Players of Gearbox’s new loot shooter were not long in coming Tiny Tina’s Wonderland to determine a “best weapon”. About a week after launch, fans settled on Liquid Cooling, a pistol with legendary tiers that can technically fire forever without reloading, provided you can reliably land critical hits. That, along with its overwhelming damage output, sets it head and shoulders above other weapons in its layers. then The gearbox sucks.
Liquid cooling is still a tremendously effective weapon. (Any gun that fires forever is damn good.) But it’s not the boss melter it used to be, as some players are reporting Damage reduction by up to two-thirds. It all begs one question: What the heck? Tiny Tina’s Wonderland is a cooperative game. Why are the funny guns less fun?
“Although it’s not PvP, we want to make sure that the harder you make the game, [the harder it] gets to you that we want to keep a wide variety of weapons to choose from,” continued Matt Cox, Creative Director wonderlandtold my box in a recent video interview. “And so when we find certain weapons that could get a little out of hand, we want to make sure we rein them in so that choosing between a variety of different playstyles is viable.”
As border areasthe loot shooter series it spawned from, Tiny Tina’s Wonderland has a setting that allows you to increase the difficulty significantly. By progressing through Chaos Chamber, the roguelite endgame mode, you can unlock different tiers of “Chaos,” each of which increases enemy health and damage output, and in turn increases your chances of finding prime loot.
Once upon a time, liquid cooling cut through those higher levels like butter. As well as other legendary pistols, like Queen’s Cry and Masterwork Handbow, which were significantly weakened in the same update that cooled down Liquid Cooling.
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As part of yesterday is big wonderland patchGearbox added 15 more unlockable levels of mayhem, up to a maximum of 35. No weapons have changed, but the update has improved the effectiveness of the already powerful AF Clawbringer class.
According to Cox, this is all partly in a quest for the North Star of Balance, sure, but mostly to ensure players are taking full advantage of the tools at their disposal. wonderland is the first game in the series to feature six classes at launch, allowing for mixing and matching between two classes. It removed grenades in favor of spells, which Cox says are being used by players more often than grenades have ever been. (Grenades were limited by ammo, while spells that work similarly are tied to short cooldowns.) He also said players tend to use melee attacks more often than in previous games. (wonderland introduces equippable melee weapons for the first time in the series.) There is metric tons of methods to tune a class for maximum damage, many of which are more interesting than the age-old tactic of finding the best weapon in the game and using it at the expense of everything else.
“Player choice is always something we want to give people,” Cox said. “For example, they actually have to choose between certain different weapons and weapons and gameplay types and spell types or whatever.”
Of course, there’s the school of thought that when a weapon – or a spell or anything, really – is ridiculously, comically overpowered, you just… can’t use it. You would probably hear a lot less about this school if there was some sort of direct competitive PvP wonderland. Previous border areas Games, for example, had a feature that allowed you to duel with members of your co-op party. It was fun, sure, but it was also an effective way to clarify who gets away with loot in disputes. That’s completely missing Tiny Tina’s Wonderland.
When asked why dueling isn’t part of the game and if it’s coming in a future update, Cox disagreed.
“We have a certain amount of time to focus on certain things,” Cox said. “And so we wanted to focus all of our resources on the things that we knew they were going to do, you know, wonderland very different from a border areas experience and make sure we have delivered that.”
