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Randy Pitchford made an impassioned plea before promising Gearbox would fix Borderlands 4’s performance issues.
Why Was Pitchford So Worked Up?
Borderlands 4 was in a terrible state when it launched on all platforms. PC in particular was poorly optimized across all possible builds.
Pitchford made the mistake of getting defensive about the game on social media. Anyone can understand his passion for the studio’s work.
But the things he was saying was genuinely making gamers happy. If it wasn’t for the fact that Borderlands 4 is the greatest game in the franchise to date, it could have ruined the launch.
When Pitchford talked in PAX AU last weekend, he clearly showed his intent to set things right.
Talking About His Background
Pitchford got started by talking about his past.
It’s so amazing to have launched Borderlands 4. You know, I’ve been working on Borderlands for a long time. I founded Gearbox in 1999 and had already been a professional game developer for many years by that point.
That was 26 years ago. And there are people that I work with every day that I’ve been working on Borderlands for over 20 years. And we’re not perfect, but we’re starting to get pretty good at some of this stuff.
But the world changes, you know? I remember when I was working on a video game called Duke Nukem. And our minimum spec was an Intel DX266. That’s a 66 megahertz uh DX2 Intel chip. And our target was 15 frames per second.
And that was amazing back then because when I played Doom on my 286, I had to shrink the screen down to be that big in order to get any kind of playable frame rate. That was like 10 or 12 frames per second.
I come from a time when we cared about fidelity and we cared about resolution. And I also came from a time where we had to learn to be a programmer. We’re all programmers. But you know what? Not everybody is going to tinker with all the settings.
Pitchford Promises Performance Fixes
Pitchford then gets to the point about fixing Borderlands 4’s performance. He said this:
It doesn’t matter that we give all the settings. If you buy a really high-end video card, or you have a performant system, some people really want high frame rates. Performance is a priority for us and it’s a priority for customers.
We’ve already delivered a whole lot of performance upgrades, and we’ve got more coming for our PC gamers to solve some of that for you.
So, instead of expecting you to go in and do all the sliders yourself, we know some of you want to prioritize frame rate. And we’re going to make that easy where you can flip switches and it just kind of does it for you.
You’ll get more frames out of it without having to think about it. And that’s important to us because we want to entertain everybody, especially people I think that tell us they expect more from us. So, we’re here. This is literally why we exist, is to try to entertain you.
Will This Be Enough?
As we pointed out, even people who don’t like Pitchford can say that he cares. Maybe a little bit too much.
Ultimately, the proof will be in the pudding. We’re all looking to Pitchford and the rest of Gearbox to live up to these promises.
