Borderlands 2

Gearbox's 2012 shooter is the one that got the balance right between loot volume and writing. You are one of four Vault Hunters on Pandora, hunting a corporate tyrant named Handsome Jack who spends the entire game talking to you over the radio and is genuinely funny while being genuinely awful, which is a harder trick than it sounds. Underneath is a procedural gun generator producing millions of variations across manufacturers with distinct identities: Jakobs are slow and lethal, Tediore reload by throwing the gun as a grenade, Hyperion get more accurate the longer you hold the trigger. Class skill trees are deep enough that two Sirens can play as different characters, and the whole thing is built for four-player co-op with scaling enemies. The endgame added raid bosses and a level cap that kept moving through years of DLC, some of which - the Tiny Tina campaign in particular - is better written than the main story. It remains the entry in the series everyone points to when defending the formula.