I’ve been playing Borderlands 4 for about a week now, and I’m happy to report that it’s the best-playing game in the series thus far.
I’ve dug in with the Exo-Soldier Vault Hunter Rafa and his Peacebreaker Cannons Action Skill, and I’ve been having an absolute blast running around and using BL4’s new movement tech that allows you to glide, dash, and double-jump your way around the battlefield, all while wreaking havoc with some wildly fun guns.
The first few hours of BL4 are filled with leveling up, world-building the new location of Kairos, and picking up all sorts of randomly rolled weapons that have the potential to absolutely decimate enemies, or be almost useless depending on the perks you get. But that’s where the fun lies in a looter shooter: shooting and looting until you find the best gun for you. And when the shooting feels as good as it does in this game, that’s not a problem. I can safely say this feels like a massive upgrade and improvement from Borderlands 3.
One of the very few things holding back the game in its early hours, for me in my pre-release version I’ve been playing, is its performance on PC. I’ve experienced numerous crashes, hitching, stuttering, and framerate drops, and I’ve only been able to find consistent performance with the game running on Low settings. This felt especially bad in the game’s opening areas where there’s a good amount of foliage in the environment.
When I presented my performance issues to 2K PR, they relayed the message to me that I should play on Medium settings and to disable Upscaling. This did not fix my problems, unfortunately. I also downloaded new graphics drivers and tweaked the settings a bit more to get it to a playable state, but the performance has me concerned.
My PC is about three years old so it’s admittedly getting close to the time to upgrade, but all of my specs say the game should run well enough on Medium settings. It does not. With the publisher’s recommended settings for my PC specifically, the game still chugs, hitches, freezes for seconds at a time, and crashes, especially when moving quickly between areas on the new Digirunner vehicle.
All I want to do is go fast and slay enemies, but it’s almost impossible to do so. On Low settings, the game is flat, drab, and borderline ugly, and it still struggles to maintain 60 FPS, which is very disappointing. BL4 retains the series’ unique visual style on Unreal Engine 5, and the team says the engine allowed them to build a seamless world without loading screens between areas, but it appears to have come at the cost of performance.
I’m not alone in my sentiment, either, so I’m confident in saying it’s not just my specific PC that creates a cause for concern. Several co-workers and content creators have expressed their own distaste for how the game runs on PC.
I have high hopes that a day one patch will improve performance when the game drops next week on Sept. 12 (and Gearbox says that should be the case). If not day one, then hopefully soon after, because the game itself is a ton of fun to play solo or with friends, as one would come to expect from the looter shooter franchise.
Update on Sept. 6, 3pm CT: Two days ago, while playing Borderlands 4, my PC turned off and would not turn back on. I took it to a repair shop, which discovered the issue was with my power supply unit, which had died. I paid for the affected parts to be replaced and fixed, and got my PC back again today. Generously, 2K PR offered to send me a loaner PC overnight, which I declined as I knew I would be getting my own back this morning.
I’m happy to report that, since getting the PC back, the worst issues I was having with the game are no longer present, so it appears the PSU was causing the bulk of my problems. Plus, according to Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, my PC is below the GPU and RAM minimum recommendations, so that could have contributed to the PSU’s failure.
The company reiterated to me again that it is “aware of an issue with several video cards impacting game performance, and Gearbox is working on a fix targeting the Day 1 patch at launch.”
For clarity, here are my PC specs and game settings:
- OS: Windows 11
- CPU: 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12700K (3.60 GHz)
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
- RAM: 16 GB RAM
- Borderlands 4 video settings: Low preset, 1080p resolution
And here are the recommended and minimum specs for BL4 on Steam:
*Also corrected mention of “Gearbox PR” in the body and replaced it with the correct “2K PR.”
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