Despite hitting a peak of over 300,000 concurrent players on Steam alone, the recently released Borderlands 4 is still at a ‘mixed’ review rating on Valve’s platform cause of numerous performance issues and technical problems. The recurring complaints from players are centered around Borderlands 4’s unexpectedly low performance even on sufficiently high-end PCs with reports of huge crashes that are stopping the game from even starting up. And though Gearbox has recently released detailed performance optimization guides for both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs along with thorough “Optimal Settings” suggestions, those haven’t really resulted in much performance gains.
And recently, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has hit back at the player criticism of Borderlands 4 on his X/ Twitter account, which reads:
“Code your own engine and show us how it’s done, please. We will be your customer when you pull it off. The people doing it now are clearly dumb and don’t know what they’re doing and all the support and recommendations and code and architecture from the world’s greatest hardware companies and tech companies working with the world’s greatest real time graphics engine coders don’t know what you seem to know. /sarcasm”
His post was in response to one user commenting on making a game look good without using AI upscaling, along with a large number of messages from Pitchford focusing on technical advice ranging from turning off volumetric fog in Borderlands 4 to turning on DLSS, among others.
Now of course Pitchford’s comment quickly attracted a lot of posts from players accusing the developers of charging a high price for a product that should’ve used more time on optimization and complaining about his snarky reaction to gamers who are genuinely having trouble getting decent performance out of Borderlands 4.
Over the years the tech industry has merged with the gaming industry in ways that have resulted in much more realistic visuals with Ray Tracing and other impressive technological feats but they have also resulted in PC gaming getting more and more expensive. And one of the downsides of that is a lot of developers thinking that optimization for games has become quite obsolete and all you need is to just turn on upscaling techniques or Frame-gen. But that really doesn’t work and the current scenario with Borderlands 4 makes it all abundantly clear that no amount of technological wizardry can help out if a game skips on properly taking the time to optimize for a wide range of hardware.
