Not Quite the Glory of Thunderdome

I think it’s fair to say that Borderlands hadn’t really found its true identity during its development process. It went through a couple of different art styles before settling down to the cell-shaded, sketchy art look that we’re used to now, and even the first game’s story was simply tacked on at the last minute to give its campaign some direction. The crew at Gearbox made a fun engine first, and then tried to find a way to build a story, and a whole world, around the thing they’d built, cobbling it all together on the fly.

And you get that same sense of “we’ll just throw stuff together,” for the game’s first two expansions. Every first-person shooter at the time had a zombie campaign, and Borderlands as a first-person shooter, so it needed its own zombie adventure, The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned. It’s not a bad campaign, for what it is, but it does feel pretty mercenary and a bit soulless (and not just because there are undead in the adventure). It’s also one of the few expansions that is almost entirely non-canonical. Almost nothing that happened in this campaign is ever referenced again (outside of a single Halloween themed Headhunter adventure for Borderlands 2), and it all feels like this side story that the series is kind of ashamed of now. But at the time a zombie campaign was needed, so Gearbox made one.

To a similar extent you can feel that, “well, I guess we have to make this,” mentality at play in Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot. The first Borderlands was very much, “What if Mad MaxStarted with a single 1970s Australian exploitation flick (a popular genre in the country at the time), the Mad Max series went on to spawn three sequels, an entire genre, style, and what many consider the greatest action film of all time, Fury Road. Not bad from a little low-budget film about cars smashing each other after the fall of society.… but on a different planet?” It had the guns, it had the cars, and it had the endless desert wastes that stretched on for miles. Everyone alive at the time made the Mad Max comparison, and it actually worked in the game’s favor. This was the best Mad Max game we’d had up to that point… it just happened to be unlicensed. So if they were going to commit to the Mad Max bit, they needed their own Thunderdome. And that was where Mad Moxxi came in.

Unlike Dr. Ned, Mad Moxxi was a character that ended up sticking around (although that’s because of the next expansion, which we’ll discuss soon). She operates the Underdome, a series of underground battle arenas where warriors could come to test their mettle. And she has a challenge for our Vault Hunters: survive three arenas, with five full rounds of battle each, and you’d get the ultimate prize: an extra skill point for your build. And since you could play the campaign twice, both in Normal and True Vault Hunter modes, that meant there were two points up for grabs for your builds. Free points? Sign us up, right?

Well… not so fast there. While the temptation of free skill points is really nice, there were some massive, major flaws with Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot that kept this expansion from becoming a beloved adventure. In fact, the flaws were so bad that it made the whole expansion feel underbaked, like it was rushed out just to meet a deadline. Generally now most people tend to think that Moxxi’s underground fighting adventure might just be the weakest full-fledged expansion ever released for the series… and there are a lot of expansions it could fight to earn that title.

The basic construction isn’t too bad. Once you land in the central hub of the Underdome, you’re given the option of battling it out in three themed arenas: The Gully, an arena themed like the wide open expanses of the main game; The Angelic Ruins, styled like the ancient Eridan ruins of the main titles end-game sections; and Hell-Burbia, an arena designed to look like Old Haven (although with a few little stylistic flourishes borrowed from Dr. Ned’s campaign). Your goal is to fight your way through each of these and come out the victor.

Battling in the arenas is pretty basic. You have to survive five full rounds, and each round consists of five waves. Wave one is the Starter wave, with simpler enemies that come out to fight you. Wave two has the Gun wave which, naturally, features enemies with guns. Wave three is the Horde wave, which is predominantly composed of psychos. Wave four is the Badass wave, and badasses and other high-grade enemies compose its ranks. And then, finally, we have the last wave, the Boss wave, where the players have to battle against a boss they've previously fought in the main campaign. After each wave ammo and health drops fall across the arena, and once the round is over a stash of loot drops for the players to quickly collect.

Additionally, after each round is completed, the game starts introducing little twists on the game play: buffs and debuffs. A little wheel will spin and the game will say, “shotgun round, where shotguns deal bonus damage and everything else deals nothing,” or “health round, where the enemies are extra thick.” These little twists can make you switch up what you’re doing and use other weapons, although honestly I never found the buffs (and debuffs) to be so substantial that I ever wanted to give up my best weapons.

To ensure the campaign wasn’t too easy, considering this expansion was the second in the series for Borderlands and players were likely already max level coming into the Underdome, Gearbox added one more twist to the gameplay: all the enemies scale up to you. Whoever is the host of the game is also the metric for what level the enemies scale to. If you’re level 30, the enemies are level 30. Higher or lower, the enemies match. This did help to keep the challenge constant and in your face, especially if you were playing the Underdome alone.

But here’s the thing: Gearbox didn’t really think about how different players might be playing together at different levels. Unlike later games in the series that scaled high-level content to the highest player in the party, the Underdome scales to the host, no matter what level they might be at in comparison to everyone else. As such if your party is level 50 but your host is very low level (you can’t even get into the arenas until you meet a minimum level threshold, although it’s still very low) then all the enemies are at that hosts level and the rest of the group can riot, wiping the floor with the enemies.

And there’s absolutely no reason not to do this. Part of the issue with the Underdome is that enemies do not give you any experience. This is meant to be a battle challenge, not a way to grind, so while you can still do challenges (like getting critical hits with various weapons), none of the enemies you kill will give you any experience at all. If you’re level 20 coming into the arenas, you’ll be level 20 leaving them as well. That doesn’t feel so bad when you’re doing the three small challenges for the elusive skill point, but once you get into the big challenges, well… then it really gets to you.

After the first mission, where you’re supposed to fight five full rounds in each of the arenas, the big challenge then opens up. This doesn’t get you any skill points, mind you, but the big challenges are there for bragging rights. Did you think you completed everything in “Borderlands? How about the full Underdome? No? Well get going!” You’d have to battle twenty full rounds in each arena, which is an absolute slog of time considering it would take at least a half an hour (even playing with a low-level host) to clear any one of the five-round arenas. Twenty rounds of it is an afternoon, and we’re talking about doing that three times. I love this game, and I’ve only bothered completing the big challenge once.

Clearly Gearbox thought people would grind out the big challenges and that would give players plenty to do while the next expansion was in the works. Keep people hooked, boost their play time in the game. It’s logical, but when you consider how threadbare the final content in the expansion actually is, it also feels pretty awful. They didn’t care if you actually enjoyed the grind or not, they just wanted you in there grinding away at the three arenas until you were utterly bored… which most people were, even after just the small challenges. It was pretty stupid.

But I don’t think that was the original intent. In the game files there’s data and references to thirteen battle arenas for this expansion: The Angelic Ruins, The Arena, The Bandit Camp, The Bog, The Bunker of Blood, The Crimson Halls, The Danger Canyon, The Decrepit Mine, The Gully, Hell-burbia, The Scrap Hole, The Slaughter Caves, and Wonderland. Only three of those made it into the expansion (although some ideas, like Bunker of Blood and Wonderland were reused in later expansions), but it’s not hard to imagine how much more interesting the Underdome would have been if the big challenge had been five rounds in each of the thirteen locations instead of twenty rounds in just three. That sounds like a more interesting, and more varied, experience.

This also speaks to how the expansion was rushed out. There was a deadline, Gearbox had to meet it, and so instead of thirteen arenas (or whatever the final count would have been once the designers got everything ready for print) we got three which aren’t bad on their own but really don’t provide a lot of varied content. The ambitions of the developers were there, but the realities of the game market, and their own deadlines, meant that what could have been a good expansion was stripped down to the bare minimum.

In the end, then, Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot ended up not really meeting the expectations of the fans. There’s a core element here that kind of works (which is why Mad Moxxi’s arenas eventually started showing up in future games as well, albeit with a more varied amount of content for each) but it just wasn’t fully baked in this expansion. It’s easily the weakest of the expansions for the original Borderlands, and it may very well be the worst content release in the whole series (with only, possibly, the absolutely threadbare Holodome Onslaught somehow sliding in under it to take the crown).