For gamers, they’ve been dealing with frustrations surrounding game developers for quite a while now. While not every dev team has been perfect in decades past, there was a time when many thought about quality over all else. As such, when a game launched, it played as perfectly as possible…most of the time. However, in recent periods, certain games have not only launched in a “broken state,” which created one kind of frustration, but then the dev teams would complain about how fans reacted to it at times. The launch of Borderlands 4 was one such event that unleashed this 1-2-punch of frustration.
The source of the frustrations was first, the game had serious optimization issues on both console and PC, which made no sense in various ways, and second, Gearbox Software head Randy Pitchford went out of his way to blame everyone but the team for what happened. When optimization issues were brought up, he told gamers “to make their own engine and sell it to Gearbox,” or to “get a refund if they didn’t like it.” That’s not exactly mature behavior.
Thankfully, at PAX Australia not too long ago, he did a panel in front of fans and admitted that there was some work that truly needed to be done:
“I come from a time where we cared about fidelity, and we cared about resolution, and I also came from a time where we kinda had to learn… but you know what? Not everybody is gonna tinker with all the settings. And if you buy a really high-end video card or if you have a system that performs, some people really want high framerate, and so performance is a priority for us and it’s a priority for customers.”
It might not be a true apology, but we’ll take it. It does “make sense” that Randy would think that gamers “would just adjust things on Borderlands 4 until it worked,” because that seems to be how his mind works. The problem with that is not everyone is tech-minded, and just as important, not everyone has the money to buy a super expensive gaming PC rig to get maximum performance. Plus, let’s not forget that not everyone got the game on PC, but on console. Thus, there was no way to tweak things to get better performance there.
Thankfully, not everyone at Gearbox Software has had Randy’s “mindset,” and thus, they’ve been working hard to get things working properly. A new patch is scheduled for this week, and let’s hope it helps.
