Borderlands 4 developers Gearbox have chucked more wrenches at the shooter’s PC performance over the weekend, following issues that’ve landed it mixed Steam review fortunes since launch last week. However, if you’re looking for patch notes, you’re gonna be a bit disappointed. Ah well, at least there are essay-length Randy Pitchford Twitter threads to scroll through if you’re partial to someone waffling about how the game runs.
Initially, Gearbox’s response to the PC performance problems was to publish a massive recommended settings table. Our James had a go at seeing if following it made a tangible difference. While you can and should read his full testing write-up , the short version is that the stuttering many players have reported wasn’t magically wiped away by that guidance.
Cue this latest update, which as Gearbox wrote on Steam, aims to “help improve stability for a wide range of PCs”. Unlike most patches, they declined to get into any nitty-gritty specifics beyond that. There’s a warning that whenever you change your graphics settings, it can take up to 15 minutes for your shaders to recompile, as well as a reposting of those optimisation guides for Nvidia and AMD hardware.
Aside from those, the studio added: “We’re continuing to read your feedback, planning additional updates and will have more details to come”. So, no bullet-pointed patch notes to illustrate exactly how the update’s gone about trying to make things run in a more stable fashion, which seems a strange choice and has understandably raised eyebrows among some players.
Who needs full patch notes, however, when you’ve got Gearbox CEO yammering into the void about Borderlands 4 on the socials. He has at least emphasised that the studio are putting in “significant work on PC performance”. Though, that did come midway through an essay-length thread that began with the declaration: “Every PC gamer must accept the reality of the relationship between their hardware and what the software they are running is doing.”
After shouting at anyone who’s assumed that PCs between minimum and recommended specs “can achieve all of extremely high frame rate, maximum/ultra features, and extremely high resolution”, the tweetman asserted that “there are a few real issues, but they are affecting a very, very small percentage of users.”
In other Borderlands 4 launch-related news, publishers Take-Two took the opportunity to reiterate they aren’t in the “spyware” business via the game’s terms of service agreement. That followed some concern over the contents of such Take-Two docs in terms of data collection earlier this year, with some older Borderlandses briefly being review-bombed.
