While Handsome Jack may be the best. I think Borderlands 1 has some interesting Villains such as Steel and General Knoxx. Through atleast for General Knoxx you do get a chance to fight him while Steel got killed by a other worldy tentacle old god monster.
While Steel hadn’t made much of a great threat to you in the game. Her Presence alone leading the Army of Crimson Lances basically taunting you throughout the game was still pretty threaten. Then you get the big man himself General Knoxx who was the top dog of the Crimson Lances. I feel like the Crimson Lances pretty much have made a big impact when I started playing Borderlands 1 and I remember them pretty well as they remind me of Terran Dominion from Starcraft.
Also the bandits too while short were more interesting and threaten in the First Game and continue onward to Borderlands 2 and Prequel.
Totally, General Knoxx is still my favourite Borderlands villain hands down. The fact that he is just as much annoyed and done with Pandora as the rest of the settlers just makes me feel sorry for him. Ffs the way he politely asks you to stop and him insulting his own incompetent soldiers is just too awesome and don’t get me started on his echo logs with general Mikey, I think I have never laughed more about anything else in all the games than these
And of course they’re not Handsome Jack but I think some like Dr. Ned, Steele-Trap etc. still were pretty interesting and funny.
Heck even some side bosses had alot of style like One-Eyed Jack and Cluck-Trap.
And I agree on the bandit part. In BL1 they were downright creepy with their glowing eyes and their gruesome quotes and I always feelt uneasy when these burning melee Psychos rushed me.
In Borderlands 2 they are merely there for comedic effect and have lost their scariness completely.
There are also just a handful of real bandit clans while in BL1 it felt really great battling your way up through their ranks, from Nine-Toes to Sledge to Baron Flynt, you had a real feeling of getting somewhere. In 2 the clans feel like just a side thought while Hyperion takes the spotlight.
The first time I played and got to Nine Toes. I still remember that moment, thinking what the hell just happened to the rest of my life?! He set the stage for some great bosses.
Knoxx clearly is the gold (heh) standard but Shank is a close second for me.
To be honest, I never thought Jack was the interesting or entertaining, and the reason he worked for me was emotional 180° during and after Command Core Angel. That version of the character’s portrayal was only rivaled by Holojack in Tales.
But that turn makes him less a villain in the grand scheme of things. Meanwhile Dr. Ned was just an @$$! But a hilarious @$$.
Knoxx wasn’t even a villain to me, just a soldier stuck with a $#!+ Job and some of the best dead pan humor ever.
Steel-Trp was a better character than Steel proper. Hilariously pathetic.
INAC was probably the most developed villain and just as funny and entertaining because of how far they carried the joke out.
In retrospect Fight For Sanctuary lifted the thr scenario from Robolution, but without the humor and charm of everything being Cl4p-trp themed.
I am going to say “the Pack” in DLC 1 were fun for me, if only because they were way overlevel for me, so I had to dance and sing to stay alive. They were in no way real contributors to the BL1 “story line”, but I will be honest, I didn’t really feel there was a story line in BL1. No real cohesion (at least in my opinion). From a pure story line perspective, I am going to go offthread a bit and say John/Jack in TPS was the best villain. You got a hint the guy was a clown at the start, but you got to watch him degenerate into a full up sociopathic narcissist as the game progressed. Just my thoughts though.
I still think BL1 is insanely fun - and to be honest, I like the graphic a bit better than BL3, which I finally got around to starting after owning for a couple years… Maybe it’s because I can run BL1 at ultra mega deluxe and my graphics card goes ‘meh’, maybe it’s because I like brown. I dunno, but 3 isn’t leaps and bounds better looking than 1 IMO.
thanks for explaining the technical details - I will openly admit to being a moron when it comes to them.
I can’t explain ‘why’, it’s just my gut feeling. Now I can try to understand a bit of the why (probably not smart enough, but I can try).
thanks again, appreciated
Indeed that’s the cool thing about Borderlands: the art has a highly stylized comic book/graphic novel look and thus is virtually timeless. It’s not like trying to compare a “photo-realistic” game from 2002 to one from 2022; the 2002 game is gonna look really dated now. The Disney comparison is apt, and also you can look at things like the Simpsons or South Park: you can’t really “improve” much on the very unique art styles there.
Glad I’m not the only one. For some reason I always felt BL1 looks a little bit better than BL2, I don’t really know why but somehow the comic look is way more noticeable to me in 1.
Like the colour palette in T-Bone Junction with its giant green billboards, it feels like straight outta a web comic…
And games with these artstyles truly never look dated. I just played Jet Set Radio Future last year or so and the Cel-Shading makes the game still look super clean and that game is from 2002!
Same goes more or less for highly stylized graphics like the Futurama game or Psychonauts for example.
I am 100% aligned - the BL ‘look’ doesn’t depend on photo-realism, and as such it doesn’t need (in my limited technical understanding) to have the greatest GPU to show it. It is a look that is unique and (paraphrasing several posters) timeless. I don’t even think about the fact that I have been playing BL1 for more than a decade as it doesn’t look dated in any way. Try and say the same about a peer era game like ‘Rage’. Not only does it look pretty craptastic to me today, it doesn’t play as fun IMO.
Bringing it back to the headline, that ‘play fun’ element is the other key to me. Each of the BLs is so much fun that I can simply replay again and again and again, without ever getting bored. The villains / mini-bosses / bosses are always something to look forward to. I always think ‘which gun that I just dropped / sold / grindered is going to be the one that I wish I kept when (next villain here) appears?’. How many other games have that insane level of replayability? I can honestly think of very few.
