Even within the gaming space, there are certain “sects” of gamers that believe one kind of thing over another, and one of them is that PC gaming is superior to console gaming because of how far PC rigs can push things versus consoles. After all, consoles have a set of specs that can’t be changed outside of getting a new system. PC rigs can be updated and upgraded constantly, allowing for better and better performance. The catch is that this means it’s up to developers to maximize the performance on PC. As Borderlands 4 players know, that’s not what happened with Gearbox Software.
If you somehow haven’t seen, the Gearbox Software team, and Randy Pitchford in particular, have been getting blasted non-stop by players who are railing against many unoptimized features in Borderlands 4. Whether it’s the visuals, the frame rate issues, or certain other hindrances, it’s driving players crazy. The whole situation is odd, especially when the game got its first Metacritic score and all the reviews were on PC!
Apparently, things were much worse than those reviewers let on, and content creators haven’t been afraid to tell the truth ever since the game’s release last week. Below, you’ll see a pair of tweets where content creators lament what they’re seeing in Unreal Engine 5, and how part of the fault is on the game and its dev team, and how much of it is on NVIDIA.
It’d be one thing if this were merely a case of “something being overlooked that could be patched easily.” Yet, this seems to be a much more complex and deep-seated set of problems. Gearbox Software didn’t do the due diligence needed to make things fully optimized on PC, and gamers are literally paying the price for it. Oh, and no, the “get a refund” option isn’t something that many want to partake in, as they just want to play the game!
The fact that NVIDIA chips are making it worse is an interesting thing, too, as certain comments from the Twitter post above highlight that the game actually runs better on certain AMD cards!
As for Unreal Engine 5, this has been a major concern in recent times with recent games, as several that have used the engine do look good, but have been incredibly hard to perfect and optimize, which leads to some rather odd glitches that players can’t seem to get rid of.
Only time will tell if Gearbox is able to resolve things in a meaningful way.
