General Gaming News

[Animalmother]

Not for me this time around I think. I struggled through 3 (but did ultimately enjoy it) and this seems alot more tedious. Reviewer complains about performance issues as well, his CPU getting up to 90° at times. Lacklustre missions, ridiculous difficulty spikes, guns being an afterthought and the open world map getting stale pretty quickly.

[arqueturus]

Not for me this time around I think. I struggled through 3 (but did ultimately enjoy it) and this seems alot more tedious. Reviewer complains about performance issues as well, his CPU getting up to 90° at times. Lacklustre missions, ridiculous difficulty spikes, guns being an afterthought and the open world map getting stale pretty quickly.

I stalled in 3 - the grind was too much and the game just dragged on and on. The writing was so much worse than 2 and that wasn't exactly brilliant. I got 3 when it was super discounted but I'll be skipping 4 for sure. I think the game and game setting, and the games characters are stale at this point.

[Maturin]

BL2 was lightning in a bottle, so I don't think they'll ever find that again. All the locations/story events were memorable and it was just so much fun. It ran great at launch across all PC specs too.

BL3 I completed, but they lost the plot with the story/characters/dialogue/locations. It was irritating beyond belief. Shame, because the gunplay had some genuine improvements.

[Raid]

BL2 was lightning in a bottle, so I don't think they'll ever find that again.

I'm pretty much of the same opinion. Pre-sequel wasn't bad, but nothing since BL2 (and its DLC) has made me think it's the high-end franchise that Randy Pitchford thinks it is.

[Lenny Solidus]

https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/border ... appointed/

Pitchford doesn't have a huge amount of sympathy for your plight—although he did have one last piece of advice to impart: "If you discover your system 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, please use the refund feature on Steam rather than have a subpar experience." Ouch.

This is where we're currently at with our favourite hobby...

I have a 5090 and a newest ryzen 3dx with more than enough ram. The game crashes now that I am over the 2 hours played. Had no issues playing it until the latest patch/update. Trying to see if I can get a refund since most time was spent trying to get the game to run instead of actually playing. AAA title on UE5.... wonder if companies will learn.


Developer response:

BL_CL4P_TP [developer] Posted: 14 Sep @ 10:31am
We're sorry you're experiencing issues playing Borderlands 4 and we appreciate your help and patience as we work with you to resolve them.

If your PC has an NVIDIA card, we have an article covering how to optimize your Graphics Settings here: https://borderlands.2kweb.online/border ... imization/

Current player count right now is 152k...optimizers.

[Raid]

I really wish we could just ignore everything that that prick says. He *constantly* blames his customers for his company's faults, I'm not sure I've ever seen a worse spokesperson for a games company.

[Lenny Solidus]

Rendy Pitchbun goes on to add...

Fun facts: Customer Service reports for Borderlands 4 at roughly 1% or so of installs.

Using that simple, rounded ratio…

More than half of the tickets (~0.55% of customers) are users reporting difficulty with their SHiFT accounts (lost e-mails/access, etc).

The next highest ticket is about FoV controls on console (working on it).

Next, 0.055% of customers are reporting issues with Twitch drops.

And, 0.04% of customers are PC performance related, with CS flagging 0.009% as “valid”. 0.037% have experienced success with education (settings coaching).

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.

This reality is dramatically different than what you would expect if your only sources of information were, say, certain internet threads.

Because I ALWAYS contact customer service anytime I have a problem with a games poor performance at launch or beyond. Doesn't everyone?

https://www.ign.com/articles/code-your- ... ntensifies

“We have made an amazing and fun and huge looter shooter campaign game. The game is pretty damn optimal — which means that the software is doing what we want without wasteful cycles on bad processes.”

Pitchford went on to insist that PC gamers have tools that help them balance their preferences between FPS, resolution, and rendering features, and they should make use of them. “If you aren’t happy with the balance between these things you are experiencing, please tune to your preferences using the tools available to you,” he said.

Acknowledging everyone is entitled to an opinion, Pitchford insisted it was right for Gearbox to have focused on Borderlands 4’s default settings hitting 30fps on minimum specs, and 60fps on recommended specs.

“Some of you would prefer more fps, or more features, or higher resolution. We have provided many tools to help you make those trade offs,” he continued.

We truly are in a wonderful new era.

[Wrathbone]

I note it doesn't state how many requests are sitting in their support inbox, waiting to be logged.

[Mantis]

It's impressive that every time he opens his mouth he seems to so strongly convey the impression that he's a massive douchebag.

[Raid]

Obviously Pitchford using support ticket numbers to justify his stance that few gamers care about the performance issues is virtually guaranteeing that every gamer annoyed by performance issues is going to submit a support ticket out of spite. He's undoubtedly managing to piss off both his customers *and* his support agents at the same time.

[Lenny Solidus]

"Premium gaming for Premium gamers", I don't know about you guys but in all the years I've played and been an avid fan of the series I've never marked it up there with what I perceive as being a Premium product. Would any of you consider it to be so? I'd say it was well above average in its prime (BL2) sure, but never anything close to being a Premium gaming experience in any sense of the word. I just think Randy's perception of his own ip vastly differs a great deal in his own mind. Why more developers don't stick with Unreal Engine 4 I'll never know, just look at how well Stellar Blade did - zero need to run on v5. No need for Lumen in a cell shaded looter shooter.

Also, this is just - whatever the hell...



Yes Randy, that looks optimised.

Edit: If it sounds like I'm jumping on the current trend I'm really not, BL1 BL2 and the Pre-Sequel are greatly important games from my back catalogue and I enjoyed them all immensely, BL3 not so much, I think I've reached the point where this style of shooter in particular just isn't for me anymore and that it's lost a little too much of its original identity and more traditional design pallet with BL4 from what I've seen. I could replay BL2 any day of the week instead.

All in all if you have folk who are running a 5090 and an X3D CPU and they too are struggling to run the game sufficiently even with heavy upscaling in the now much more standardised 4k 60 era then you're not even really catering for that very same so-called "Premium" market you are trying to convince everyone you are.

[Wrathbone]

"Premium gaming for Premium gamers", I don't know about you guys but in all the years I've played and been an avid fan of the series I've never marked it up there with what I perceive as being a Premium product. Would any of you consider it to be so?

I played an hour of BL1 when it came out and hated almost everything about it. Never touched the series since.

[Alan]

They put out Blueshift and went straight downhill. How they survived till now while better studios topple is beyond me.

[Raid]

They put out Blueshift and went straight downhill. How they survived till now while better studios topple is beyond me.

Do people remember them for Blue Shift? I had completely forgotten it existed, but remember Opposing Force.

https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/b ... own-engine

Code your own engine says the CEO. The Gearbox CEO. The Gearbox CEO promoting Borderlands 4. The Gearbox CEO promoting the Borderlands 4 that uses the Unreal Engine that Gearbox didn't develop.

[Stormbringer]

They put out Blueshift and went straight downhill. How they survived till now while better studios topple is beyond me.

Do people remember them for Blue Shift? I had completely forgotten it existed, but remember Opposing Force.

Blue Shift was actually my favourite Half-Life expansion. In the grand scheme of things, I actually enjoyed it more than the core game.