Borderlands 2 was ahead of its time

We didn't know how lucky we were. "Hey, that's a decent improvement on the original," we thought back when Borderlands 2 came out in 2012. Great class system. Tons of guns. It was a lot of fun. We didn't realize Borderlands 2 would end up being a framework so many games would build on, and yet fail to live up to. We didn't realize it was quite so special. Borderlands 2 took stuff from MMOs, like color-coded rarity levels and raids, but reduced the boredom of traveling by adding bouncy vehicles right out of Halo. It worked both as a co-op experience for friends who wanted an excuse to hang out online, and a solo game. It had a long tail of DLC, timed events like the $100,000 Loot Hunt, and endgame challenges like Digistruct Peak, as well as Overpower levels for players who'd maxed out everything else. Though it predated "games as a service" it was, in its own way, a forever game. There are still at least 5,000 people playing it at any given time on Steam, even today. At the same time, Borderlands 2 is very 2012. When the siren-class character, Maya, spots an elite enemy she shouts "We got a badass over here!" like the Neil deGrasse Tyson reaction. Axton, the soldier-class character, sometimes says "You get a bullet, and you get a bullet!" like Oprah but for murders. There's a double rainbow easter egg, and the pirate-themed DLC features ninja pirates for god's sake. Borderlands 2 is a museum of memes from the early 2010s.  Woah, that's a full rainbow. It's also heavy with pop culture references, but there's a line between the two. The vehicles added in the Captain Scarlett & Her Pirate's Booty DLC are designed to look like the skiff from Return of the Jedi. That's just a reference. When Gaige, the mechromancer-class character, shouts "Unlimited power!" like a million image macros of Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith, that's a meme. Now, several years later, I find the dated-ness of those memes weirdly charming. I haven't heard anyone say "Garbage Day!" or reference trap cards in ages, but here they are in Borderlands 2, frozen in meme amber. Neverending story  It wasn't all memes, of course. We wouldn't have cared about departing NPCs saying "I must go, my people need me" if they weren't in a game that kept us around with an eternal cascade of sweet loot. The sniper rifle that shoots acid bullets in three-round bursts when zoomed. The pistol that reloads almost instantly and is stable as a rock. Those kept us playing through True Vault Hunter difficulty, through multiple DLC packs, across hundreds of hours.  Play a loot game for that long and builds inevitably degenerate. One example of that was The Bee, a shield with a decent chance of dropping from a propaganda radio host in the Boneyard area of the Arid Nexus. Named for Muhammad Ali's famous quote (a reference, not a meme), ...