Gearbox CEO Ignites Firestorm With Bold Rebuttal Of Borderlands 4 Performance Outrage
Amidst complaints of stuttering and choppy performance, the CEO of Gearbox, responsible for Borderlands 4, chimed in on X. Randy Pitchford says that this is a "Premium game" and you should not expect it to run on older PC hardware or the likes of a PS4. Interestingly, there does not seem to be a specific optimization for the PS5 Pro, which would make sense for this demanding game when paired with the current most powerful console.
He also says that many gamers should not attempt to play it at its maximum settings, including 4K resolution on older hardware. While this is a fair point, there are many titles that have been well-optimized in the past upon release with less compromise in settings choices. He recommends using DLSS AI upscaling, which has been an almost necessary toggle setting for many games recently.
While we often expect the console versions to be much more optimized due to the uniform hardware compared to PC, this isn't always the case. Cyberpunk 2077 played infamously poor on console, and took several years to finally fix many of its woes. Likewise, Borderlands 4 is also experiencing issues on its console ports such as the Xbox and PS5.
Thankfully the developer is implementing some changes, including the possibility of adding a field of view (FoV) slider that gamers have been requesting on console. This will apply to the Xbox Series X/S and PS5, although it appears to only be in the initial stages.
The CEO here is right in some aspects, despite the sarcastic tone of some of his responses. On the PC, we have a plethora of settings to toggle in order to tweak the graphical fidelity and acceptable performance. This is a plus for PC, but when consoles experience issues, the options are much more limited. Most console choices end up being just focused on graphics, or performance, with little tweaking allowed.
It does not seem to be very helpful that the CEO has to resort to some sarcasm to address complaints about performance, but here's hoping that they're on fixing issues before it gets too out of control.
