Video games, for the most part, come and go, the vast majority of them fading into nerd cult obscurity. However, every so often, a game comes around that stays around. One of the most elusive puzzles in the gaming industry is, what are the factors that give a game ‘legs’? In other words, what’s the secret to extended longevity of competitive play and community? To even begin finding answers to this enigma, we must turn to the company that is the unrivaled juggernaut of long-lasting interactive electronic entertainment: Blizzard. Blizzard has to its name four games that have been around a Very Long Time and that still have as strong a community as ever: World of Warcraft, Diablo II, Warcraft III and the venerable Starcraft. These games are paragons of replayability, even though the latter three haven’t had additional official content in years. The online Diablo II community remains prodigious, and Starcraft is still South Korea’s national sport, in no way threatened by the impending Starcraft II. But I didn’t come here to talk about Blizzard. I came here to talk about Borderlands.

WTF? That is some kind of tangent, you might say. However, that kind of side-tracking isn’t just sloppy writing – it’s an integral part of the Borderlands experience. For its ability to sidetrack the player with gloriously extraneous shoot’n'loot missions, and for many other reasons, Borderlands has some serious legs on it. It may, in fact, be the only game from this console generation that people are still playing six or seven years down the road. Let’s face it–in the years to come, Halo 3 will be replaced by another frenetic FPS (Halo 4, for the XXXbox, with the unlockable Master Chief/Arbiter slash-fiction alternate ending), and even the new highest-grossing weekend opener Modern Warfare 2 will probably have a new sequel like Call of Duty: Postmodern Warfare, where you fling lobster phones at blue rubber ducks on a giant melted clock while snarling snippets of Sartre.

Borderlands is the 3-D version of Diablo that Too Human wanted to be. Taking cues from open-world standbys like Grand Theft Auto, Borderlands feeds you endless ways to get distracted from your purported mission of finding and opening The Vault, a legendary trove of alien treasure. Aside from dozens of optional missions (well, required, really, to raise your level enough to survive the game’s steep leveling curve), it’s possible to get lost for hours simply maiming wild packs of skags (creatures that make even animal-rights activists grab a gun) or giving bandits a taste of their own medicine by raiding and looting their camps scattered around the wasteland. Loot is the name of the game, or it should have been–“Loot” certainly would have been evocative of the game’s core gameplay mechanic and progression incentive.

The developers weren’t exaggerating when they said that there were over a million guns, many of them rife with insane overexuberance. When I was only level seventeen (out of a cap of 50, planned to be raised eventually by DLC), I found in a leveled chest a rocket launcher that shoots five Rockets in quick succession. In any other game, this would be the biggest, baddest motherfucker you would get to lay your hands on. In Borderlands, it’s but a small taste of the insane armory your Vault Hunters can find in chests, corpses and even piles of skag droppings. Much like Oblivion, Borderlands rewards your playing style by improving your proficiency with each type of firearm as you use it. Furthermore, in a feature I would love to see become widespread, Borderlands contains challenges that you can complete at any time for bonus experience. They work just like achievements or trophies, but they actually impact gameplay. They usually involve killing a certain number of a certain class of enemy, or using certain classes of weapons enough times. Some of the challenges are a bit ludicrous in scale, and I don’t know that I will even finish the high-level challenges associated with my weapons of choice before I max out my character.

Skills trees provide a fair amount of customization to your character without drastically changing gameplay. While Brick the Berserker and Lilith the Siren can be specced to favor hand-to-hand combat, make no mistake–the focus is still on dem guns. Nevertheless, skill tree synergies are easy to understand and highly effective, if lacking somewhat in variety between the character classes. Common themes include enhanced damage in a certain type of weapon and short-duration damage/accuracy/regeneration bonuses triggered by killing an enemy. The skill tree setup in Borderlands is just one of the ways that it differs from Fallout 3, its most closely related ancestor. In reality, though comparisons to Fallout 3 are inevitable, the similarities are superficial. Borderlands is much more focused on the player’s FPS skill, with the character’s build affecting gameplay less, whereas in Fallout the right perks meant you practically didn’t even have to aim. Borderlands rewards players for killing enemies in quick succession, discouraging the more opportunistic, predatory style of gunplay found in Fallout 3.

The game is not perfect. As with any ambitious open-world, non-guided experience, the pacing can be uneven. While this isn’t a fault, exactly, as any game that allows for open exploration will naturally have difficulty keeping its players progressing evenly, it seems like Borderlands could have spread the more interesting missions out. The difficulty curve of the game at the beginning is steep, forcing you to complete nearly every optional mission you are given to level appropriately to your enemies. Later in the game, however, I became vastly overleveled simply by continuing to accept and complete optional missions, and no grinding at all. Because being a higher level than your opponent means your attacks do bonus damage, the end of the game was quite easy, even anticlimactic. The game does feature a second playthrough (and even a third promised in future DLC) that aggressively increases the levels of your opponents, if not their number or intelligence (which is already quite impressive). This is the kind of extra replayability that many traditional RPGs lack, and a welcome remedy to Borderlands’ relatively short play time.
One way in which the game falters is its somewhat linear, inorganic “job board” system of delivering quests. Whereas competitor Fallout has quests delivered by any number of NPCs you encounter throughout the game, optional quests in Borderlands come from electronic help-wanted bulletin boards that they must be returned to when complete. Speaking of which, my greatest (and only, really) annoyance with the game was the amount of time I spent turning in quests, when I would rather have been completing them. The game does the small kindness of allowing the player to work on multiple missions at once, but returning them still means trekking across vast stretches of the Wasteland. It would not have detracted from gameplay at all to simply have missions completed as you finished them, without having to return for the reward.

All in all, however, these gripes are trivial, and do not detract in any significant way from the sheer, addictive joy that is Borderlands. It is a streamlined, Halo-player-friendly Diablo with a wicked sense of humor, cel-shaded visuals that will age much better than “realistic” graphics, and a gun for every taste. Compared to its predecessors, Borderlands is faster, brighter and more fun. Finding that high-damage sniper rifle with a decent scope or that elusive corrosive rocket launcher is a rewarding metagame that can swallow hours in the double digits. The game features player vs. player arenas scattered throughout the blasted landscape, so if you’re quite agitated because your “teammate” grabbed up the best shield, you can just smack him and be instantly teleported into a PvP duel. In this way, while single-player is a blast and worthy of any gamer’s time, Borderlands is much, much enhanced by the couch co-op principle. It is clearly meant to be enjoyed with other players. My compatriot Akili and I played through about half the game in a series of weekend sessions as a Hunter/Berserker combo, drinking vodka and becoming increasingly excited as we picked off winged Rakks with alcohol-addled accuracy. I’ll admit–there may have been screaming.