I have an issue with the idea that Borderlands is dominating gaming news. I didn’t even realise it had launched so I wouldn’t exactly call it popping off the shelf.
I was going to comment the same thing. Maybe it’s just the circles i’m in, but like the only thing i’ve heard about it is the price and the performance issues on PC
Yeah but I would have known thwy had released because they would have been advertising or something. I don’t feel like anyone’s spoken about Borderlands since that comment about how it should be $90 or whatever.
That’s interesting, because without even really looking for it, it came up in Nintendo Directs, Keighley presentations, Sony presentations, and any discourse about games moving around release dates on account of GTA VI. For whatever reason, this game’s release date was moved up by a couple of weeks over its initial release date announcement, and that pretty much never happens, so it made headlines for that too. Oh yeah, and while trying to watch streamers play Borderlands, those streams have been interrupted by ads for Borderlands 4.
I get where you're coming from, I found out Borderlands 4 launched when I saw the news about it having performance issues. That said, if you look at Steam charts Borderlands 4 is just smidge below Silksong numbers and at the time of writing this comment Silksong is the 4th most popular game and Borderlands is 6th most popular game, barely beaten out by a game called Banana (which I've never even heard of and I have no clue why it's that popular).
I get what kind of a game it is. I don't get how that is so popular. We're talking about player counts that not even Destiny 2 could reach. The only rational conclusion I came come to is that those numbers have to be botted.
my guess is that a lot of people let the game idle in the background to farm items, that’s why it’s so “popular”. It’s not “active players”, it’s just a large number of people farming items in the hopes to get one they can sell for a larger sum.
Afaik it has been in the top charts for over a year.
I've also been playing this, even though it's well out of what I normally play. I'd describe it as being closer to an ARPG than a MOBA, and for both better and for worse, it feels like a roguelike version of mid-seasonal gameplay in ARPGs. Couple of buttons on relatively short cooldowns backed up by buildcrafting meant to make those buttons utterly broken with lots of good opportunities available. There's okay variance between runs. Buildcrafting is super flexible in general, you can move all of your ability upgrades around to other abilities at any time with no cost, you can even give almost everything to friends in co-op.
Not all is good. The game was review-bombed at launch due to the metaprogression and cooldown changes from the demo, and honestly, that was probably correct. The balancing work and the per-character XP requirements ruined some of the fun that the demo had. The worst was hotfixed within a day, even adding a compensation system for demo players, and progress is like 3X faster now, but it still feels like it's too slow and not fluid enough. I sorta settled on having a "main" in a genre that's more fun if you swap between characters to keep things fresh. The devs will probably find a solution sooner than later.
There's some other problems like the performance absolutely tanking in lategame regardless of what you're playing on (my trusty RX 580 performs about as well as my friend's RTX 4080, and that's a pretty universal complaint), there's some multiplayer bugs like a boss attack that only the host can survive, some questionable balancing here and there, one of the 8 characters feels unfinished (Shell), but overall it's been pretty good, fills a pretty unique role and the problems don't really detract from what I'm getting out of it.
I have no clue why it says MOBA gameplay because it is nothing like a MOBA unless there are multiple definitions on that term. The only thing is that you have 4 (5) skills?
Played the demo for like 8 hours which was enough for getting all my 5 chars to level 10 or more which feel enough to put on whatever in the skilltree.
Agree with the slow progress however but I don’t mind too much. I have a lot of fun with the game.
I am genuinely curious how Steam puts games in its Top Seller list. It would seem that sometimes a game gets into the list that does not belong merely because it is new. I amnot saying that applies to this game, but I would like to see some metrics that show whether Steam alters anything for anything in the Top Seller list.
Why can’t a game you haven’t heard about be in the top sellers? I did hear about it a couple of weeks ago, played the demo and it was a no brainer for me to buy it.
How Steam measures whatever sells what I don’t know but it can be 15 minutes of fame for smaller studios also. If the game is good, it is earned imo.
Edit: read your comment a bit better now. I am sorry if this got a negative feeling to it. Not my intention.
It’s by revenue over a certain amount of time, but I don’t know what that period of time is. A $35 game has to sell twice as many copies as a $70 game to rank just as high. Since the Steam Deck is about $400, depending on SKU, it’s usually in that top sellers list despite not matching the volume of sales that certain games do.
DID Blands 4 “dominate”? The only mention of it I saw was pitchford (and his magic flash drive) bragging that the servers wouldn’t get hugged over the weekend and… yeah.
B1 is a bit slow, but quite fun, B2 is brilliant, BTPS is similar to B2, but the crafting stuff is annoying, B3 was too chaotic with a too cluttred UI and a damn annoying story, B4, I have no idea
I liked that one but weirdly there’s no NG+ and the DLC kind of sucked. I finished it with a friend and we were like, “that’s it?”. It’s not very long, and it ends shortly after your end of skill tree powers become available.
I think it was a really good game originally. The writing has gotten really fucking bad though, and the gameplay hasn’t really evolved with the times. (I can’t speak on the new game.)
The new one feels like progress so far. I’m not very deep in, but the story and dialogue are not nearly as annoying as 3 was. The biggest difference has to be the movement. In previous games it often felt like you were trudging forward until you found an enemy and then running backwards so they didn’t catch you before they die. Grappling hooks, double jumps, and gliding add a TON of movement and gives you those John Wick moments where you’re bouncing around the area and blasting people from every direction.
I really don’t understand the open world though. I don’t think that’s the direction they needed to go. I think the best looter-shooter I’ve played recently is Roboquest. It has all the movement you said (and more), but it’s in tight rooms, so the devs have more control of the design. Open worlds means the devs have essentially zero control of encounters and it becomes too easy. The only thing they can do is crank up health of enemies so they don’t die as quickly.
I’m not far enough to have settled on an opinion on the open world yet. I did find it tedious in other BL games that I had to walk through the same areas in the same order over and over again to access the end game or start a new character.
That being said, I often don’t know where to go or what to do in BL4. Thank Torgue they added the Echo objective finder, that’s pretty much the only way I’ve been able to stay on track at all.
Yeah, I just have a bias against open world games at this point. Damn near every game thinks they need to be open world, and most of the time it just makes things more tedious and boring. It takes a ton of dev time to make just for players to run past 99% of it. There are some games it really works for, but most would be better off with a tighter design (and it’d also save time and money).
I understand your worries. I was was also concerned about the openworld first, but so far they have nailed the open world part pretty well. Travelling has been fun. There has been always fast travel near when i have wanted to use it. There is enough hidden jokes and easter eggs that i feel rewarded to look around.
I dont really understand your point. Devs still curate where you meet the enemies. Its not like its procedurally generated map where everything is random.
I cant remember single time in my 20 hours of gameplay where i have tought that i hate fighting here, or that these enemies dont fit here.
I dont really understand your point. Devs still curate where you meet the enemies. Its not like its procedurally generated map where everything is random.
I haven’t played it, so maybe they’ve done something to control it. I doubt it though. If you can come from any direction, that makes encounters much harder to design. Think about older Borderlands games when entering a compound. You’d come through one main gate and enemies would be set up with cover and you’d have to fight your way through. With open world you could do something like fly into the middle of the compound, and that’s has to be accounted for.
Check out Roboquest, for example. It has some really impressive movement options, but it’s choice of rooms let’s them restrict how much you can abuse them. You’ll always be fighting through the enemies from an expected direction.
I cant remember single time in my 20 hours of gameplay where i have tought that i hate fighting here, or that these enemies dont fit here.
This isn’t what I meant. There’s nuance between liking something and it being the best possible thing. It can be good and still be possible to be better. My biggest issue with open worlds is, like you mentioned at the beginning, fast travel. It takes so much time and resources to make an open world, just for players to fast travel past most of it. Is it really worth the that? Did it add that much to the experience? We could have more cheaper games with tighter designed experiences instead of games that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. (BL3 cost $140m, and for cost “more than twice” that, so minimum $280m.)
I don’t think people understand that everything is an opportunity cost. If you make an open world game, that’s at the expensive of so much more. At minimum, it’s going to be less game to play (or longer between games and more expensive). Is getting a lot of space that you hardly interact with worth it?
The thing about open world is, you can make those smaller contained spaces you keep mentioning with Roboquest inside of some structure with a single entrance and boom, we have your preferred formula.
Sure. You can make those, but you have to spend a lot of money and time making the open world just to make places for the rooms to live. Is that worth it? Everything is opportunity cost. Did doubling the cost improve the game that much?
It depends on the game. Could a Sonic game be fun in open world? Yes, and it was. Would The Hunt? Or Supermeat Boy? Probably not. I’m just pointing out you can still design for your movement abilities in an open world.
For sure, you can. However, every modern game is trying to be an open world game. It’s stupid. We get ballooning budgets and dev cycles for games that don’t really get anything from being open world. I’d rather get three great less open games than one open world game that is sacrificing things to make the open world work.
I will agree theres a lot more. Theres just a lot more games in general. Pick up the Solium Infernum remake, or Windblown, or Wizard of Legend, or even Helldivers 2 isnt open world. Plenty to choose from. But I do emplore you to play Sonic Frontiers. Shit was dope. Also Sword of the Sea just came out, another fine addition to the atmospheric collection. Theres just a lot more now. So you’re gonna see a lot more and you’re gonna see a lot more terrible games.
It’s not even just about the games being terrible. The ballooning costs is just unsustainable. It’s the reason we’ve seen so many layoffs, and it sucks. It’s just mismanagement. The executives are the ones telling the developers to make open world games, for the most part. They don’t understand how that effects the rest of the design, or how much it ends up costing. They just see a trend and tell the studios they need to follow it.
If it was just that we got some shitty games I wouldn’t care. However, it’s effecting people’s lives. We need a more sustainable industry of smaller budget games that know what they are and plays to its strengths. We’ve got too many games trying to be everything games. It’s the reason studios ramped up the price to $70, and then, quickly after, $80. Soon they’ll be Charing $90-$100 because they let costs get too high to maintain.
For better or worse it’s unreal engine 5 (AKA volumetrics: the engine), so it’s got some easy performance gains here and there with engine.ini tweaks and maybe some mods to remove stuff if denuvo isn’t too bad about it.
I haven’t looked at the performance reviews per system yet but I recall the complaints for Borderlands 3 mainly came from people trying to run it on an old i5 with a 1060 or similar. You need a high end system, that much is clear. Or you need to get comfortable with 30 fps.
I’m not saying Randy is right to strike that tone, but you can’t deny there is a point to saying that some games are meant to be played on powerful systems and won’t accept anything less.
People with high end systems (5090s etc) are apparent having a lot of performance issues, and are unable to run the game at 60fps/4k without AI upscaling or frame generation.
There’s also a lot of complaints about stuttering, and the game wouldn’t launch at all for a lot of people when it first came out.
People with high end systems (5090s etc) are apparent having a lot of performance issues, and are unable to run the game at 60fps/4k without AI upscaling or frame generation.
It’s even better when you realize that the performance degrades the longer you’ve been playing that session. It’s unoptimized and leaky.
My complaint about borderlands 3 was the cringe main antagonists. Like I’m happily shooting stuff and they hop in with painfully mediocre snippets of whatever they’re supposed to be doing. Also they killed off one of the best characters. The gunplay felt nice, the music and graphics were good. I didn’t have any real technical issues.
Sure, in theory. In practice we're talking about 3k machines struggling to hit 60FPS (dropping as low as 30fps on occasions) on max settings with DLSS on. A 3k machine gets you high setting low 70 FPS with DLSS on. If a 3k machine is not a high end system what the fuck is a high end system? And the bigger issue is what exactly are we paying for here? Borderlands 4 doesn't even look significantly better than Borderlands 3. There's no reason for the game to be this performance heavy when it looks like a game from 2019.
You have a point in some hypothetical scenario but in actuality this is a case of Randy being full of shit.
It's sad that a lot of devs just make their game and then slap frame-gen on it and then release it. Like who cares about optimization. Not that I blame them, people still buy those games full-priced, so...
Even so, the steam hardware survey seems to indicate that the vast majority of users wouldn’t reach specs to enable developer-approved framegen anyway. (Unless you count Lossless Scaling).
We’re kind of going full circle back to the paradigm of “You are judged on your entry level as much (or more) than your high end [gameplay performance]”.
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