Wish they would develop a more clearly defined healing role and some way (if it is possible) to get people to play cooperatively. I really liked borderlands 2 but the grouping spoiled it for me.
It's a mark of the kind of people who play certain games that the culture becomes a dominance hierarchy, inimical to what play is supposed to be, which tells us a lot about the way players are appropriating games via aspects of the real world that belong to other spheres, like business. MMOs can end up like business simulations with combat. The thing about online games is they immerse you in an atmosphere via which you can be frustrated or realised and sadly these atmospheres are made via ranked distinctions within the game world. The thing is that one of the differences between play and work is that you are supposed to enjoy play, it's an end in its own right whose purpose is merely to realise you non-instrumentally, and too often on line multiplayer games become appropriated via issues concerned with rank and lineage (since it takes time to develop a position which signified superiority, players tend to play in cohorts of people who acceded to the same rank around the same time), so that class indicators become real aspects of these worlds. It's sad that people have to incorporate these universal aspects of the world into worlds that might offer other possibilities. I play on line multiplayer games just for the experience of cooperation and doing something together, to feel useful and helpful but there seems less and less of this online!
There is another issue with these massively multiplayer games, you mentioned you got heavily into World of Warcraft at university, and that is that the contemporary economy is based increasingly on isolated working practices and individualised competition, students at university compete directly with one another for limited rewards (when I was at university you had to come top in order to have any hope of progressing) so with the dog-eat-dog culture, on line games are one of the few spheres on can access cooperation via.
How does this game play on low-end hardware, say an i3 processor and a 525m card? Surely they can't sustain a pay-to-play model for very long, however much they want to recoup production costs, they'll limit the player base massively.
I never played one of these games, having read about how addictive they are, I am afraid to even give one a try. Also, I hate overly technical games where you get abuse if you aren't put the time in and are playing with a different spirit to others.
The thing that annoys me in Borderlands games is that you are always having to loot continuously. If you play a healer and play toward the rear of the other players to give you arcs to shoot to heal, then when you get there, everything has gone and you are getting left-overs and run out of bullets. I actually get sick of opening boxes while everyone has run off. Also, I run out of ammo continuously and when you have to shoot-to-heal it just means you permanently run out of bullets. This, in itself, makes me lose interest in the game.
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