Borderlands 2 - Constructive Criticism

Admittedly, I did not do a thorough playthrough of Borderlands 2, nevertheless, I found a few issues that stood out to me. However, instead of blowing our brains out like the psycho above, lets indulge in some constructive criticism.

Problem 1: Replayability

There are a few elements that are holding together the replay value of Borderlands 2. They are: co-op, procedurally generated guns, and character classes. Unfortunately, branching narrative content and generated locations are not a part of this formula, which often play a significant role in other highly-replayable games. There are no choices to be made in the story or side-quests, therefore there is no reason to replay the game for story alone. The locations do not change from playthrough-to-playthrough, making you play in the same environments each time. There are opportunities to significantly improve the replay value of Borderlands 2 that could have greatly complemented the amazing number of guns available in the game.

Suggestion
When playing through the game the second time, there is no incentive to listen to what the characters have to say. You already know the story from the first playthrough and are waiting impatiently for the NPCs to stop talking and let you go shoot things.
To remedy this, the developers could introduce choices to be made through the story which would lead to different consequences and, ultimately, different endings. Another thing they could do is give the player the option to play the game without any narrative - where they could pick a location they want to clear and do that to level up and obtain new weapons. The story is not the main appeal of the Borderlands series anyway.

Procedurally generated locations, and maybe even bosses, would add significant replay value to Borderlands 2. As gun-play is the main focus of the series, random locations and bosses would add highly noticeable variety to playthroughs, as both are a part of the gun-play experience. The game takes pride in its procedurally generated guns, why not extend this mechanic to locations and bosses? It would fit the game very well in my opinion.


Problem 2: Gun Attributes

More often than not, the weapons you find on your journey are worse than what you have equipped. These are missed opportunities to get to play with new guns, and that's not fun.

Suggestion
Weapons chests and boss corpses should definitely give you guns that are better than what you have, or at least equally powerful but in a different way. A weapon attribute generation formula could be improved to give the player guns that are as good as the weapons the player currently has equipped or better up to a certain point dictated by the character level. This way there will be no useless guns, but only the guns that do not suit your play-style or skill build. If implemented, the new formula would let the player play with different guns more often and would improve the emphasis on loot and the excitement of looting, therefore, more competently showing off the procedurally generated guns.


Problem 3: Gun Variety
Even though the game trailer boasts "870 Gajillion" guns in Borderlands 2, that imaginary number does not mean much because during your playthrough you will not be able to see even a fraction of these procedurally generated guns; especially since most of the guns you find you don't end up using because they are worse than your current set of guns.

Suggestion
If there are so many varied parts that are used to generate guns, why not let the player also collect the parts, whether on their own or by salvaging complete guns, as they go through the game and create guns of their own out of those parts? Gun parts will come with certain attributes, level, and rarity attached to them and a gun would consist of a mandatory number of specific part types like barrel, body, magazine, sight, stock, and more depending on how the guns currently get generated. I would like to see gun crafting become a new way for players to enjoy the immense variety of the weapons in this game, I think it would be a huge selling point for the next Borderlands game that implements it, not to mention that it would add so much more fun to have with guns and looting.


Problem 4: Loot Stealing

When playing co-op with strangers, what is the most annoying thing you can encounter? Loot stealing. You open the weapons chest and start looking at the weapon attributes when suddenly the chest is emptied by a stranger that joined a minute ago. You ask him to put the weapons back so that you can examine them, but the stranger refuses or says nothing, so you proceed to kick him out of your game. Of course, when playing with friends this isn't much of an issue, but making playing with strangers obsolete because of loot ninjas takes away from what the game offers to its players.

Suggestion
Make loot instanced to each player. Other dungeon crawling games that are loot focused do it because it works well, so there is no reason not to implement it here. This will also make the suggestion for Problem 2 much easier to implement, as you don't have to worry about multiple player levels when generating gun attributes.


Did I miss any other important problems with the game? Have more suggestions on how to fix these problems? Let me and the developers know in the comments.