Playing Episode 4 made me realize how much of a missed opportunity "Helios" was in The Pre-Sequel
One of the things that excited me the most about Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel was that we were going to be able to explore Helios for the very first time in a Borderlands game.
Since borderlands 2 I have always wondered what was up there
I was super excited when I learned that Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel was going to be set on the Hyperion moon base Helios but all of that excitement disappeared once I started playing the game. I thought it was going to be a game that really explored the kind of place that Helios was but instead it turned out to be nothing more than another hollow and boring shooting gallery ( with a lot more lame jokes)
That was a big reason why I was nervous about episode 4 being set on Helios but thankfully unlike The Pre-Sequel Telltale actually manged to turn Helios into a pretty interesting and lively place.
A perfect example of this is the scene in the "Hub of Heroism"
In Tales we really get to see what type of place Helios is and the type of people that work for Hyperion
We also get to see just how crazy this place can actually get lol
In the The Pre-Sequel the "Hub of Heroism" is just another shooting gallery where you have to complete boring challenges and side quest
In one episode Telltale manged to make Helios more fun and exciting than it ever was in my entire play through of The Pre-Sequel
Comments
I think one of the main problem is that Borderlands the Pre-Sequel is a shooter-roleplaying game. It is limited by the format of the genre and forced to make Helios a shooting gallery instead. It would be pretty boring for a shooter to just wander around in a big space station with nothing to shoot at and carrying a gun. Thus, there wasn't any opportunity to explore the culture and how Hyperion works. Perhaps, they could have made Helios the main mission hub instead of Corcordia. But then again, Helios was under assault by the Lost Legion in the game.
Tales from the Borderlands is an adventure game, thus this offers the best opportunity to explore the every day lives of Hyperion through the eyes of relatable people. I love playing Rhys because he gives us insight on how a normal Hyperion behaves and acts. In Borderlands 2, we never get a real insight to the normal people of Hyperion because we are mostly fighting robots, cyborgs and their president Handsome Jack is well....Handsome Jack. Unless of course you listen to one of the Echo recordings, but they weren't as interesting and insightful as playing an actual employer.
I have to say, episode 4 has made Hyperion a very interesting cooperation for me.
No kidding. What I was expecting to be a rather uptight corporation full of snobby assholes turned out to be... Well, a rather uptight corporation full of snobby assholes who settle their differences via finger gun-fights. Like, damn, that was cool. In my opinion, the Hyperion personnel provided us with one of the most memorable moments in the entire game. It's always refreshing to see the less-than-savory aspects of a typically-evil corporation balanced out by endearing little quirks like those.
Helios wasn't completed during TPS though, and was therefore a completely different environment. There weren't the normal Hyperion workers walking around having finger gun fights and drinking booze-infused coffee, the Lost Legion had taken over the base (and some of the only actual Hyperion workers were infected with the Space Hurps, turning them into enemies). The people we killed were predominantly Dahl soldiers or zombies.
It would actually be pretty messed up for an FPS to be set in modern-day corporate Hyperion because we would literally be slaying hundreds of innocents. Seriously, could you imagine really shooting accountants and tour guides? Could you imagine shooting Vaughn in cold blood?!
I know that Borderlands' whole shtick is all about moral ambiguity, and that arguably the cannon fodder we are presented with are just as innocent (the Dahl soldiers dying words often point out that they're 'the good guys'), but I don't think Borderlands could ever get away with allowing players to engage in that type of environment.
Even if we were to go to present-day Helios in BL3 I still think it would be under the guise of 'war-time' rule and that all those amazing characters that Telltale presented would have to be replaced with faceless 'enemies' (soldiers/robots/creatures) - unfortunately it's just one of the limitations of the FPS genre.
Although we did get to create the jack ai
It was actually Jimmy Jenkins you help make in tps. The Handsome Jack AI in tftbl is version 9000.1. I think that version number is also a reference to dragonball z lol.
Aw, I loved Helios in The Pre Sequel. I thought it was the best part of the whole game. Surprised you didn't like the story/side missions during that portion, I thought they were pretty great! Like the side missions with Nakayama trying to get Jack to notice him cracked me up, we learned more about Jack's former boss whom he eventually kills, and I loved seeing the incomplete sections with the virus that was driving workers insane.
I do agree that Telltale's Helios was even better, but it's not fair to compare them. TPS's Helios was still incomplete, so there probably weren't that many employees there yet, aside from the engineers building it. Plus, it was just attacked. Many were killed or in hiding. Telltale's Helios is years after completion and a normal (as far as BL goes) running business. So we got to see a lot more liveliness and personality because it's actually jam packed with employees now. Plus they're both completely different genre of games. Of course TPS is going to involve way more action than talking.