Having The Worse Luck Recording Borderlands 3

This story takes place during the Borderlands 3 reveal event in LA. While I was very fortunate to be invited to this momentum happening and there were definitely a lot of high moments, I actually had the worse luck while recording my gameplay sessions. Also, the FL4K reveal event didn’t go smoothly but luckily there are friends that rescued me.

Capture Session Disaster

There were 200 demo stations at the Borderlands 3 reveal event. Therefore everyone who got to the venue was assigned a specific station during their check-in. You had the attend a presentation first and then you received access to the closed-off section. While finding my way to the demo pod, I stumbled into my buddy Scott Pytlik, Director of Global Influencer Marketing at 2K Games. He was happy to see me and was excited to introduce me to one of his co-workers. Apparently, my name regularly comes up during meetings, therefore, Scott wanted to introduce me to the team. However, I’m getting sidetracked over here.

So… Once Scott dropped me off at the demo station he was like have fun and see you around. Because there weren’t any clear instructions on what to do and the only info up on the table was a cheat chart on how the controls worked for both playable vault hunters.

Therefore, I just booted up the game and started playing just like the guy next to me. Apparently, we both picked the wrong save file and ended up in a co-op game with each other. I later found out that we were not supposed to do that. However, this did let me play a level 25 character in co-op as one of the first people as everyone else was playing a level 10 character solo.

The downside of this story is that no one started the capture session, so in the end, I didn’t have any gameplay footage of that session. The guy in charge of that zone felt responsible as it was his task to set everyone up at those demo pods. I said I still had fun and that I’ll be back for the next capture session. 2K Games was nice to me and booked me for both sessions that day.

Second Try

In the afternoon play session, I ended up in the same zone. Therefore, the guy that didn’t enable my capture session last time double-checked if my recording was running this session. Everything seemed fine until my few-hour session ended and he started checking the footage.

Apparently, the capture software recorded the second screen. OMG! I got a few hours of static desktop footage with the assigned save-folder up on the screen. The representative felt extremely guilty and could just hit himself.

Ki11erSix to the rescue

To my surprise, Ki11erSix was assigned to the demo pod next to me. Which was really cool, we talked for a bit and took a selfie. But as my second recording session came to an end, Ki11erSix found out that my recording was messed up for the second time. I would have gone home without any footage. Therefore, K6 came to the rescue and shared his footage with me. He didn’t promise it was the best footage – he’s known for not having the best aim – but at least I would have something to work with. That was a really nice thing he did for me, I love this cooperation within the community instead of seeing everyone as competition.

Reset Button

At the Fl4K reveal event, I apparently ended up at the demo pod that had the most glitches/bugs. Well, that happens when you get to play an early build of a game. Unfortunately, I was the one with the most trouble that day. Maybe, it’s my playstyle XD

I got stuck in a combat sequence because one enemy got stuck in the wall and couldn’t be killed. Therefore, the mission wouldn’t progress.

The weirdest glitch I had that day was like; a reset button. 2K staff members would start and stop your captures every hour to reduce the file size of your recordings. After my first hour, a 2K representative stops my recording session and then immediately started the next recording. At first sight, there was nothing wrong, however, when I made my way to the next combat zone, I noticed that my character didn’t want to fire its weapon. When I opened up the echo menu, I found out that my inventory was completely empty. During that brief interruption, I lost all the cool weapons that I had collected and my vault hunter was back at level 1. Luckily, because we were playing a developer version of the game, they could restore my progression and give me some weapons. Even the devs hadn’t seen anything like this.

Conclusion

While capturing this game wasn’t always the most successful for me personally, I did enjoy my time with the game. The events that 2K Games had set up were great and I’m honored that I could be part of them. You are playing early builds of a game during these events and things can go wrong. It’s great to see the people around you stepping up and helping you out. Ki11erSix didn’t have to share his gameplay footage. Chris Brock – GBX Producer who was at the FL4K Reveal event – didn’t have to leave his break and come over to help me. 2K representatives could have fixed the situation. So I’m very grateful for the love and support that I received.