I played Borderlands 2 for quite a while, 1200 hours +, 100% on Steam. Some of the best gaming moments in my life fighting Vermivorous the Invincible with 3 friends. What came after in the franchise was just disappointing to me.
I don't understand why everyone likes 2 so much. Borderlands 1 had the real dystopian Mad Max vibes. And there was Claptrap for some comic relief.
Borderlands 2 started making a comical relief character out of everything. Bandits were clowns. All the bosses were clowns. All major NPC's were clowns... The entire "dystopia" went out of the window and Borderlands 2 turned Mad Max into a slapstick comedy.
Just the intros of the two games show the massive difference. There is no "survive the wasteland" anymore.
Which abilities did you like? I found some nice but many were a bit overpowered. But maybe that's because I selected Brick Salvadore in Borderlands2. The dual wield button practically destroyed everything. They also had so much power that the unique guns (which was the original selling point for Borderlands) felt less impactful.
Honestly the lack of balance is what I appreciated, throwing drones or skags at people or summoning a mech and firing off a huge volley of homing missiles. Given the series was already flanderized by BL2 it was nice to have more unique powers; though the timing of them felt a bit nasty as they were too frequent to be worth saving but had enough cooldown to be annoying in a tight spot. I think a good balance in future would be impactful powers with a much longer cooldown or some kind of conditional trigger that keeps guns the main focus.
I played the shit out of 2 as well. When 3 came along it had literally all of the improvements I wanted to see, and it felt so much better to boot, but the core gameplay had grown stale because of how much time I spent in the second