and RAGE, leading the developers to decide they needed to make a big change in order to stand out from the crowd. With the game nearly 75% complete and less than a year to ship, the team decided to do a full stylistic overhaul, bringing the cartoonish graphics more in line with the irreverent tone and over-the-top gameplay that had developed as the game took shape. It was a move that proved popular with everyone on the team – except for the original art director, who was so upset about the change that she left Gearbox and quit the industry altogether.
II Loadsman said:

I could say much more about the music and art style leaving a huge impression on the younger me, but instead, I'll just leave my personal ranking of the Borderlands games here - I'm a real sicko, so I have them as 1 > 3 > Pre-Sequel > 2 > Wonderlands - I'm not saying that 2 is bad, I simply prefer the others to it. It's a bit late for there to be much more activity in this discussion thread, but I'd be curious to see other people's personal rankings too.

We’re curious, too! Let us know down in the comments if you have a different take on the order of preference for the series!
IronAznSnsation said:

In my opinion, this is the best one coupled with Tales from the Borderlands. Tried a little of BL2/BL3, but they definitely didn't land the same way the first one did. I'll probably finish them one day. Only thing stopping me from doing the remaster is the Mad Moxxi dlc.

Brasshande said:

One of my favorites on the Xbox 360, though Borderlands 2 is even better. Only marginally tainted by the absolute disgrace that is the Mad Moxxi's Underdome DLC

Yes, as those last two comments show, there are some criticisms of Borderlands. The first game had four DLC packs: The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, and Claptrap's New Robot Revolution. Three of those DLCs are pretty well regarded by the community, but it seems that no one has anything good to say about Underdome Riot.
XBox Assassin83 said:

In for the badge, have all the achievements, but I will still be playing, helping friends get the completions on any of the content that isn't Moxxi's Underdome. I don't care how good a friend you are, it's not happening.....

Other complaints mentioned that the game can be very grindy in parts, with one achievement, in particular, causing some headaches:
CraigTMG said:

I will never recover from the hours spent grinding the Claptrap collectibles. The repeated dialogue still echoes through my dreams.

DJBringa said:

Such an awesome game. Can't bring myself around to grinding for those claptrap collectibles, but I'm glad to see this game still getting love after all these years

Vok 250 said:

Very grindy. Was hard to pick up again after already beating it years ago.

Though, as one commenter pointed out, grindiness is relative!
ShinUkyo said:

I saw many mentions of the game being too grindy. To a degree, sure, as that's the sort of game it is. But after playing the second game and others that followed: going back to the original Borderlands actually made it feel quick and concise! I guess it's always a matter of perspective. There are games I completed in the early years of 360 that felt like slogs at that time. Then, when compared to modern grindy games, I'm like, "Jeez, I completed entire games in a few dozen hours back then. In games like Destiny 2, I play for a few dozen hours and feel like I've barely accomplished anything."

A total of 2,910 gamers unlocked an achievement in one of the three tracked versions of Borderlands during the month of September, with 1,291 gamers starting it for the first time and 111 completing at least one version of the game during the month. A grand total of 39,278 achievements were unlocked, worth 761,424 Gamerscore and 1,138,773 TrueAchievement Score – that’s an average of 13.5 achievements, 261.66 GS, and 391.33 TA Score per gamer for the month!
The original Borderlands and the Game of the Year Edition each have 80 achievements, while the Japanese stack has only 70, as the Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution DLC was never released for that version. The GOTY stack saw the most achievements unlocked in September, with 30,309 total achievements. 2,858 achievements were unlocked in the original version, and 599 were unlocked from the Japanese stack. Even with three tracked versions of the game (plus three more on TrueTrophies and two on TrueSteamAchievements), but that’s still not enough for some people:
ClockWrkPhantom said:

I wish this had an XlS stack to play, I’d do it a 5th time.

Paid in Fyrestone, awarded for turning in the first mission, was the most-unlocked achievement of the month, at 1,189 total unlocks (1,092 in the GOTY version, 85 in the original, and 12 in the JP stack), while Completionist, which requires completing the Secret Armory of General Knoxx DLC, had the fewest overall unlocks, at just 97 (74 GOTY, 18 original, 5 JP).

Borderlands is a big game and a challenging completion, especially including some of the DLC, so we want to offer up a big shout-out to the 18 gamers who managed a complete run-through of one version of the game from start to finish during September.

Scythe Emp had the first full completion during the month of September, completing the GOTY edition between the 1st and the 12th of the month, but our fastest finish award this month goes to Kage 316 who knocked out the whole game in just 137 hours and three minutes from first unlock to last between September 20 and 26. Honorable mention to DynamiteJonez and VictimOfDesire, just a little slower at around 145 hours each.

October is drawing to a close, but there’s still time to earn your TA Playlist badge for this month’s featured game, SUPERHOT, either by popping an achievement in the game or by dropping into the Spoiler-Free and Spoiler Discussion Threads to leave a comment about your experiences blasting red dudes in this unique take on the FPS genre. And don’t forget to vote in the poll for November’s game of the month, closing soon. See you next month!

Thanks to BetaSigX20 for writing this Wrap-Up!

Related stories:

TA Playlist

Written by The TA Playlist Team

The TA Playlist is a monthly community event. Everyone votes on which of four games to play, and then we all play through it in the following month. There's a dedicated hub to discuss everything about the game, from story beats to gameplay tips – and of course, you can track your achievement progress during the month as well. TA Playlist was created by Mark Delaney and is now run by Miles, Nici and Chewie.