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Gearbox has delayed Borderlands 4 on Switch 2.
They made this announcement on social media:
Greetings, Vault Hunters – We need to share that the release of Borderlands 4 on Nintendo Switch 2 is being delayed.
We do not take this decision lightly, but are committed to ensuring we deliver the best possible experience to our fans, and the game needs additional development and polish time to do that.
Our hope is to also better align this release with the addition of cross saves, which we are working on and recognize, is very important. We will update you all on the new release timing once we’ve fully adjusted our plans.
In accordance with Nintendo’s policy, all digital pre-orders to date will be cancelled. Customers can initiate that process themselves now, or it will happen automatically starting on Friday, Sept. 26.
Gearbox goes on to direct customers to Nintendo’s support website on how to cancel pre-orders. We’ll link to the US Nintendo support page here. If you ordered the game from a 3rd party retailer, you’ll have to contact that retailer.
This Is Actually A Relief?
Gearbox Creative Director Graeme Timmins responded to the announcement:
A tough decision, but ultimately the right decision. Quality matters and a delay is the appropriate call.
We have been hearing about issues for Borderlands 4 since it launched on all other platforms. So it’s no surprise that Gearbox would need more time to work on the Switch 2 port.
Could The Switch 2 Itself Be The Reason For The Delay?
Last August, EpicNNG actually got to try out the Switch 2 version of the game on Gamescom. He shared his sentiments on Twitter:
Okay I’ll just put it bluntly:
Borderlands 4 on the Switch 2 could barely run at 30fps with 4 enemies on screen in docked mode. It had horrendous input delay, and the render resolution was seemingly turned all the way down.
He also made a video about it for YouTube. But around the same time, other people were sharing video of the game playing on the platform. We’ll share one such video clip below.
It isn’t clear what the situation was at Gamescom, but there were a lot of Switch 2 third party games that had terrible previews. And many of those games, famously Star Wars Outlaws, turned out to be performing much better than expected.
We don’t have enough information to assess if Borderlands 4 was also part of that Switch 2 preview situation. But with this delay, Gearbox is going to make that question irrelevant.
We have seen a lot of games prove that the Switch 2 can gamely deliver on current generation games. We aren’t seeing games with huge issues when they actually get released so far. Hopefully, Gearbox can put the work in to make sure that the console continues that trend.
Obviously there’s a huge upside if Gearbox can make a definitive portable version of Borderlands 4 on the record breaking game console of the moment.
