Yesterday, the official
Borderlands X account finally spoke up about the performance issues that gamers have been reporting on console and PC since
Borderlands 4 launched, taking a much calmer approach than Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford. Pitchford was making his own headlines, thanks to how angrily he was replying to users posting about the issue, including a now-immortal challenge to "
Code your own engine and show us how it's done, please." In comparison to those fiery statements, the official
Borderlands account has instead claimed that "Updates to improve stability and performance already started rolling out over the weekend and another is coming this Thursday. This is our top priority." Console player performance concerns are also mentioned to be under investigation, and the requested Field of View slider is already in testing.
So, while it would seem that Randy Pitchford was behaving defensively and not fully owning the performance issues with
Borderlands 4, the broader development team is taking a different approach and focusing their efforts on fixing the problems instead of fighting with people about it on X. Hopefully, Pitchford follows suit, because by most accounts,
Borderlands 4 is actually a pretty good game compared to 3, and is really only bogged down by these performance issues, and now in relation the Gearbox CEO's behavior on X. Fortunately for Gearbox at large,
Borderlands is a fairly popular series, and if these performance issues are ironed out quickly enough, the long-term success of 4 is promising. One would hope, anyway— especially if Gearbox plans to sell any of
that DLC it keeps mentioning.
In any case, it's actually not all that surprising to see another major game launch bogged down by performance complaints. In the era of Unreal Engine 5, performance complaints regarding Epic Games' latest engine have become commonplace. This week, it's
Borderlands 4, and three weeks ago it was
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater. While the problems do seem to be more severe in
Borderlands 4's case, this game is at least targeting a far more ambitious open world than
Delta's gameplay which is frequently separated by loading zones. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has also
commented on Unreal Engine 5's optimization woes, claiming that "The main cause is the order of development," and that developers aren't optimizing the engine properly. While nowhere near as severe a dismissal as "code your own engine," it does still leave a bad taste behind, and makes one worry how many more Unreal Engine games are going to ship with major performance issues.
