When comparing Don't Starve Together vs Borderlands 2, the Slant community recommends Don't Starve Together for most people. In the question“What are the best online multiplayer games on PC?” Don't Starve Together is ranked 3rd while Borderlands 2 is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Don't Starve Together is:
Getting together a group of friends to play Don't Starve Together adds a lot of enjoyment to the game. If you're all first timers, learning how to survive as you go along is amazing, since you get to share in the learning process and the experience together. As you craft and build your own forts, farms, and more, you find more and more ways to learn how to survive, making things less daunting than if you play the game alone.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Couch co-op makes the game even more fun as you all learn together
Getting together a group of friends to play Don't Starve Together adds a lot of enjoyment to the game. If you're all first timers, learning how to survive as you go along is amazing, since you get to share in the learning process and the experience together. As you craft and build your own forts, farms, and more, you find more and more ways to learn how to survive, making things less daunting than if you play the game alone.
Pro Pleasantly twisted sense of humor
There's a dark sense of humor that pervades the game. There's a humanoid spider boy who can grow a beard of silk. There's a living chest called Chester who acts like a dog. There's also silly info text, werepigs, trees that retaliate when you chop them, and many other things.
Pro Deep and varied crafting system
The crafting system has a lot of depth to it and there are tons of items to make. Starting with the recipe for a torch and a pickaxe. You can also make weapons, armor, and various laboratories that enable new technologies. Building new stuff and advancing is the key to surviving the coming winter.
Pro Tweak the gameplay settings to fit any skill level
The game gives you a lot of customization options. You can change the length of day, weather patterns, and spawn rates for resources and monsters. This allows you to adjust the difficulty level to suit your skill and preference.
Pro Unique mix of 2D and 3D art offers a change of pace
Don't Starve Together has a very unique art style that places two-dimensional characters in a three-dimensional setting. Even the waves in the sea look like cardboard cutouts used in a puppet show. This look and feel to the graphics is a nice change of pace from ultra-realistic games.
Pro The further you get, the more you will learn
Starting out you'll only be gathering twigs and grass, maybe chop a tree. You'll also gather basic food such as mushrooms and carrots. Then you'll start building your encampment, learning how the day/night cycle and the seasons work. Later on you'll start building massive farms, refridgerators, fortifications, and many other things. All of this is done for the sake of not starving.
As the game progresses, you will encounter mechanics such as drought, forest fires, the rainy, season, the cold and many others. To counteract these you need to plan properly and will probably die the first time around. Once your knowledge reaches a certain level, you'll be able to survive indefinitely.
Pro Great replay value
Don't Starve Together has randomly generated (customizable) levels, unlockable characters, a story mode, and you can also play it with up to 5 other friends. All of this helps keep subsequent attempts/playthroughs fresh.
Pro Actual couch co-op that can also be played online
Those playing on local split-screen can play online with others at the same time. This way even if playing locally with a friend, both can experience online play on the same machine and screen.
Pro Complimentary classes that are great for teamwork based co-op
The varying classes and play styles are designed to work together and promote co-op play. One player may be a tank, with large guns and durable shields, while another may have medic abilities and a long-range sniper rifle. This makes for a scenario where each class compliments each other, which is a fun way to play together.
Pro Cl4p-trap for the win <3
Clap trap <3
Pro So much loot, that you will barely see any twice
Borderlands 2 makes it feel like Christmas every time you kill an enemy or open a chest. Whether it's ammo or health or a new and better weapon, whatever you find will reward your curiosity and pique your appetite for more. The potential to find the best loot in the most humble locations makes killing enemies and finding chests incredibly exciting and satisfying. While many loot-based games succeed due to this mechanic, Borderlands 2 surpasses the competition by delivering randomized goodies with unique appearances and stats.
The guns and items in Borderlands 2 have distinct visual features depending on their attributes. For example, a gun with a melee attack bonus might have a blade on it. The customization goes beyond pallet swapping (where the only difference is the color), which leads players to become much more attached to their guns than a bunch of polygons should make them.
You will also find tons and tons of different types of guns. Six different types of guns exist in the game. Each gun can be made by one of eight different manufacturers. Each gun is also made of five additional parts. All of which are generated randomly. With the many millions of combinations available, you never know what attributes the next gun you will find will have. This also gives a slightly different experience to each playthrough, because it’s entirely unpredictable what weapons you will find and when.
Pro Contains fun low-brow humor that can still be serious when it needs to be
Despite being an in-your-face action game with an ostensibly serious plot, Borderlands 2 features a fun-loving sense of humor. This is exaggerated in the sidequests, which feature some of the funniest and most creative writing. This helps the player dive into the main plot while also having the choice to go on sidequests that offer an expanded sense of humor.
The humor is often based on popular memes or lowbrow concepts, which should appeal to a wide range of players.
Pro Each playthrough is a different experience
Borderlands 2 is all about options. With near-infinite weapon options and six character classes, you can play the game multiple times and have a different experience each time. The classes have multiple skill trees that let you tweak your character’s moves and abilities to match how you want to play. This all adds up to a gaming experience that is difficult to beat for customizability.
Pro Stylish comic book like art style that breaks from the herd
The solid black outlines and bright colors make this game look great and stand out from other first-person shooters. The artistic style is similar to the art in comics, clean and bright and breaks with the trend of gray and brown in recent FPS video games.
Pro Runs well on low-spec hardware
It even runs well on a core2duo from 2007, and the comic look is timeless without looking outdated.
Cons
Con Steep learning curve
The first few attempts will last only a couple of in-game days. This is because the game has various punishing mechanics, which you can only learn through trial and error. One such mechanic is the darkness, which will kill you in under a minute if you don't have a light source. Followed by packs of hounds that randomly spawn to kill you. In most cases preparation is key and you can't prepare without knowledge.
Con Can get repetitive
You'll have to repeatedly collect a lot of basic materials like twigs, grass, and ore. This is because most of the starting recipes share the same required materials. Even later in the game you'll be doing many repetitive tasks. Gathering enough firewood for winter is especially bad because you have to chop down dozens of trees. All of this is made worse by the limited inventory space, causing you to make the same trip multiple times.
Con Gameplay can become repetitive
The best strategy is often to run away, take cover, shoot, and repeat. The AI doesn't do much to pursue you, which gives the player a significant advantage and makes patience vital. It can also lead to long firefights with little actual danger – a recipe for boredom.
Con Boring bulletsponge enemies
A lot of the enemies, and especially bosses, are just bulletsponges that require no different tactics in place to beat them.
Con There is little actual cooperation between players
Most of the "cooperation" in Borderlands 2 is limited to shooting the same mob. There are almost no skills or perks that integrate with other characters in a meaningful way (there are a few stat bonuses, but that's pretty much it).
Con Tedious to check gun stats
Being forced to check the stats on each gun you find in order to be able to compare it to the items already in your inventory can become tedious.
Con Limited visual customization of characters
For a game that is full of choices, Borderlands 2 is somehow lacking in visual customization options for the player’s character. There is no way to customize the characters’ faces or body styles; for the most part all that can be changed is the color of their outfit. This can lead to online games full of identical characters, which is not only confusing but also makes it difficult to feel any sort of pride or ownership over your character.
Con Unbalanced enemies
Whether by bugs or by poor design, you may be fighting weak minions at one moment and an enemy that's stronger than the final boss at the other, Crystalisks are almost immune to DLCs characters due to bugs, Pyrotrashers can instakill players just by spawning, the second boss represents a huge difficulty spike right at the beginning, some mini-bosses like Saturn can easily down the player in half the time that the final boss while having roughly the same HP.
Con More tedious with each run
Each time you try to play again in a new difficulty the game becomes even more grindy, slow and brutal.
After the first playthrough a lot of strategies and builds become useless and after the second one only the most OP synergies and builds have a chance to survive, so get ready to search up in google and grind for the most OP stuff you can find.
Con Overrated
It gets old doing the same thing over and over.
Con NPC always talk in the background or HUD
You can't have a funny conversation or nice conversation with your friend, you need to listen to a NPC scream, cry, rant on your ears all along.
Con Tons of jokes just don't land
Yes there are some good jokes that could make you laugh, but you need to hear 150 unfunny forced jokes to get there.
Con Potential lost loot due to sharing
Loot isn't reserved for each individual player when playing co-op, meaning the first person to get to the loot can take as much of it as they want. This can lead to contention between co-op players, which defeats the purpose of cooperative play.