#Tales of the borderlands

[renoloid372]

jurger

[handsomefreak69]

Helo

[stinger-shot]

Pov me looking at borderlands art style

Pictures under the cut

LOOK AT IT

I wan it..

[blighted-lights]

you know for a game series that is completely carried by women, a lot of borderlands fans sure only focus on like. three men, huh.

like this isn't a transformers post and my blog is mainly transformers but i cannot understand it. you have an amazing cast of compelling women who are arguably far more interesting than their male counterparts and you choose to only focus on the same three crusty men over and over. are you joking. are you being fr right now.

and it's not even JUST that. some of the fandom interpretations of these men are so far off-base from their canonical apperances that it's just. um. okay. okay. that's what we're doing. okay cool. let's bend over backwards trying to justify why handsome jack is the way he is and make a good dad jack au were the canonical exploitation and abuse of his daughter is completely erased. okay. okay.

[wackulart]

squeezes him with all my might

[roadkillraat]

how many ocs do you have? borderlands and non- borderlands realated?

all together I have over 35 ocs, and i wish to get rid or sell a good handful of them one day i plan to do a adopt center for the ones i don't want anymore. Borderlands wise, i have around 5-10ish?? which each one will have their own tone.

Spencer retired corpo

Raja retired soilder now siren

Felix Morgan the bandit cowboy

Big Red a clan leader goliath

tinker a hermit scavenger

Dez or R4T who is a bandit working for the calypsos

The Reaper an assassin Robot/Ai

and a few more I can not think of right now (it's 5am as i am writing this

my goal is to draw or yap about them at least ONCE and see how people think of them :D

[muqaddasaman]

Blog 1 – Balancing Narrative and Gameplay 

Video games must carefully balance narrative storytelling with gameplay to deliver the best experience. In this blog, we’ll explore several recent games and the techniques they employ to present compelling narratives without sacrificing gameplay enjoyment. 

“The first lesson for any video game designer is to get the player to stop and look at something that you want them to look at, and the second is to repeat the first lesson the entire game long” (Valve, 2023). These were the words spoken by Ken Birdwell, gameplay designer at Valve who worked on Half Life (1998), as he mentioned the struggles in striking the balance between allowing the players to explore the lore and narrative of the world that requires focus and attention while simultaneously giving them the freedom to enjoy the various gameplay mechanics allowing them to do whatever their heart contends to do so. Thus, it becomes a challenge within a challenge to not just create a game enriched with a great narrative with entertaining gameplay mechanics while encouraging players to slow down and engage with the narrative amidst the lure of the game’s mechanics. 

To overcome this challenge various companies, utilize different methods ranging from utilizing cutscenes that forces the players to watch a non-interactable video that shows the story, all the way to giving the players complete autonomy with barely any guidance in terms of narrative storytelling. And while one may prefer one form of story and gameplay above another, at the end this is completely subjective as numerous video game studios have successfully showcased drastically different methods in balancing narrative and gameplay.  

One of the most prominent examples of achieving such balance between narrative and gameplay is the infamous narrative cutscenes. The term ‘cutscene’ was coined by Robert Gilbert in 1987 when he introduced fully animated story sequences in his game ‘Mania Mansion’. During a presentation in Germany Gilbert shared that he called these moments as cutscenes as they cut away from the game itself allowing for a clear showcase of narrative. (Elumski, 2012). Games like “Metal Gear Solid” and “Yakuza” games series adhere to this idea that true balance cannot be achieved if players are allowed complete control as this will produce a vast degree of possibilities that will disrupt the detailed narrative that is created by the writers, hence the control from the players is taken away during key moments while an animated cutscene showcasing the narrative is played out. This idea is best explained by Jesper Juul (2001) as he describes that even if platers act out the entire play of William Shakespeare's ‘Hemlet’ themselves, they will still not experience the exact story of the ‘Hemlet’ had they watched the play instead of participating in it. 

But recently new creators and studios have risen to challenge this perception and notion by not only creating a vast world with engaging gameplay mechanics that require time and focus to master while simultaneously giving no inkling about the lore and narrative of the game, apart from a few abstract cutscenes or textual cues. Games like “Elden Ring” and “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’ are popular examples of this kind of gameplay and storytelling. Yet despite the apparent absurdity of this form of balancing of narrative and gameplay, these games utilize the concept of goal-oriented narrative storytelling, where narrative bits are rewarded after difficult trials and hurdles that the player must overcome. These games understand that player “intractability is a key dimension of computer game narrative” (Qin, Rau & Salvendy, 2009) and thus by providing narrative as a reward for player’s interaction with the game’s mechanics pushes players to actively seek out narrative’s by interacting with the mechanics themselves.  

While many games succeed in balancing gameplay and narrative, some narrative experts argue that 'interactive storytelling' is inherently contradictory. Their reasoning is that a cohesive narrative requires a certain level of focus to be comprehensible, whereas video games often present distractions in the form of gameplay mechanics. For a player to understand a game’s narrative, they must grasp not only the immediate storyline but also the broader world, including its lore and the character's place within it. Games like Heavy Rain and the Dark Souls series have been criticized for disrupting key narrative moments with mechanics like quick-time events or enemies attacking players during pivotal scenes. These interruptions can force players out of the story, diverting their attention and ultimately detracting from the narrative, which in turn hurts overall experience. 

Yet, despite the drawbacks attached with the idea of interactive storytelling, many video games have successfully managed to find a balance in allowing entertaining gameplay and complex narrative storytelling. Relying on the concept of embedded and emergent storytelling, video games allow their players to not only discover narrative elements in the universe of the game itself, but it also allows players to craft their own personal stories through gameplay. This produces a certain degree of realism in video games, just like the stories in our daily lives are mostly a biproduct of activities and experiences instead of a preordained narrative. This realism in-turn leads to immersion which is an achievement that every game developer desires to achieve in their games. 

Sources 

Elumski (2012). Ron Gilbert - Maniac Mansion postmortem. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNpjGvJwyL8 [Accessed 11 Oct. 2024]. 

Juul, J. (2001). Games Studies 0101: Games telling Stories? by Jesper Juul. [online] www.gamestudies.org. Available at: https://www.gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/. 

Qin, H., Rau, P., Salvendy, G. (2009) Measuring Player Immersion in the Computer Game Narrative. In: Entertainment Computing [online] https://www.researchgate.net Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220302079_Measuring_Player_Immersion_in_the_Computer_Game_Narrative. 

Valve (2023). Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbZ3HzvFEto&t=3124s [Accessed 11 Oct. 2024]. 

[nataliedecorsair]

How to hang out with your bird gf? Here's some mostly useful guide. Also, don't forget about the frog 🐸 Some of the previous comics are here and here ----- Separate post about Hedwig/Yadwiga is here.

Post about Vaughn, Yadwiga and their AU is here

Find even more comics about them on my Tumblr by the Pticenoga hashtag

[iamthekarmapolice]

I LOVE THEMATIC COHERENCE!!!! I LOVE THAT THE STORY OF THE GAME TOOK THE WACKY PREMISE OF THE GAME, ENDLESSLY FIGHTING OVER NOTHING, AND TREATED IT WITH A PRECISION-CALIBRATED BALANCE OF COMEDY AND DRAMA!!! OF COURSE IT WAS ALWAYS ABOUT SPITE FOR SPITE'S SAKE!!!! IT COULD HAVE NEVER POSSIBLY BEEN ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE!!!! LETS HEAR IT FOR LUDONARRATIVE HARMONY WOOOOOOOOOOO

[renoloid372]

you look very handsome today

[psakhich]

[stinger-shot]

Alright so,

I just remembered that I have borderlands (my favourite shooter game) and I had a thought.

Ironhide would 100% play this game, it has his humor and GUNS and Ironhide is a damn weapons specialist so ofc he'd like shooter games!

Like he would 100% have most of the games and would have completed them all just because they are quite addicting.

He would probably also find claptrap very annoying. Everyone does (expect me ofc, I love my lil depressed robot.)

I don't know who he'd choose to play as though, maybe Roland in the first game? I have no clue for the seccond though.... or third. (I don't know mutch about the 3rd game at all or the 4th)

[shroomthealien]

Look, it's just so damn fitting for them also lil @nataliedecorsair Pticenoga reference

[nereeitor]

:o

[handsomejagoff]

one of my friends called this face the “telltale scowl” and i think that’s so funny

[phenikas]

"Hello, handsome. What a day, hmm? You look lonely. I can fix that."