Borderlands 4: Seriously, What’s Going On?

September has quickly turned into one of the busiest months in gaming, and that’s considering that the month started with Hollow Knight: Silksong, Cronos: The New Dawn, Hell is Us, Metal Eden and Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion. The subsequent week was relatively calm, featuring only one major release – Gearbox’s Borderlands 4. Despite the attempts by CEO Randy Pitchford to chase away prospective consumers with the whole “might cost $80” controversy, the development team has done a good job building up hype.

Between the deep dives into each character’s skill trees, proper cinematic origin stories, and even a deep dive into the endgame, the overall vibe was pretty positive. Let’s ignore Pitchford saying near launch that he wants “everyone to have realistic expectations for performance” and that “lower end and older hardware may not perform as well as higher end, modern PCs.” You’ll probably remember that Borderlands 3 suffered some pretty severe performance issues when it launched. Surely Borderlands 4 couldn’t be worse, especially since it’s running on Unreal Engine 5, which is notorious for its optimisation. Right?

We arrive at launch day, and I distinctly remember Steam reviews hanging around “Mostly Negative” for the first few hours. It quickly rose to “Mixed” and has sort of hung around there since then, with 65 percent of the currently 22,931 user reviews giving it the thumbs-up.

Many of the reviews complain primarily about performance, optimization and even stability. There are those complaining that their hardware is “top of the line” except if they drop the settings to Medium (which, ironically, is what 2K’s QA team used to achieve 60 FPS on a minimum spec PC, according to Pitchford). There are crashes, freezes, stuttering, the whole works. One highly-awarded user review sums it up rather well: “Love how modern-day games can’t be bothered to be optimized anymore, and they still want $70.”

All that alone is scathing enough, but hey, 65 percent positive, right? And it even passed 300,000 peak concurrent players on Steam at this time, becoming the biggest launch for the platform in the series’ history. Clearly, those complaining are in the minority, except that percentage doesn’t tell the whole story.

However, even the most notable positive reviews warn that performance and optimization are major issues, and that you should only really pick it up if your rig can handle it. Oh, and Frame Generation is still a must.

You would think Gearbox would issue a statement, promise some updates and then work on improving things while letting the overall quality of the game speak for itself. It’s more or less doing that, even if the first update, released last Saturday, simply says it improves stability for a “wide range of PCs.

It also provided optimization guides for Nvidia and AMD GPUs while also warning that anytime the settings are changed, you need to wait for shaders to recompile, which could take up to 15 minutes. Oh, and please play for at least 15 minutes to see if performance has changed in any way. Some have even discovered that going into Nvidia’s Control Panel and increasing the shader cache size to 100 GB helps with stuttering.

But there’s no mistaking the performance issues. Even Digital Foundry, which tested the PC version on the “fastest gaming CPU that money can buy”, still faced stutters, to say nothing of all the other issues. It concluded by noting that, “This one does seem to be running worse than usual for an Unreal Engine 5 game. It is below where it seems like it should be, given how other games using this engine perform.”

But that should be it, and we’re all ready to move on as Gearbox works to improve and optimise its big meal ticket. Except, no one – not you, not me, and probably not the development team – could have accounted for the Pitchford Factor.

Fresh off of polling console players about whether they would like a field of view slider (after multiple complaints wondering why it didn’t ship by default), telling them how it could affect “fairness,” the Gearbox CEO went off on one multi-thread long…declaration, let’s call it, about many things. “Every PC gamer must accept the reality of the relationship between their hardware and what the software they are running is doing.” He went on to describe that there are many tools in place to cater to those who prefer more features, frames or a higher resolution.

“There are a few real issues, but they are affecting a very, very small percentage of users. We are fixing those, and many are already fixed.” All of this seems well enough until we get to the part about DLSS. “If you are so attached to the idea that DLSS is bad for your game experience because of something you saw or read on the internet, I am sorry. I hope instead you would use the technology designed to give you the experience you want.”

Still, he assured players that the studio would keep working and that “the more people that play, the more data we get and the easier it is to keep making improvements.” Which sounds like a weird way to encourage people to spend money and/or time on your game, but Pitchford says he knows that the reactions, both negative and positive, are coming from a place where fans “really care.”

But that should be the end of it, right? Well, like we said, that’s one multi-thread long declaration of sorts. In another post, he shared statistics from Computer Service where complaints accounted for about one percent of installs, and that only 0.04 percent are related to PC performance. About 0.009 percent were marked as “valid”

“That is less than one percent of one percent (0.01%) of customers using CS tickets for valid performance issues, which is less than 1/5 of the users using CS to get help with Twitch drops,” said Pitchford. “This reality is dramatically different from what you would expect if your only sources of information were, say, certain internet threads.”

While this may come across as dismissive, it seems in some roundabout way to actually advertise that not enough players are using Customer Support. He then went into another spiel about everyone who has real issues is someone that Gearbox “cares about,” and that these details would be a “useful perspective if you are getting your feelings from others online.” And there’s the ‘don’t believe everything you read.’

But surely, that’s it, right? Of course not. In yet another thread, Pitchford outlined all the different ways that players could see improved performance on PC before advising that they opt for 1440p at “super high” settings. “If you’re not 4K stubborn and just want to have a great, fun time with higher performance, please consider running at 1440p resolution. If you’ve got a beast of a video card, you’re probably fine at 4K. But if you’re in the middle or close to minimum spec, I would definitely recommend making that trade.”

When told that it would have been better to make the game for the “most common hardware” in the first place, he responded, “Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers. Just as Borderlands 4 cannot run on a PlayStation 4, it cannot be expected to run on too-old PC hardware.” Then he compared it to “trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower’s motor,” which would result in disappointment, and advises those who can’t run the game well “by accident or wishful thinking and/or don’t want to try to mess with settings to make things good enough for you,” to just get a refund.

Oh, and before that, when told that he should try making the game look good without upscaling, Pitchford pulled the ultimate card: “Code your own engine and show us how it’s done, please. We will be your customer when you pull it off. The people doing it now are clearly dumb and don’t know what they’re doing, and all the support and recommendations and code and architecture from the world’s greatest hardware companies and tech companies working with the world’s greatest real-time graphics engine coders don’t know what you seem to know. /sarcasm” Which sounds more like passive aggressiveness, but I digress.

All in all, regardless of where you fall on this debate, there’s no denying that Borderlands 4 has some problems on PC. How long it will take to address all of them is ultimately the biggest concern. I won’t beat the dead horse that is Monster Hunter Wilds still having performance issues after all these months on PC, even if it’s running on a different engine. But there have been plenty of titles, Unreal Engine 5 or not, that simply won’t run best for everyone, regardless of how much optimization is done.

That doesn’t mean Gearbox can just stop trying, however, especially if it wants to justify that higher price tag. It’s best to wait and see, and hopefully, this doesn’t turn into a situation where shareholders are demanding answers months down the line.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.