I haven’t played 4, but I played 1, 2, and a bit of the presequel or whatever it was called. They were essentially all the same game. Run, shoot, run, shoot, hear vaguely off-color joke, run, shoot. Is there any particular reason to bother with an overpriced remake of the same old game? Is there a reason for worrying about 4KUHD textures on a game where the aesthetic is cartoony? If you’re a 9 year old who’s never played, and it’s all on mom’s dime, I could see being tricked into buying it by the advertisers, but why is anyone else excited about it?
I played the hell out of the first Borderlands (including New Game+ across all expansions), but promptly bounced off 2 & Pre-Sequel because it literally just felt like more of the same and I was already sated.
BL3 and now BL4 are literally just more of the same, but with ever increasingly more egregious monetisation.
I think that was the one that started in an ice zone, if I remember correctly? I literally couldn’t get past it because I find that aesthetic quite boring…
The ice zone (Southern Shelf) is only the very beginning of the game, you reach more interesting areas after defeating the first major boss, Captain Flynt.
Started with 2, liked it, hated 3, now playing 4 since yesterday with a friend and gameplay wise it has a bunch of changes/improvements. So if someone enjoys the gameplay its good. I mean cod and battlefield and fifa are also nearly the same game every time ;)
This has been there already with Ubisoft games. It wont end well for the IP and also, the main problem is Randy Pitchford. That problem wont be fixed any time soon.
For a long time he was told by everyone in public and in private that he was awesome and perfect, and the greatest game developer, which made him a ton of money and very famous. Now his latest game is failing and his overinflated ego is panicking.
Seems to me he and Gearbox have been in lots of shit for a while now (the infamous USB drive, serious plagiarism accusations when Borderlands did an artistic 180 during development, Alien : Colonial Marines released broken as hell after funneling its funding to make BL2, Duke Nukem Forever…)
And every time Pitchford’s (mostly unnecesary) public answer has been terrible.
As far as DNF goes, it was probably an easy profit for the company. They bought it from 3D Realms and patched it up into something releasable. I doubt they spent a lot on the deal. It didn’t have to sell many copies for them to hit break even.
Not a bad business decision, and I’m glad that development story had a definitive ending.
It’s the year of the wealthy personalities who dont keep their mouth shut because they believe they are right and everyone will agree with their points and love them.
Happening right now with Mark Cuban on the NBA side.
Eh, the people are dumb as fuck and will keep buying their slop. Just look at Nintendo, one of the most horrible companies out there, releasing the same 5 games over and over again, but the idiots keep buying. They will keep buying their Mario Kart until it’s $200
That’s an option, but there were a lot of people involved in making the game. I’m not a fan of collective punishment. They most probably did their best, he’s just a shit spokesperson.
I’m enjoying the game. And yeah, a lot of cool folk work there. Sure a few suck, but there are a lot of neat humans that poured their heart into this game.
I also haven’t had a single issue on a two year old mid-tier laptop so i can’t empathize with the fuss over performance. I’m sure there are older machines out there that wont run it at 1000FPS or whatever.
At the end of the day, it’s a game. Calm tf down and play something else rather than raise your blood pressure over something so relatively trivial.
Deep breath people. It’s a game. Support it or don’t. Edginess not required for this decision.
I played the first one but after that the formula felt pretty samey and I was bored of it. Would a fourth Borderlands game even be good if it wasn’t laggy?
I have come to accept that this is a PR campaign to plaster the name everywhere all over social media and let it worm its way into currently pissed off gamers’ heads for a few months down the line when they’ve calmed down and inevitably buy the fucking thing.
Pitchford is a slimeball. Rarely has a man who is allegedly not an insurance or used-car salesman given off such nakedly scummy vibes.
We need to stop giving free publicity to this little marketing man, and to this poorly optimised, expensive game.
I don’t think there’s anything that well thought out, and it’s just someone who takes things personally and cant resist blurting out their thoughts.
Since after what he said my thinking was even if my friends beg me to get the game on discount I wont because of how personally irritated the comments have made me.
Not casting aspersions towards you personally, but we all know how gamer boycotts go generally. As in, they don’t. People cave and buy the games anyway, once they’re over the initial outrage. This is 100% marketing.
Those people buy games regardless. But this feels like a personal challenge of being called out. Like the face popping out and going “yeah I knew you couldn’t resist bitch”. Usually there isn’t that psychological push back being put out there. It’s not needed.
We’ll see how it comes out in the sales figures, I suppose! I would like to believe you’re right but I just have absolutely not a jot of faith that people will stick to their outrage. 😂
The game already charted high on steam before he said anything. The game didn’t need customers to be directly insulted to get attention, and there’s so many better ways to get attention if controversy is the intent like saying people can’t see over 60 fps and that over 1080 is something most people don’t notice. Gamers are spoiled expecting more when 30 fps was the standard, etc.
Telling people to refund if they don’t like it is just bizzare. The game isn’t struggling for marketing. And there’s many other things that can be said. BL4 will sell just fine but if headlines and calling out consumers was effective marketing then Saints Row and Concord would have sold better. Its more BL4 will sell well inspite of Randy’s attempts to tank it.
I swear I have no idea why they let him talk. He doesn't even own the company, surely someone at 2K could just go... you know... shush.
I don't even think the BL4 thing is that bad, on the face of it. There is really no need to make it worse.
"We have been made aware of some performance issues in certain systems in our new release, we'll be looking into performance improvements in future patches". It's not that hard. At this point just copy/paste whatever the other thousand UE5 games said, go fix the wonky precompilation boot step and stop digging a hole.
Hell, it's even easier than that, because they have actually pretty much put that out. All he really needed to do was shut up about it.
UE5 is a shit engine as of now, but what can be expected of a company run by someone just as insufferable? Epic took the advent of tech like DLSS and frame generation as an excuse to disregard performance and functionality.
All you have to do is pick out any UE5 game that exists and Google that + “performance.” Even meeting the recommended specs for Rogue City, I still had to find specialized configs to get the game the game stop crashing on launch, and even then, those specs were based on using upscaling and frame generation. In reality, “recommended” was about 25fps at 1280x720. That used to be, and realistically should be unthinkable.
AND EVEN THEN, the engine’s built-in settings for upscaling and frame generation caused even more crashing. Ultimately, I had to disable it in-game and turn it on in my driver settings because of the busted-ass engine. This is a problem with the state of gaming, and people like Randy, Tim and their supporters are only exacerbating it.
The engine’s not the problem. Personally, I have only played a single game on UE5 that had shit performance on my aging PC (I can’t even use DLSS), and it’s an early access, independently made, survival crafting game. It was never going to perform well or even be finished.
Apparently the graphics are basically the same as 3, but performance is dog shit on even the best hardware and crashes are unavoidable.
When people complained, he said they need to use AI fake frame and upscale from 720. Which still wasn’t good performance.
It might get fixed later in updates. But this guy is handling so badly he might legitimately be mentally unwell. It’s at the point it’s weird he still has a job
That’s probably not the cause of the issues here though. Denuvo impacts game performance but not as badly as Borderlands 4 is seeing. The engine they chose has issues even on non denuvo games. It’s an unoptimized mess and then gearbox didn’t optimize any further themselves.
BL4 is running horribly, even on higher end PCs. I have a 4090 and a decent processor, but only getting 80FPS max with a good few settings on low or off and AI frame gen on (I would rather not, but performance is just that bad).
According to hardware unboxed 4090 at 1440 natively on the badass preset gets an average of 67 FPS. I'm not defending the poor performance of Borderlands 4, it's definitely ass, I just don't think we should take insane statements from randos at face value. Always verify performance with reputable sources instead of someone saying something on the web without giving the full picture. Who knows what they've done with their computer to get such poor performance.
That doesn’t really seem to contradict the other person’s claim that much? In fact like your said if just a few other things are running on that person’s pc and eating some resources, their claim seems super believable in the context of what you just said so I’m not sure what your point is.
A reviewer/tester is going to be benchmarking in a best case scenario environment. Real people using their real computers will be experiencing a huge variety of other environments. Different temps, hardware settings, programs running, etc. None of that context excuses the performance, and makes that person’s performance claim believable.
And Silksong will also run like shit if I run an AI model in the background that's hogging all resources, but if I said Silksong ran like shit on a 4090 you'd say I'm full of shit. But with Borderlands 4 it would be okay to say that because it fits your biases?
My point is you can't take such statements at face value. They need to be looked at critically because who knows what the person is doing with their machine or what kind of information they're omitting. Maybe the other person has a CPU bottleneck because they threw a 4090 together with a Ryzen 7 2700X? If you take them at face value you're just reflecting your own biases which means you call it bullshit if it doesn't fit your bias or you agree with it when it does fit your bias.
What’s crazy is how inconsistent the problems seem to be. I’ve got a 4080 Super and a decent processor, and I’m getting 120-140fps with most settings as high as they can go with frame gen on at 1440p. Only crashed once in about 40 hours of gameplay.
Oh, you have identical specs and built at the exact same time? Yeah, half of you are going to randomly have issues and half won’t. Enjoy head casing about that.
I’ve got a 6800xt and it runs really well on medium settings. Looks pretty good as well. Never had the game crash on me either. It’s 60fps but I’m cool with that. Gameplay feels smooth at that and it’s steady. No upscaling no frame Gen. 3440x1440.
I have heard a lot of people are having issues with Nvidia hardware though.
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