Sorry. Is someone holding a gun to your head and forcing you to play it?

You're never online!

Like I said to you yesterday, Doc, the game is very heavily weighted towards enjoying it with friends as opposed to enjoying it alone.... Alas, Borderlands' weird handling of co-op (unless you're all in the same game with the same people always, not everyone makes 'progress') means it's not as conducive to being a drop-in, drop-out experience as it should be.

Yeah, or some sort of 'rollback' thing where you can take the cheese from under your foreskin to help the dry cracker of a game go down better.

Woo, missed a lot of fun with this one. I'm glad it came out at the same time as Halo ODST that I still haven't loaded yet in favour of playing Kane and Lynch.

Woo-oo, dodged fannies all my life, I'm such a clone. I'm glad I came out when I was on holiday.

Fair enough. In singleplayer it felt far too 'empty', like an MMORPG but without any other players. Fair enough, other single player games also have pretty simplistic 'go here, kill that' quests but they are also more 'lively'.

I wonder if a better structure for Borderlands 2 would be a more open world, with the level of the foes in each area making going where you shouldn't unwise; as opposed to the original's much more structured 'story'? There'd still be an overall story and plot specific locations to go to, but everything else you could in theory attempt (even if you failed) from the off.

This description gets rolled out every time people talk about an RPG levelling issue. When is someone going to actually make the fucking game?

That wouldn't work either. F3 levelled monsters in a particular area at the point you entered that area. So if you had multiple characters, one higher than the other, how would it handle that?

We weren't talking about co-op there, were we?

This being the Borderlands thread, yes. Yes we were.

There are two other options.

1) Allow your character to be 'level-balanced' when you join a game - so you drop down to the level of the host.
2) Use the power of maths. If you're a higher level than your partner, and the monsters are levelled to you, scale your partner's damage up by x% to make it equivalent. At the same time, scale down the damage the monster does to him compared to you.

That'll never work. The monsters will just offshore their damage to an alternative foe who will be exempt from any hit point score reductions.

The meaty/Bobby exchange seemed to be talkgin about SP, but ANYWAY.

I'm not sure how you can solve the issue of co-op level disparity. Either the monsters will be too tough for the little'uns, or too easy for the grown ups. The only alternative I can think of would be to prevent parties where the lowest to top level character difference is more than [x] levels.

In the interests of balanced coverage, I got the urge to play this this afternoon and quite enjoyed it.

[...]while they hack the enemy into more management pieces.