It did not take long for players of Gearbox’s new loot shooter Little Tina’s Wonderland to determine a “best gun”. About a week after launch, fans flocked to Liquid Cooling, a legendary gun with levels that can technically shoot forever without recharging, provided you can reliably land critical hits. That, plus its dizzying damage exit, put it with head and shoulders above other weapons in its layer. Then The gearbox annoyed it.
Liquid Cooling is still a hugely effective gun. (Any gun that shoots forever is damn good.) But it’s no longer the boss smelter it used to be, with some players reporting damage reductions of up to two thirds. It all raises a question: What the hell? Little Tina’s Wonderland is a collaborative game. Why make the funny weapons less fun?
“Even though it’s not PvP, we want to make sure that the harder you make the game, [the harder it] get for you that we want to preserve the choice between a wide range of weapons, ”Matt Cox, creative director at Wonderlandtold Kotaku in a recent video interview. “And so when we find certain weapons that might get a little out of control, we want to make sure we rein it in so that the choice between a variety of playing styles becomes viable.”
Like Border areasthe loot-shooting series, it originates from, Little Tina’s Wonderland has an option that allows you to increase the difficulty significantly. By running through Chaos Chamber, the roguelit playoff mode, you can unlock different levels of “chaos”, each of which increases enemies’ health and damage in exchange for increasing your chances of finding loot.
Once upon a time, Liquid Cooling cut through the higher levels like butter. Like other legendary guns, like Queen’s Cry and Masterwork Handbow, that were significantly weakened in the same update that cooled Liquid Cooling.
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As a part of yesterday’s big Wonderland patchGearbox added 15 more unlockable levels of chaos, to a maximum of 35. No weapons received any changes, but the update increased the effectiveness of already powerful AF Clawbringer class.
The whole thing is, according to Cox, partly in the hunt for the north star of the balance, but mostly to ensure that players make full use of the tools at their disposal. Wonderland is the first game in the series that includes six classes at launch and allows mixing and matching between two classes. It removed grenades in favor of spells, which according to Cox are used more by players than grenades have ever been. (Grenades were limited by ammunition, whereas spells that work in the same way are tied to short chills.) He also said players tend to use melee attacks more than in previous games. (Wonderland introduces equipment melee weapons for the first time in the series.) There is tons of methods of fine-tuning a class for maximum damage, many of which are more interesting than the age-old tactic of finding the best gun in the game and using it at the expense of everything else.
“Player selection is always something we want people to have,” Cox said. “Like, they actually have to choose between certain different weapons and armor and gameplay types and spell types or something else.”
Of course, there’s the mindset that if a gun – or a spell or something, really – is ridiculously, comically overpowered, you just … can not use it. You would probably hear a lot less from that school if there was some kind of directly competitive PvP in Wonderland. Earlier Border areas games, for example, had a feature where you could duel members of your co-op party. It was fun, of course, but it was also an effective method of deciding who to go from there with prey in disputes. It is completely absent Little Tina’s Wonderland.
When Cox was asked why dueling is not part of the game and whether it will come in a future update, Cox hesitated.
“We have a certain amount of time to concentrate on certain things,” Cox said. “And so we wanted to laser focus all our resources on the things that we knew would do, you know. Wonderland very different from one Border areas experience and make sure we delivered them. ”