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Randy Pitchford has made a surprising revelation about Borderlands 4 just as Gearbox prepares their big PC update.
As we’re sure you’ve heard by now, as much of a success as Borderlands 4 has been, fans have been griping about the game’s optimization.
This does not mean that the game is experiencing severe performance issues, or that such issues hamper the experience. For the most part, gamers can ignore or even not see any issues.
But this is more about the players feeling disappointed. The optimization is the reason a lot of medium spec PC users are having issues playing the game. On the higher end, PC gamers aren’t seeing the performance they expect.
The Big PC Update Is Here
Gearbox made this announcement on their website:
…Today we’re releasing a new update to help improve stability for a wide range of PCs.
Please note that any time you change any of your graphics settings, your shaders will need to recompile; it may take up to 15 minutes for this process to fully complete.
They went on to share different instructions for Nvidia GPUs here and AMD GPUs here. For those curious, Intel Arc GPUs are also experiencing issues. You may expect them to make updates much later than their peers.
Randy Pitchford Revealed Something Surprising
Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford went online to touch base with the players. As we know, that doesn’t always work out well. But we can’t say he isn’t earnest.
Randy tried to defend Gearbox’s choices for PC on Twitter. We won’t share his whole thread here, but he did reveal something surprising.
Randy said this:
For a campaign shooter looter, it is absolutely reasonable for developers to focus on default settings achieving 30fps on minimum specification and 60fps on recommended specification.
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.
… But please accept that the game is doing a lot and running pretty optimally and that you may have to either accept some trade offs between fps, features and resolution as your preference or you will continue to be disappointed.
So, Randy just admitted that Gearbox focused on maxing performance at 60 FPS. This is the reason that gamers with powerful rigs aren’t seeing their PCs perform that much better.
If you have seen everyone’s performance tests on social media, there are builds that can run the game above 60 FPS. But they’re still very inefficient given the performance potential of those PCs.
The Value Of Setting Expectations
If this was Gearbox’s plan from the start, we think they could have avoided a lot of grief by announcing this before the game launched. For an online multiplayer game that connects gamers across different platforms, that’s not unreasonable at all.
Gearbox did succeed in making their online cross platform connectivity work, and that’s helped make Borderlands 4 a huge success. And we do know Gearbox is talented enough to get full optimization on PCs and consoles in time.
Given this situation, Gearbox may want to set expectations for the Switch 2 version of the game before it launches next month. If they’re still working with Nvidia’s bespoke hardware, than the game’s state at launch may not accurately reflect that console’s potential too.
But we’re sure Gearbox can make things right eventually.
