Borderlands 4 Is Getting Scathing Steam User Reviews – But Is It Really Gearbox’s Fault?

Borderlands 4 seems to be having a rough time with Steam players… but circumstantial evidence implies the problem is not 100 % with the game itself.

The Mess On Steam

PC Gamer reported the bad user reviews on Steam. Most players are complaining about performance issues. The problems do run the gamut of several builds and PC companies, between Intel, AMD, Nvidia, etc.

As of this writing, the game has received a Mixed review average on Steam, from 6,135 English language user reviews. It also has a Mixed review average from 7,900 user reviews in all languages.

But as we hinted at earlier, it doesn’t all add up.

The Signs Point To Everyone Is Enjoying It, Actually

Curiously enough, Borderlands 4 received a MetaCritic of 84. What makes that even more perplexing is that most of these reviews were on PC.

Take-Two primarily sent PC game keys to reviewers instead of PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. And that meant most reviewers were also exposed to these performance issues.

On top of that, it just hit a peak of 207,479 concurrent players when it launched on Steam a few hours ago. It’s clear that fans were excited, and they stuck around so that the players kept growing and growing.

As of this writing that concurrent player peak is at a comfortable 100,000 number.

There’s Something You Should Know About The Steam Users

Steam has their requisite Steam hardware survey quite frequently, and something came up that probably took the wind out of their sails.

As TheGamer found out, half of Steam users are below spec for Borderlands 4! That’s a stunning percentage of the potential player base who may think they’re ready to jump into Kairos, but they actually can’t.

Now, we aren’t suggesting that Steam users didn’t check on this, or that they don’t understand system requirements. But the circumstantial evidence suggests there are people who tried when they were already told it wasn’t happening.

As of this writing, Steam’s survey was updated to August, and the demographics really haven’t changed that much.

In terms of CPU alone, most Steam users have Intel CPUs clocked between 2.3 to 2.69 mhz. One third of them have 8 GB VRAM, when the minimum requires at least 16 GB.

And don’t get me started on the Steam Deck.

“Next-Gen” Has Come For PC Users

The truth is, in spite of the less realistic aesthetic, Borderlands 4 is a current generation video game that was built around new technology.

That means PC gamers can’t just slap a powerful GPU on a weak or even mid-range PC and call it a day.

Gearbox will certainly put the work in to update the game on PC and address everything they can. But as a large scale online multiplayer game, there’s only so much optimization can do.

If you’re having trouble running Borderlands 4 right now, there’s a huge chance that you have to upgrade your PC build.