Borderlands 4 Developer is Keeping an Eye on Bleed Damage, Won’t Make Knee-Jerk Nerfs

Shortly after the release of Borderlands 4, players have been discovering all kinds of builds for the new set of Vault Hunters. However, some have noted that there might be bugs related how the co-op looter shooter calculates damage for the bleed status effect. Social media user Haderaxe showed off the status effect being incredibly powerful in a video, which had Vex kill a boss in the span of a few seconds by firing a single shot and letting bleed do the work.

Responding to this, Borderlands 4 creative director Graeme Timmins took to social media to promise that Gearbox won’t be making any knee-jerk reactionary changes to nerf certain builds or play styles. Rather, Timmins acknowledged that the power likely came from a glitch in how the game calculates damage from bleed. He also noted that the studio had fixed similar bugs with characters Harlow and Rafa before the title’s official launch. These bugs would make the damage caused by the characters crash the entire game.

“Chill guys, we’re not going to knee jerk react to anything,” wrote Timmins. “That said, this looks like a bug we fixed with Harlow and Rafa prior to launch that could recursively cause damage it and actually crashed the game and/or froze the UI. Going to investigate, could be legit stability prob [sic]”

One player noted that the issue showcased in the video likely comes from the fact that, because of the way damage from the bleed status effect is calculated, it in itself can cause additional instances of bleed on the same enemy. This largely comes down to the fact that bleed can be triggered by getting a critical hit, and with certain passive skills, the damage caused by bleed can also be a critical hit, in turn causing a new instance of bleed on its own. This recursive method of stacking bleed status effects on a single target is likely a bug.

Since its release just last week, Borderlands 4 has turned out to be incredibly successful. Its PC version – available on Steam – has also ended up being the biggest launch in the franchise’s history, peaking at 288,130 concurrent players over the weekend. Even this peak was eventually surpassed, and at the time of writing, Borderlands 4 sits at an all-time peak of 304,398 concurrent players, according to SteamDB.

For the sake of comparison, Borderlands 2 had peaked at 125,000 concurrent players, while Borderlands 3 peaked at 93,820. While the latter was still a popular game, it was likely hindered by the fact that it spent a whole year being available exclusively on the Epic Games Store.

As for the console versions of the looter shooter, while we may not have exact sales figures, it might be safe to say that it has been successful on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S as well. Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford recently took to social media to address the lack of a field of view slider on the console versions of Borderlands 4. For more details, check out our coverage.

Borderlands 4 is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. A Nintendo Switch 2 version is slated for release on October 3. Check out our review for more details.