They care because people that haven’t bought it should know that these issues don’t seem to be getting better. They should know that their money would be going to that asshole’s pockets. This shit matters and you wanting to plug your ears to discomfort doesn’t change that.
This guy is why PR consultants and Social Media teams exist. Some people just should not have contact with the public. However good he might or might not be in his work on the project itself, someone should have told him to sit down and shut up and let someone who knows how not to damage the entire game with a single statement handle the communication.
I generally have nothing but a deep sense of loathing for marketing, but I genuinely feel bad for the people who have to try smearing lipstick on this pig.
I’m not much of a fan of the series, but the complaints I’m seeing are in the “I only get 30fps instead of 60fps on ultra!” kinds of things that make me roll my eyes super hard
The eye rolling would be justified if the 30FPS was on something like a 3070 or something like that, but when the complaint comes from someone sporting a 5090, well…
If the game runs at 30FPS on the latest, greatest top-of-the-line card from Nvidia, imagine what kind of performance people are getting from 4060s or RX6600s…
A game that’s this badly optimised is a disrespect to all gamers.
Is that what the situation is? I think that’s also only the case on 4k with brutal mode enabled or whatever.
Obviously that’s still not great if so, but I’d still put it in the eyeroll category personally. I don’t really feel butthurt if I have to run at 1080p or enable vlss or not get 120fps or whatever, especially on day 1 for a game.
But I come from an era where there were games you had to shrink some 3d games lower than 320x200 to get a playable 10fps, so I’m also probably feeling some “back in my day we walked uphill both ways - kids today” energy here. What do I know.
"There's no such thing as bad press" is such a dogshit saying that is demonstrably untrue. There is absolutely bad press, just because we're talking about it doesn't mean it's good for the product. For every one schmuck who thinks they'll buy Borderlands 4 just to prove how good their computer is, there's a hundred people who have decided never to buy it at all and half if them have written off gearbox entirely.
I don’t get it. Borderlands 1 ran at like 720p (less?) on native hardware (Xbox 360) and it looked great, mostly because of the cel-shaded graphics. Cel-shaded was code (maybe still is) for low-res and it covers it up well. So I feel like anyone trying to push 4K Borderlands (Gearbox, or players) is in the wrong here and that may be part of the problem. Now if Borderlands 4 can’t run at 1080p or 1440p on good hardware… that’s Gearbox’s problem to fix. Trying to run Borderlands at 4K sounds about as stupid to me as Animal Crossing at 8K — apparently that has been accomplished with a very powerful computer and an emulator. (AC for Switch is not performance locked to hardware, it’ll scale up to whatever you can run it on.) But it just begs the question “fucking WHY?”.
I feel like the discourse around Borderlands 4 should be “is it fun” followed at a great distance by “is the story compelling enough to draw me in?” I did not have plot expectations for the first one, and it exceeded them.
Disclaimer: played and beat BL1 and all its DLC. Dabbled in 2 and 3. Have not played BL4 yet. Looking forward to a Siren play on my Series X at some point, but not now.
Trying to run Borderlands at 4K sounds about as stupid to me as…
On the contrary, it should be perfectly runnable at 4K because its a 2025 FPS game and the cel-shaded graphics should be easy to render.
‘Unreal Engine’ is no excuse either. Try something like Satisfactory rendering literally thousands of dynamic machines on a shoestring budget with Lumen, like butter, on 2020 GPUs, and tell me that’s a sluggish engine.
This is on Gearbox, who’ve developed on Unreal for 2 decades. And ‘sorry, we’ll work on it’ would have been a fine response…
My understanding is that Unreal is a garbage engine for optimization at face value, it has a lot of useful tools and a lot of incorrect/dated documentation for those tools some of which are also just kind of configured wrong as their default settings. If effort is put into optimization to configure things correctly and only use the various tools like nanite or lumen in their actual use cases (rather than just throwing them on everything) you can get some pretty fantastic optimization.
TLDR: Good but complex tools marketed as low effort with bad defaults and exagerated marketing.
Honestly Cyberpunk’s raytracing runs like poo compared to Lumen (or KCD2 Crytek) compared to how good it looks. I don’t like any of the RT effects but RT Reflections; both RT shadows options flicker, RT lighting conflicts with the baked-in lighting, yet doesn’t replace it if you mod it out.
Most of Cyberpunk’s prettiness is there from good old rastarization, more than most people realize.
PTGI looks incredible, but it’s basically only usable with mods and a 4090+.
Eh, I guess it is. But it also isn’t. We have stagnated a bit in the rasterization and VRAM departments when you talk about affordable entry level cards that most people buy.
And the PlayStation 5 has not changed since it launched…
Sure, newer cards have Ray Tracing stuff and new video encoder pipelines and some other things. But when you look at classic rasterization, and look at xx60 and xx70 class cards, it’s not the sort of leaps we use to have. Node shrinks are not what they use to be.
A 3060 is as fast as a 2070 super. Just as an example I have first hand experience with. There use to be much larger performance gaps between generations.
Yeah, but it’s not just a toon shader/cel shaded shader.
I’ve seen footage, this game has full (highly stylized) PBR and all sorts of fancy lighting along with the cell shaded look. Reducing it all to “cell shading” isn’t the whole story.
Hi-Fi Rush is much closer to classic Borderlands than BL4 is.
Right, I’ve seen the footage too, and I don’t think I’d recognize it as a Borderlands game if the name wasn’t included in the ads. I’m struggling to understand why they chose to go that route, rather than sticking to the beloved, iconic, performant art style of the other games in the series.
That’s a fair take. I’m sure they feared looking dated. I think that’s a misguided fear that you have when you don’t think the other aspects can live up to expectations.
Which is weird because it sounds like they tried really hard with the story, as in they tried to elevate it beyond the usual dick and fart jokes and snark. (They didn’t eliminate that stuff, but rather tried to have a balance) BL3 was terrible in that dept. it went way too hard on that shit imo.
That would be comical. Breaking the 4th wall, boss talking shit. Get a refund punk you suck at this, while you’re at it throw your PC in a lake, fish play better.
Oh, Sans is smarter than that; he’d say how you can’t refund because you’ve already played for way more than 2 hours to get this far. If anything, he would mention your actual playtime statistic in his dialogue.
To make it perfect, the boss should appear right after the two hour mark is met, so you actually can’t. The boss should also use that material. Modern day metal gear solid is they also manage to pull user owned games and game data from steam API or something.
Can someone find an excuse for how this behaviour is not just extremely short sighted / plain stupid? Never heard of the guy before, but he seems to behave like a petty little child throwing a tantrum for something that is obviously his or some of his near colleagues fault. Comparable level of stupidity to “Do you guys not have phones?” lol.
I think they would be better of by just ignoring or at least appeasing the crowd with something.
Edit: I read into some of his key moments as a person and comments he made on the topic. Yikes. Maybe he is trying to appeal to edgy kids so they nag their parents to buy better hardware. Maybe his brain got quadruple-A-fried over the years. But then again, maybe he is just another CEO asshole and has always been lol. It’s a shame, Borderlands 1 and 2 were great games back then. Just let a good game rest in peace, there is no need and no sense in milking every last drop out of every successful series. /rant
There was his crashout before Borderlands 2 where Gearbox accepted a boatload of Sega money to help finish Colonial Marines, and instead outsourced the project. Gearbox kept the money in spite of the failure, and allegedly used it as funding for Borderlands 2. (They were sued by Sega for keeping the cash, but later dropped the suit)
He also crashed out during the Borderlands 3 leadup.
Groped the Claptrap VA 6 years ago because he was tired of voicing Claptrap “as a favor” and when offered normal market rates wanted more because Claptrap is iconic. Pitchford cornered him at the hotel elevator, grabbed the VAs junk and said “youre gonna do what I tell you to” -allegedly.
Other than that, about the same time, he left a thumb drive at a Medieval Times that had company secrets and squirt porn on it. Same thumb drive. Brother apparently can’t afford 2 thumb drives to keep his porn separate from his company secrets.
Pitchford is the problem with Gearbox, but as a whole he’s a far cry from being Rockstar or Nestle, so it doesn’t cross people’s Ick threshold to trigger boycotts.
No, in fact at this point, I struggle to imagine what value he could possibly provide his employer that could match or exceed the damage he’s doing. Certainly, everywhere I’ve worked in the games industry he’d have been out on his ass… some time ago. I clearly must be missing something. Who knows?
I mean, he’s the CEO, but there must be a board and a group of investors he’s answering to.
Yeah, I’m a longtime Borderlands fan who follows what’s going on with the franchise, and Randy just acts like a child who inherited a video game company. He usually says this dumb shit with a smile on his face, so I think he’s intending it to be in good fun, but it just does not come across that way.
But then again, maybe he is just another CEO asshole and has always been lol.
When you fire everyone that disagrees with you, it doesn’t take long to loose the ability to handle criticism.
Like, there’s a very good chance this guy has had absolutely nothing but praise while “working” on this game. So now that people whose job doesn’t depend on making him feel like a genius are giving feedback, it literally breaks his brain.
He most likely genuinely believes the game is perfect and all the criticism is from “trolls and haters” who are just lying because their jealous of his genius.
There’s a reason this attitude is so pervasive among the wealthy.
Now that I think about it, that has been one of my two blanket explanations for rich people being assholes.
The other one being the mix-up of correlation and causation (or even just the direction of causation). Money arguably does make you a worse person, but also being a bad person usually can make you a lot of money in the first place.
Can someone find an excuse for how this behaviour is not just extremely short sighted / plain stupid?
It’s not. It works because he’s always operated like this and keeps getting away with it. People keep sucking up his garbage games so why should he change?
I mean the best thing they could do is to acknowledge that the game could use some optimization and promise to continue working on it. Even if they have no intention of doing so. But that might get them in trouble with Nvidia since they slapped an “Nvidia optimized” badge on it.
The worst thing they could do is say “buy a better PC”.
Exactly, like what CDPR did with Cyberpunk - own up to the fact that it was shit on release, then take the time to fix it and update it. People flipped nearly overnight from having a negative opinion of the game to a positive one when they released the working version of the game (plus a really solid DLC, which probably helped too).
Not adding a nonbinary does not make him a transphobe. Not every game, movie or story need a trans sexual character. It’s fair to ask for an addition in a “roleplaying” game (which it is here to be fair), but its not fair to call someone transphobe if he or she does not do it.
Going straight to “you’re a transphobe” undermines the actual fight when real transphobia occurs and fucks it up for people who are seriously being harmed by actual transphobia. You aren’t helping anything with that. Considering the mechanics of the game, I could see where adding the option could take a lot of work. Maybe it does maybe it doesn’t, but that doesn’t equate to transphobia, you’re just being an asshole.
Would it be nice in the base game? Sure, but it’s not there, and speculating that he’s a transphobe because of that seems like a hell of a conclusion to make.
Edit: I should add that the game via its special dialogue tokens, but not in the UI. This shows at least some level of support explicitly added by CA.
Why not a separate update cross reference update between both games? I can imagine something Haunted Chocolatier related content (not the entire game) to be added into Stardew Valley that acts as a sort of “advertisement”, to get people familiar with the new IP. Or not. Just an idea.
As much ad that would be cool, I want ConcernedApe to make it its own game. I don’t know how much net income he made from SDV, but he DESERVES another payday with HC.
Also, he may have changed enough engine/code stuff in HC so SDV and HC aren’t compatible with each other to bundle together.
That’s true. My machine doesn’t have a TPM. I understand they are trying to make things easier for their team, but I agree I’d rather have wider support.
Counter-counterpoint: Linux users are no users if a game is brimming with cheaters. Who the fuck plays a competitive multiplayer game full of cheaters only because it runs on Linux?
If we had private dedicated servers and the ability to play without anti-cheat, Linux support would be a non-issue. But because we don’t have that, anti-cheat is seen as a necessity, and we don’t have Linux support.
There’s lots they could do to minimise cheaters that they’re not doing. The main one being not sending the cheaters information in the first place.
The wall hack cheat works because for some bizarre reason the server sends players information about the position of other players they can’t possibly see, players on the other side of the map for example, there’s no reason for the client to have that information. The cheaters cannot access information that isn’t given to them.
I agree that only sending absolute needed data is a great policy for stopping all sorts of cheating. I could see them skipping this step if they don’t have a way of doing it fast enough that won’t cause other issues like player pop in. That’s what it’s have to assume.
Yeah it’s not supported for my system so I can’t even launch it. But I was watching some friends stream it and it crashed for three out of four of them within two games. I don’t think any of us will be getting it after release.
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