So the second piece of Borderlands: The PreSequel DLC was announced on Thursday. "Holodome Onslaught" will be released on December 16, 2014 and is essentially adding a boss-rush mode and a level cap increase. And that's it.
Players will fight continuous waves of the stronger enemies from the game's campaign mode with a few new ones thrown in, and receive new items, heads and skins. Being able to level up to 60, provides access to another 10 points to invest in your character's skill tree.
If it at all sounds like I'm not bouncing off the walls with excitement, it's because I'm not. Granted, I haven't played it and am basing all opinions on a single press release, but as the first piece of major add-on content, the concept is somewhat underwhelming. The last Borderlands game had 11 DLC releases - two new characters and nine campaign add-ons, including three holiday themed offerings.
By comparison, The PreSequel is going to have four, so expectations would be correspondingly higher. In a little over a week, we'll have two of them, and the trend so far is not encouraging. Even the smaller add-ons (the head-hunter packs) in Borderlands 2 provided new mission areas and enemies to explore and vanquish for new loot as par for the course. "Holodome" gives the impression it's going to be primarily enemies we've fought before in an arena setting, with a smattering of new things to shoot.
I was excited for the Doppelganger pack, and have been enjoying it so far, even though that had much less content with the addition of just a single new character.
Except that character was Handsome bloody Jack.
Technically his clone, but as the only way they could have gotten Jack into the game it was pretty damn awesome, considering the character had become larger than life over the course of the previous game (and will likely continue to be if the first episode of Tales from the Borderlands is any indicator). My point is, that while it was fairly minor, the addition of Handsome Jack as a playable character had enough of a "wow-factor" to let the DLC pack stand on its own, which "Holodome" appears to be lacking.
The premise is Athena telling the story for the third time - now to Axton and Gaige, Vault Hunters from Borderlands 2, who were out on a mission while she told it the first two times. However, they want the cliff notes version and have her skip to all the good fights, presumably all the bosses and mini-bosses.
The "tell the story again" approach was used once already to kick off True Vault Hunter mode. After the first play-through, Tiny Tina informs Athena the story wasn't exciting enough and asks her to tell it again but to make it more hectic, restarting the campaign with tougher enemies (and with Tiny Tina's commentary, which for me is almost as big a draw as the better loot).
The DLC launch will include a free upgrade with the addition of "Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode", a third campaign play-through with enemies and rewards scaling up in proportion to the player character's level. If this update also includes new commentary from Axton and Gaige, then I'll start getting excited.
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