The coolest sword in the whole world: the Sword of Podcasts,
Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Tiny Tina’s Wonderland, an FPS developed by Gearbox and a spin off of the Borderlands franchise. For a spin off title, the game mechanically plays much the same as any other Borderlands game, but with its priorities flipped around a bit and with a different narrative and theme. Rather than the wasteland-y aesthetic the series is known for, this title (while still existing in that universe) has table top role playing games as its central conceit, with you playing a character in a campaign being run by Tiny Tina from Borderlands 2 (and presumably onward). This RPG theming is more than a coat of paint, but not by too much, which could be a good or bad thing depending on your tastes and how much you like the Borderlands franchise. There’s a lot of fantasy style creatures in the form of wyverns and skeletons and the like, but at its core you are still shooting guns, grenades have been replaced by spells which have similarly varied effects like grenade mods. Class mods are armor, shields have become wards, etc. The mechanics are all still present here, but with a flavor overhaul, and the world and story have been restructured to match the fantasy ideas. If you’re familiar with Borderlands, I can’t explain much more about the mechanics you don’t already know, so jump into the podcast to hear us talk about the RPG systems in the form of skill trees and player customization, voice casting in a triple A game and how that effects how we feel about the dialogue and writing, and we use Comedy Algebra to explain the phenomenon of finding something funny when you’re 18 and ceasing to find it funny at 30.
Thank you for joining us again this week! Borderlands isn’t a game in our typical wheelhouse as far as the podcast goes, but the idea of playing a new shooter seemed like it would satisfy a craving for (one of) us, so here we are. Is this the type of game you’d like to hear us talk more about? Are you a Borderlands fan from way back? Did the writing in this game land for you, and did you engage with the endgame content gear grind? Let us know over in our Discord or in the comments below. Next time, we’re curling back up into a ball and getting cozy under the familiar adventure game blanket to talk about Night in the Woods, so we hope you’ll join us for that!