Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford continues to address criticisms for Borderlands 4’s recurring performance issues, now to the point of outright saying players to get a refund for the game if they’re still unhappy with how it runs on their system.
Borderlands 4 saw huge concurrent player counts upon release with a peak of over 300,000 players on Steam but due to the looter shooter’s numerous performance problems the game is currently at a ‘mixed’ review rating on Valve’s platform. And even though Gearbox has released an update for Borderlands 4 aimed at bringing stability improvements along with detailed performance optimization guides for both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs along with thorough “Optimal Settings” suggestions, they haven’t resulted in much performance gains reportedly.
However, Pitchford continues to offer suggestions to players ranging from turning on DLSS and now to just get a refund from Steam instead.
“I was offering to help you if you are not satisfied with your experience and want some help making trade offs. I’m trying to help users understand that the software is the software and there are options available right now for people who want to play right now to make significant and dramatic trade offs between fps, resolution, and graphics features.”
“We are working more on the software, but the software will not radically change later. However, hardware will get better (just like some or all of your hardware probably didn’t exist when Cyberpunk first launched). Do you feel you need help to achieve the trade-offs you’re looking for? What kind of hardware are you using and what resolution are you trying to run at and what frame rate is acceptable to you?”
And lastly, he suggested players to get full refund of their copies if they still find Borderlands 4 difficult to run on their PC:
“The game is the game. Please get a refund from Steam if you aren’t happy with it.”
It seems Gearbox has been missing the crux of the players’ complaints entirely which is that Borderlands 4 runs awfully even on hardware that’s far above the recommended specs (including an RX 6900, based on a comment from an user) so putting the blame entirely on players for trying to run the game on older hardware seems like a cop out.
The situation would’ve gotten better significantly if the devs sincerely acknowledged the issues and had assured players about working on future patches to help fix them for good, cause making a game optimized to run on a wide range of hardware is also part of the overall development process.
