6. Borderlands
How it ended: Borderlands, a game who's narrative focuses entirely around the opening of a 'vault' that contains vast amounts of treasure for the player to get their hands on instead contained a giant, world-destroying alien that looked like a congealed mass of excrement. Felling the alien promptly makes it pop in a very small downpour of items, sort of fulfilling the promise made at the beginning of the game. If that's the case, why is the ending considered bad? Well for starters, the word vault immediately evokes the image of a giant, colossal room full of neatly sorted items for the player to rummage through to their heart's content. You'd also expect to actually go inside the vault that every character harps on about throughout the entire game. None of that happens: you kill an alien and get an inventory's worth of crud that was worse than what you already had. How it should have ended: Sure, keep the amorphous blob that is The Destroyer in, but when the vault hunters did eventually down the final boss, Gearbox should have let the vault hunters actually enter the vault and collapse in a gibbering mess when the discover a room lined with treasure chests, gun cases and safes. Thankfully, Gearbox made up for their failures with downloadable content for the game and subsequent sequels, but the original game on its own still has its disappointing conclusion in place.
Joe Pring
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Joe is a freelance games journalist who, while not spending every waking minute selling himself to websites around the world, spends his free time writing. Most of it makes no sense, but when it does, he treats each article as if it were his Magnum Opus - with varying results.
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