I played a whole ton of Borderlands 2. More than I have multiple MMOs. The writing was fantastic, it made me laugh, and while the gameplay started frustrating me, I loved the game enough that I didn’t care.

All that said, I was lukewarm on Borderlands: the Pre-Sequel, and I have a hard time putting my finger on why. By rights, I should have been ecstatic and incredibly excited for it. After all, I put more hours than I care to admit into the previous game, and it meets my perfect checkbox for a game: fun, well-written, co=op, my friends are interested.

Except… we weren’t. I’ve been trying to put my finger on why, and the only thing I can come up with (in conversations with Ash) was that the trailers were awful, and it seemed indicative of the fact that the Pre-Sequel was the B-team’s project. At some level, the poor trailers managed to make us lukewarm about a game that would absolutely have been an auto-purchase in the absence of any marketing at all.

I’m fairly sure that myself, Ash, and Kodra would have bought the game, day 1, if there had been no trailers at all. Rae even told us she was preparing to buy the fancy edition but heard that we weren’t that interested and didn’t bother. Somehow, “made by the secondary team” quickly morphed into “not going to buy the next in a beloved series” due to about six minutes of internet video.

And we’re supposedly resistant to that kind of advertising. We like to claim it doesn’t affect us.

It obviously does.

I can’t help but wonder if it works the other way– bad trailers nearly lost my purchase of a game whose predecessor I adored, but I have a hard time thinking of games that I would never have purchased had I not seen a trailer. They certainly exist, I just can’t think of them. Even browsing my Steam library, I can’t immediately bring one to mind.

At any rate, the Pre-Sequel is fun in the first 20 minutes we played of it, and while it very aggressively finishes what Borderlands 2 started in terms of telling me outright that snipers aren’t welcome, I think I’ll still have fun with it.