I never noticed your reviews despite many hours lost in the forum, well I usually don't read reviews. But that's very cool stuff.
Myself it's only 40 hours of gaming, not finished play it but great time overall. Anyway some details:
About the respawn: There's respawn but it's been hugely improved in comparison to the 1. They worked on multiple points:
- They spread more selling points so you could sell your stuff before having to drop it or go back. It's an indirect improvement point, but the effect is quite real, it lowdown a lot the respawn. But strangely it seems it didn't worked for you, I wonder why.
- They low down a lot the respawn time so many time you'll come back and there will be no respawn yet, the 1 was rather awful on that point. Moreover the respawn will be less shocking.
- In case you have to come back to a place, you are most often approaching from a different direction and they put care to have respawn places and their fight setup quite different depending of your direction approach. It's because those respawn places are very structured area places and structured respawn.
- Re fight once or twice the same respawn location can be very fun unlike in 1. Those respawn places are very structured, so you can apply very different tactics for managing the place. A respawn becomes like two or three quite different fights.
- Often you can find a road to avoid go through a respawn place if you prefer. The 1 had that too partially but I think it's improved in 2.
I think they could improve this respawn more by having no respawn until you can't see the place anymore and even start the time count at this moment. At least this should be a game option.
In my opinion the game breaking respawn isn't this respawn but the objects respawn each time you reload, that more or less killed for me the mood and the illusion.
About the quests: Ok good writing, good chaining, fair diversity, that special system of the game with quest and story telling through radio com has few bugs, but it proves to be overall very efficient.
But they strongly failed the quest searching aspect. There's some work on that point but it's overall failed, you quickly end in just following a cursor. There's multiple reasons for that. But one is coming from a wrong approach of the core mechanism of the game.
Many quests are related to items, enemies, characters, and locations to find. There's a fairly good job to have the items mildly hidden but they spawn only when a quest is started, and it can't work like that without a stupid cursor. It can't because you find an area and you explore it, search in corners, and stuff. Then later a quest starts and trigger some spawning in that area, cool but too late, you won't search and dig again that area so you just follow the cursor.
For enemies and characters it's more arguable and could be related to evolutions, but most often the game don't bother manage it, so it ends of giving up try find clues and significations and you end just follow a boring stupid cursor.
Second game breaking point for me.
About the graphics: So you seem on the realist point of view, the more realistic and the more detailed, the better it is.
For me no matter the detail level or realism level, it's always very far to be realistic, take an old but not too old game you was considering very realistic and replay it and quote how unrealistic it seems now, that's pure illusion.
But the style and the art design, that is a huge point. Skyrim thrown a dangerous precedent case by reaching a stunning quality on this aspect. Anyway, in it's own style, for sure more cartoon on choice, Borderland 2 is just a great achievement on that point. Mood, style, appeal, everything strong, in comparison of Skyrim it is just missing the art design quality level, but it is stronger on points like mood and originality. Skyrim graphics will perhaps become dated despite the art quality level, Borderlands 2 will never be dated on that aspect, thanks to the very strong style approach.