Why Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, A Co-Op Game, Keeps Nerfing Guns

Picture: Gearbox

It didn’t take players long for Gearbox’s new loot shooter The wonders of Tiny Tina to determine a “best weapon”. About a week after launch, fans settled on Liquid Cooling, a legendary multi-tiered gun that can technically fire forever without reloading, provided you can land critical hits reliably. This, added to its stunning damage, puts it above other weapons in its strata. Then The gearbox nerfed it.

Liquid cooling is still an extremely efficient gun. (Any weapon that fires forever is damn good.) But it’s no longer the boss-melting machine it used to be, with some players reporting up to two-thirds damage reduction. All of this begs the question: what is it? Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is a cooperative game. Why make fun guns less fun?

“Even though it’s not PvP, we want to make sure that the harder you make the game, [the harder it] gets for you, that we want to keep a wide variety of weapons to choose from,” Wonderlands Creative Director Matt Cox told Kotaku in a recent video interview. “And so when we find certain weapons that might get a little out of control, we want to make sure we get them under control so that choosing between a variety of different playstyles becomes viable.”

Like Borderlands, the loot shooter series from which it originated, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands features a setting that allows you to dramatically increase the difficulty level. By going through Chaos Chamber, the roguelite endgame mode, you can unlock different tiers of “chaos,” each increasing enemy health and damage in exchange for increasing your chances of finding prime loot.

Once upon a time, liquid cooling cut those higher tiers like butter. So did other legendary guns, like Queen’s Cry and Masterwork Handbow, which were significantly weakened in the same update that cooled Liquid Cooling.

As part of yesterday’s big wonderlands patchGearbox added 15 more levels of Chaos to unlock, up to a maximum of 35. No weapons received changes, but the update improved the effectiveness of the already powerful AF Clawbringer class.

It’s all, according to Cox, partly in pursuit of the North Star of balance, of course, but mostly to ensure that players make full use of the tools at their disposal. Wonderlands is the first game in the series to feature six classes at launch and allow mixing and matching between two classes. He’s done away with grenades in favor of spells, which Cox says are used more by players than grenades ever were. (Grenades were limited by ammo, while spells, which work similarly, are tied to brief cooldowns.) He also said that players tend to use melee attacks more than in games. previous ones. (Wonderlands introduces equipable melee weapons for the first time in the series.) There are tons of methods to fine-tune a class for maximum damage, many of which are more interesting than the age-old tactic of finding the best gun in the world. game and use it to the detriment of everything else.

“Player choice is always something we want people to have,” Cox said. “Like, they actually have to choose between certain types of weapons and different weapons and gameplay and spell types or whatever.”

Of course, there’s the school of thought that if a gun — or a spell, or whatever, really — is ridiculously, comically overpowered, you can just…not use it. You would probably hear a lot less about this school if there was some sort of directly competitive PvP in Wonderlands. Previous Borderlands games, for example, had a feature where you could battle your co-op party members. It was fun, sure, but it was also an effective method of determining who can walk away with loot in conflicts. It’s totally absent from Tiny Tina’s Wonderland.

When asked why dueling wasn’t part of the game and if it would come in a future update, Cox objected.

“We have some time to focus on certain things,” Cox said. “And so we wanted to laser focus all of our resources on the things that we knew were going to make, you know, Wonderlands very different from a Borderlands experience and make sure that we delivered.”