Borderlands: Needs More Melee Love

Every class in Borderlands is given a unique melee weapon to fend off those pesky midgets and skags that come charging at you. Brick, your tank archetype, has an entire specialization based around pummeling your opponents. Other characters have certain melee talent skills to invest in, but not enough to build your character around. With everyone being able to defend themselves from close encounters – hotkey ‘v’ – you’d think the loot-whoring would have extended to this category. You’d be wrong.

Gearbox seems to have overlooked the mechanic’s potential. Certain weapons have + melee bonuses, but that’s about as far as the developer went to itemizing. There’s no replacements weapons, such as new knives for Mordecai. That means that fisticuffs doesn’t scale well with your level. The formerly useful tactic now only annoys most enemies, when it used to do substantial damage.

I previously mentioned that select items do boost a character’s melee output, but Gearbox could have done so much more. For instance, meleeing doesn’t even have a proficiency bar, something each weapon has. This means that while every other weapon gets better for you the more you use it, meleeing remains static. Its effectiveness is thus increased solely by the game’s random item generator. Bonus damage, a chance at stunning and ammo savings are possible proficiency boosts.

It’s unlikely the Gearbox Software has the time to develop new content for the upcoming patch, what with all those bugs and all. Hopefully, it’ll come as part of the promised 2009 DLC.

Okay fine, let’s just hope it comes.