When I say Borderlands, I mean the franchise, not the game.

I checked Steam Charts to get an idea about how many people are playing the different Borderlands games currently. The original, Pre-Sequel and Wonderlands have players in the hundreds, while 2, 3 and 4 have players in the thousands. The game I’m talking about has 6. Not six thousand, six.

I was going through my Steam library to find a game I might be interested in playing and stumbled on Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep. I was confused and it took me a second to remember what this was. It’s a DLC for Borderlands 2, but as part of the marketing push for Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, they made a standalone game of it. They balanced some things and gave the player quite a bit more skill points (2 per level instead of 1, and you get your action skill on level 2 instead of 5).

For the record, it is not a good game. As a DLC, it was designed originally for characters who already have a build. Here, it’s very difficult to find weapons, you need to do sidequests to gain levels to be on level, but finding on-level weapons is basically impossible for most of the game and since most of the weapons you find are white and green rarity, the game is a constant slog of fighting through armored enemies and archers that take you off balance, so that you can’t really shoot them from afar. It’s a mess. But it is cheap ($9.99 and currently 50% off) and I think it was free when it came out.

Now, the franchise has some extremely rare items. The coveted hybrid Nemesis, for example, is 1 in 19,000 from the source. There are even rarer items, but often the rarity in itself is not the only problem. Often certain items are difficult to obtain, because the source is in a hard place to get (like the Nemesis requires a long drive, because they forgot to include fast travel in the DLCs in BL1) or the kill is slow (because of immune phases, for example). And of course, since no-one plays this game, that makes every drop in this game rare in larger context.

So, as I was playing through the TTAODK (let’s go with that), the four kings dropped me a Norfleet. Now, I don’t know if they are the source or is Norfleet just part of the world drop pool in this particular game, but here’s the thing: My new Norfleet is level 7. That is impossible in BL2, which is the only other game where Norfleet exists.

Now, I need to find out whether this was just pure luck or whether the kings actually drop a Norfleet. After all, they had to add something to the various bosses to drop, so that there would be at least some semblance of balance?

Not sure this is of interest to anyone, but I felt I need to write about this, because it was so weird.