What was stat based or buffed about being able to turn invisible and shoot out shockwaves, or use a deadly bird? I thought the abilities were still pretty cool. If anything dual weilding is a buff, since it's essentially only doubling what you were already doing with one gun.
Still cool though, obviously.
I thought the ability's were almost pointless. aAmost all the time of my play though barely a single person used them. Just fairly mindless shooting in which you just happened to be with another player. I played something like 10 hourds with Corp and I can honestly say if he was or wasn't there, it would have made 0% diffrence. The gameplay experience would be the exact same. Making enemys a higher level and "better loot" isn't enough.
Compare that to something like Guild Wars were you are limited to 8 skills with 6 other players, every skill counts and can act as a game changer. It's a far superior cooperative game as (funnily enough) you need to co-operate, the soup of skills compliment each other.
The other thing as well that Guild Wars does better is accesbility. The game has hundreds of skills but only allows you to use 8 at a time. It's a streamlined experience that requries some basic level of thinking without streamlining it to the point of Borderlands that the RPG mechanics are pretty much a gimmick tacked on.
You could just remove all the player skills in this game, all the weapons, all the specific class builds, just keeping Borderlands levels and enemys the way they are and it would probably make a tiny incremental diffrence to the game. If you took a single class out of Team Fortress 2, you'd have a broken game. If you pick a set of skills over another in Dues Ex, there are entire sections you can miss out on. In Borderlands skills just border (hu-hu) on irrelevant.
You can blame it on dumbing down for the sake of sales or "not wanting to get in the way of shooting" but even when you look at left4dead, the most basic rudimentary shooter you can imagine, which is essentially, a casual game, it does a far better job of having you depended on other players. Simply by adding monsters that can completely incapacitate your ability to fight back and throwing swarms of enemy at once a single player can't overcome. It's intuitively (like Team Fortress 2) apart of the gameplay.
So yea, Borderlands 2, how about a Co-OP game that requires Co-OP and maybe a few skills that do something usefull once and a while?
. From my time with the other characters, the only other one I liked is the Siren with her cool Phasewalk ability. I didn't really care for the other two.
