It didn’t take lengthy for gamers of Gearbox’s new loot-shooter Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands to find out a “finest gun.” About per week after launch, followers settled on Liquid Cooling, a legendary-tiered pistol that may technically fireplace perpetually with out reloading, offered you possibly can reliably land crucial hits. That, plus its staggering injury output, put it head and shoulders above different weapons in its strata. Then Gearbox nerfed it.
Liquid Cooling continues to be a tremendously efficient gun. (Any gun that fires perpetually is fairly rattling good.) But it’s now not the boss-melting machine it was beforehand, with some gamers reporting injury reductions of as much as two-thirds. It all begs one query: What the hell? Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is a cooperative recreation. Why make the enjoyable weapons much less enjoyable?
“Even although it’s not PvP, we need to make it possible for the more durable you make the sport, [the harder it] will get for you, that we need to protect the selection between all kinds of weapons,” Matt Cox, artistic director on Wonderlands, advised Kotaku in a current video interview. “And so once we discover sure weapons that may get just a little uncontrolled, we need to make it possible for we rein it in in order that the selection between quite a lot of totally different play types turns into viable.”
Like Borderlands, the loot-shooting sequence it spun off from, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands encompasses a setting that lets you considerably ramp up the problem degree. By working by means of Chaos Chamber, the roguelite endgame mode, you possibly can unlock varied tiers of “chaos,” each boosting the well being and injury output of enemies in alternate for rising your probabilities of discovering top-flight loot.
Once upon a time, Liquid Cooling reduce by means of these increased tiers like butter. As did different legendary pistols, like Queen’s Cry and Masterwork Handbow, which had been notably weakened in the identical replace that cooled down Liquid Cooling.
As a part of yesterday’s massive Wonderlands patch, Gearbox added 15 extra unlockable tiers of chaos, to a max of 35. No weapons obtained any adjustments, however the replace did increase the efficacy of the already highly effective AF Clawbringer class.
It’s all, in line with Cox, partially in pursuit of the north star of steadiness, certain, however principally to make sure gamers are making full use of the instruments at their disposal. Wonderlands is the primary recreation within the sequence to characteristic six courses at launch, and to permit mixing and matching between two courses. It eliminated grenades in favor of spells, which, in line with Cox, are used extra by gamers than grenades ever had been. (Grenades had been restricted by ammo, whereas spells, which perform equally, are tied to transient cooldowns.) He additionally mentioned gamers have a tendency to make use of melee assaults greater than in prior video games. (Wonderlands introduces equippable melee weapons for the primary time within the sequence.) There are tons of strategies to fine-tune a category for max injury, lots of that are extra attention-grabbing than the age-old tactic of discovering the very best gun within the recreation and utilizing it on the expense of every thing else.
“Player alternative is all the time one thing that we wish folks to have,” Cox mentioned. “Like, they really have to decide on between sure totally different weapons and weapons and gameplay varieties and spell varieties or whatnot.”
Of course, there’s the varsity of thought that if a gun—or a spell, or something, actually—is ridiculously, comically overpowered you possibly can simply…not use it. You’d seemingly hear loads much less from that faculty had been there some form of straight aggressive PvP in Wonderlands. Previous Borderlands video games, for example, had a characteristic the place you can duel members of your co-op celebration. It was enjoyable, certain, nevertheless it was additionally an efficient technique for settling who will get to stroll away with loot in disputes. That’s completely absent from Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands.
When requested why dueling isn’t a part of the sport and if it’s coming in a future replace, Cox demurred.
“We have a sure period of time to focus on sure issues,” Cox mentioned. “And so we wished to laser-focus all of our assets on the issues that we knew had been going to make, you recognize, Wonderlands very totally different from a Borderlands expertise and make it possible for we delivered on these.”
