Borderlands 4 Launches To Mostly Negative Steam Reviews Over Performance Issues And Crashing
(www.thegamer.com)
from simple@piefed.social to games@lemmy.world on 11 Sep 22:56
https://piefed.social/post/1254653
from simple@piefed.social to games@lemmy.world on 11 Sep 22:56
https://piefed.social/post/1254653
AAA game? Performance issues and crashing on release? Why I never.
threaded - newest
I briefly watched Jackfrags video on it. The graphics aren’t even anything special, the world isn’t overly populated and I can’t imagine there would be any overly complex calculations running in the background and it performs like shit.
Fuck these fucks.
It’s Unreal Engine 5, so the bad performance is included by default. I’ve played 4 UE5 titles in recent months and all of them ran terrible even though they were far from groundbreaking graphically.
Hell, I could play the gorgeous KCD2 on high settings at a buttery smooth 60FPS but apparently I need to set everything to the very lowest and down to 720p to get the same result on much worse looking Unreal games.
Same. My graphics card upgrade did little to help out performance on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2.
The weirdest thing to me is that the graphics settings don’t make much of a difference. There’s like a 20 FPS gain between “Ultra” and “Lowest” and I could barely tell which one it is just based on the visuals alone. How do Unreal devs mess up their optimization so consistently across many games? Surely the problem must be somewhat related to the engine itself.
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I’ve played two games (off the top of my head) that run UE5. Remnant II and Payday 3. Both have performance problems.
Remnant II is just overall poorly optimised. Payday 3 has weird random hitches. Granted they seem like they might be server side because when I get them my friend does too, almost simultaneously, and vice-versa.
Yes, those are lagspikes from the server IIRC.
I played Remnant 2 on my rtx 3080 and had no issues with it performance wise. I think I had one instance of getting stuck on world geometry but that was it really. Mostly in multiplayer too, played the whole thing with 2 friends.
I also had great experiences with Claire Obscur, Split Fiction, Tempest Rising, The Alters, and Talos Principle 2. All of them are UE5. I dont really like Epic or Tim Sweeney so I wouldnt normally defend them, but its more that I wouldnt be too quick to blame the engine when all these other devs can do it right.
I don’t have bugs with Remnant, it just doesn’t perform all that well without all the AI up scaling and whatnot. I think it’s more of an optimisation problem than anything else.
I’ve a friend who experiences problems after ~40 minutes of play time though, the frame rate just tanks.
I will admit I had to fiddle with some settings to get it smooth on a few of these games. Par for the course on PC. One thing that I’ve turned off is actually that frame gen stuff - it makes my frames choppy. I think its weird because if I had a variable frame rate normally my gsync monitor handles that but with frame gen it seems to really fuck it up. Otherwise I always set to my monitor resolution and 100% scale, DLSS on, and crank everything to epic. Cant remember if Remnant had RTX but thats one thing I set to medium or low usually, that shit is a hog in almost every game.
Now is a great time to play it again. The newest DLC just dropped. Henry gets his own forge. I'm liking it a lot so far.
I’m kinda waiting for all the DLCs to be released for my next playthrough. I’ve already spent hundreds of hours on the first one alone.
I bought at release played 60hrs so far barely touching the story… I haven’t even saved Haans yet but decided to stop and wait for all the DLC drops then play the shit out of it in its completed glory.
Kinda there with you. Just bought the base game, played through it once, ~70% through a hardcore Henry playthrough, and then I’ll wait for all the DLC to get that and do one more playthrough.
I love that game so much i played like 30 or 40 hours and hardly did any main missions. I haven’t been to the wedding or anything. The game is almost too overwhelming to play for me. I really wanna play the dlc, but i think i have to start over and play like a normal human being.
Wayfinder uses ue5 and runs just fine.
That is the only example I have.
Expedition 33
Clair Obscur and Hellblade 2 also ran great on my Steam Deck. And I suspect Fortnite does as well.
My guess is that developers of the other games just pour in high def assets without using any of UE5’s crazy LoD techniques.
Yes, that’s the thing. UE5 CAN run well, if you don’t use most of its fancy features. But then what’s the point of that dumb engine?
Just because it can load in high quality assets doesn’t mean that everything has to be 4 billion polygons. You use it sparingly for where it will make the most impact. That doesn’t mean that a mountain in the background that you’ll never get near has to be of the same quality.
I don’t think that’s really the engines fault.
I thought the entire point of nanite was to allow developers to throw in high quality assets without having to worry about the performance hit.
It probably doesn’t work with interactable objects and other edge cases. And it for sure doesn’t work with trees because they highlighted in the Witcher 4 showcase how they created a version specifically for trees.
But ot does work with foliage though.
Maybe they think they can do a better job, but it definitely does work with plants. It didn’t used to, when it first came out it was limited to just static objects, and it didn’t work on terrain at first which I was thought was a weird restriction, but it works on pretty much everything now.
Well you can do that but then it isn’t going to run on a steam deck, whether or not you as a developer think that’s a problem depends on what hardware you are targeting.
But you’ve still got the problem of file size. I’ve noticed that if the asset is really big you actually run into streaming issues when loading it in. It looks fantastic, but you probably don’t want your rock to take 10 seconds to load in. If you go look at the matrix demo you’ll see they have a lot of asset reuse because of that.
Nanite isn’t magic it’s neither going to enable you to just throw in 16k resolution textures and just not worry about it there’s always going to be a trade-off. But it’s insane to say that it isn’t a useful feature or that you should never use it.
The only ue5 game I have played with good performance is satisfactory and that's because good performance is necessary for a game like that (so they put a lot of effort into it)
Thing is, you absolutely CAN make UE5 games perform well, but all the shit they advertised as making photorealism performant, Nanite, Lumen, Megalights etc… Can be used wrong and make performance worse instead of better. Or so I keep hearing. Nanite in particular is only good if you have REALLY detailed assets, in which case it helps perform better.
Threat Interactive on YouTube explains a bunch of things that are often done wrong.
As someone looking in from the outside, the problem is with the way UE5 markets itself, (people using UE5 can correct me). The appeal of UE5 is that it does all the boring stuff for you. For example, instead of buying a good light system off of your engine's marketplace or making your own you can just use lumen. Any system marketed as something you can "just use" is going to get implemented wrong because its appeal is supposed to be that it is low effort.
^(no shame to devs that do think like this, game development is hard and having solutions like this just gives more time to make the game you want)^
But it does make sense that it can be used correctly, UE5 is way to mainstream for it to be built on systems that never work.
When listening to the dev commentary of Valve games, they talk about how much work goes into level design planning even just for the sake of optimization, like clearly delineating barriers between major regions (doorways) so the engine can unload objects from other areas.
I get the impression the “First step easy” setup from UE5 may have made it so that more people can give us unoptimized messes, but still only a few rare devs understand proper optimization at all levels of development.
UE5 performance is fine these days if the game developer actually utilizes the tooling in place to catch problematic assets, sequences, blueprints, and more. Now, those tools may not be the easiest to use, but they do exist, and, with official documentation. It’s got challenges, but the tooling exists. In 5.5 there was even an expirmental plugin released that’s supposed to help with the burden of integrating this work, so it’s obvious there’s effort being put into providing tools for developers to make performant games
The problem is that takes additional time in a production pipeline, and is uaully pushed off to the side til the end of a game’s dev cycle instead of the beginning, if it’s done at all. And due to the way that many game studios are funded and operate, it’s not uncommon for product quality to follow the model of delivering features first to meet funding milestones instead of focusing on making sure the work that’s being introduced is also performant.
Don’t buy gearbox games. Pitchford is a self important head in the sands salesman. Along with Tim Sweeny, they’re a couple of the most used car salesman types in gaming
I can think of just 1 guy who is even more of a used car salesman… Chris Roberts. Literally has been selling digital spaceships like used cars. Including the actual prices of the digital ships being roughly the same as a used car.
As a diehard fan of the Wing Commander series, you take that back right now! Right now!
I bought, and still have, every single Wing Commander game released as they launched. Core experience of my early gaming days.
All kidding aside, Star Citizen is a steaming shit pile of a grift that has gone on for far too long.
At this point I wonder if he still believes he’s making the full game? And if not, did he ever?
Don’t forget Todd Howard. He’s the ultimate example of a Tesla salesman who has a self driving car drive itself into a ditch and then he says “it just works.“
Can’t forgive them for the cash cow they turned Risk of Rain into. Such a perfect game that I sunk hundreds of hours into to get me through the pandemic. They buy the series, release a quarter-baked DLC that simultaneously makes changes to the base game for everyone, spends a year fixing it, then announces another DLC as soon as they fix the problems they created with the 1st one. All while ramping up their merch lineup like the over $100 TTRPG version.
One of the reasons being patent with games is worth it. In a year, they may fix the bugs, they may not. But the only thing you lose is a bit of time playing other games. And cheaper too :D
I loved BL 1 and 2. Still haven’t played prequel, tina, or 3; might finally buy one of those next big sale.
I liked the Pre-sequel just as much as 2. 3 is…skippable.
I’m big on the entire Borderlands franchise, played 1+2+3+TPS and even both Telltale story games. I’m still going to wait at least until it drops below $40 at the very earliest. I get the notion that we will start seeing sales on BL4 relatively soon.
*sigh*... This generation of games will all suck because of Unreal Engine 5. I'm a patient gamer, I have plenty of unplayed games on my Steam library. I will not upgrade my video card because of this horrendous game engine.
Can’t play your new $80 game due to performance and crashing issues? Hey, if you’re a real fan you’ll find a way to make it happen.
That franchise hasn’t been good since BL2
Borderlands 3 was significantly better, in my opinion.
The gameplay was much improved; the writing was…not good.
But I played the hell out of 3 anyway, so…
I liked the slide mechanic but hated the fact that enemies would see me when invisible as FL4K… story was meh. Haven’t even done a full replay iirc, unless I did finish my Zane playthrough… whereas I’ve played BL2, TPS, and BL1 multiple times.
I couldn’t resist the rakk build for my FL4K - and that particular action skill was crazy for triggering anointments. Only ever maxed his level though. Got close with Zane (he stays slow, but gets pretty overpowered by the end - but only if you avoided the bugged out non-functional skills). Next highest level I got was on Amara. I loved Moze’s power armor, by that’s the char my girlfriend mained, so I never got mine leveled very far.
I don’t remember if I ever finished Moze, I think I started but didn’t play much. It probably didn’t help that I got the game on epic initially cause it was free but I really hate epic so that was also probably a blocker. Idk I tend to cycle between BL2 and TPS playthroughs. I remember I picked claptrap in TPS and the game was like “uh are you sure? You clicked on claptrap, are you sure?”
I definitely wasn’t playing Borderlands at any point for the story. I like that it has one, but if they wrote some terrible villains, it doesn’t affect how much fun I had with my build synergies in those boss fights.
BL3 had some fantastic DLC though. Loved that.
BL2 was great. Some of its DLC was even better. Assault on Dragon Keep is one of the best looter shooters ever made. The gameplay was a blast. The jokes were funny…And out of left field it broke your fucking heart by secretly being about a young, traumatized girl’s grief.
…and then they turned it into spinoff game with Wanda Sykes’ voice constantly grating your brain into shredded cheese
It wasn’t out of left field. They telegraphed it frequently.
Yes. The out of left field had more to do with what was expected going in. We all expected silly D&D and fart jokes. We didn’t expect a legitimately touching examination of grief and denial to bring depth to a silly character.
Have you tried Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands? It’s basically an entire spinoff game from Dragon Keep DLC with its own unique systems. Personally I think it’s the most creative game in the genre.
I haven’t, and I really should. Like, REALLY should. I was college roommates with and took part in the wedding of someone high enough at Gearbox that I can’t say their role without doxxing myself, and we’ve stayed really close.
So, BL3 wasn’t great. the pre-sequel was out of house and doesn’t really count. It was made in an entirely other culture. It’s not like there have been a lot of games since BL2.
I honestly don’t understand the hate.
No hate, just unmet expectations.
If you’re going to dismiss the criticism of BL3 or the Presequel then yeah, it makes you don’t get the hate.
I’m not dismissing the criticism of BL3, I honestly don’t know what it is beyond my personal experience. I wasn’t a big fan of the antagonists or the weapon changes, but It didn’t ruin the game for me. I really didn’t know that the game was so widely disliked - I never even looked into it. It came out, I played it, lost interest, and moved on with my life.
3 was the best out of all of them from a gameplay perspective. People don’t like the story but I never cared for any of the borderlands stories personally.
Honest question: if the story doesn’t matter that much to you, what do you value in a game?
I’m not OP but varied gameplay and interesting mechanics is way more important for me unless it’s a very story rich game that’s done well (the last of us or death stranding for example)
Depends on the game. In a looter shooter like Borderlands, it’s the looting and shooting
Story matters in a lot of games to me. But not in borderlands. I play borderlands for the looting and shooting basically. And 3’s the best at that. Though I’ve heard 4 is even better still in that regard.
Let’s be honest, the only story missions we ever cared about were those starring Handsome Jack.
Such a great big douchey motivator!
The Tiny Tina DLC was pretty good.
True, TT’s B&B was great. Shame the TT standalone game lacked that charm and any meaningful engame.
Well most review sites give it high scores with the negatives being primarily the performance so at least this time there might be a good game in there somewhere underneath all those shader compilation stutters
I think that’s the one I played. It was such a fun game.
I’m not a big gamer but all the hype/marketing for the borderlands universe turned me off.
It literally crashed while Conan was doing a Clueless Gamer promo for it.
Play 1 & 2 again or if you want to get introduced into the series those are the ones to play oh and the Tiny Tina spin offs are good.
EY-YO IT-SA TONY TINA OVER HERE COM’MON! WHERESA MY PASTA, LUIGI?!
Tony Tina, why are you bustin my balls?
YO TONE, getta loada this bozo, waltzin’ on in here like ya own the joint
The Tina dlc which has a standalone game is great. Even though it doesn’t make sense as a standalone since it’s a significant and well executed end to the BL2 story.
Wonderlands is pretty iffy though
Also… why now? BL games always get 90% off eventually, lol.
Or come up free on EGS.
Yeah, but then you have to install EGS.
Or you can use heroic games launcher and never have to install egs
It’s fine. The weekly free games are worth it. I’ve played some weird and cool games I would have never found otherwise thanks to EGS’ free games.
If you say so :)
You can use Heroic Launcher instead. And you get an Amazon Games and GoG client as a bonus.
I will continue claiming EGS games, and playing them through Heroic, purely out of spite to Tim Sweeney and his bullshit. He has to pay out of pocket for every license i claim, and i wont say no to that
The secret is to use Heroic Games Launcher for EGS games. In addition to being a launcher for EGS, GOG and Amazon… It’s cross-platform, which EGS is not. Makes playing EGS games on Linux a breeze.
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wow youre so smart and sophisticated ! you only play big boring grown up games about taxes and working a job! way to go adult!
Bruh. What’s got you triggered so hard?
Do you need a hug?
okay 🤗
🤗
I forgot what we were talking about. Does it matter?
nah, lets go grab a beer or something 😁
🍻
Don’t buy fucking Gearbox games. Jesus fucking shit on a bike chrisy. I have been saying that for over a decade.
Half-life opposing forces was good atleast
Must have slipped through the cracks.
Haha fair, gearbox still has an awful track record
Gonna just remind everyone, or tell anyone who isn’t familiar… Gearbox’s Colonial Marines has a typo in an ini file that breaks the game’s AI. Gearbox was made aware of it after a modder found it in 2018. They acknowledged it by making a joke, then did nothing…
That one letter typo is still there after 13 years.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/65e92d7c-bc4a-4d74-9447-a483b6791b48.gif">
Isn’t this the 1 letter typo where removing it makes the game massively better?
Yeah, if I remember right, the issue is that the typo breaks the system that tells the xenos how to behave in combat. They should use vents and try and flank you, but instead they just charge right at you.
Still a ton of other issues with the game, but that was huge.
And it still has the loss of focus in the inventory screen bug that’s plagued the game since the first one.
Bout to finish the main story of bl3, wish it was longer, seems like content was cut so they could sell expansions, idk maybe im just comparing it to borderlands 2 + all expansions, I didnt really do side quests but typically I do these when I need to, playing solo I didn’t ever need to leave and do those before coming back to the main story.
Enough ppl dont complain about how they artificially extend the time by having you wait for ppl talk, thought it was a limitation in older games, especially bad in sanctuary, like let me just play the game, talk while I do stuff, don’t make me stand around pausing the game if I open my menu extending it futher.
As I understand it, BL3 didn’t use the same writers as BL2. The DLC for BL3 did, though, which is why it’s of a very high quality. BL1-2 are some of my favourite games and as someone who doesn’t replay/reread/rewatch I’ve replayed those games a lot, but Pitchford was a huge douche about BL4 and its pricing so I decided hey, I’ll solve that problem by just not buying it.
I tried 3 just to see what all the interest was about, but couldn’t get into it. There were loads of guns and none of them seemed great or much different from each other. Was I supposed to collect them and sell them? I wanted to like it cos I enjoy the art style, maybe I should give it another go sometime.
That is part of the genre, yeah.
They’re procedurally generated within a range of possible effects and damage based off the “manufacturer” in-game
You’ll end up finding one you really like and using it for like 5 levels, while selling other loot, until you find one that jives more with your play style and is more powerful than your current loadout
Ah gotcha, cheers. I guess I’m old fashioned but I kinda just like a shotgun mostly when gaming.
But yeah I’m thinking maybe I should give it another try, I did really like the style.
I haven’t played 3, but loved 2. Still haven’t finished it, maybe should.
There’s a bunch of generic weapons (themed by manufacturer and weapon type), but there’s also some unique ones. Bane in particular was a really funny one to discover.
My favorite weapon was a legendary rifle that had a shotgun mode, a lot of the guns have different modesc many shotguns, and its really easy to get legendaries (way too easy, while it was too hard in past games) I had a full inventory of legendaries constantly from mid way to endgame, kinda hated that because I liked ll my options. Liked the flamethrower rifle that when reloaded became a turret that ran around, abused those lol (got that legendary a few times in different forms)
TBF those do sound cool as fuck!
But but but IGN gave it an 8/10 and said it was the best game in the franchise! Did they lie, are they out of touch, or are they working with publishers to try to smooth over the transition into more expensive games?
They noted the perforemance issues in their review
Yet it doesn’t seem to negatively effect the score
How do you know that?
They specifically mentioned multiple questlines breaking and blocking progression in addition to several smaller bugs yet they still gave the game an 8/10. I get that IGN reviews are the softest of balls to hit, but that’s ridiculous for even them
Right but how do you know that didn’t impact the score? For all we know they knocked it down a point for that.
The review score is for you, the review lives beneath it, for the people who can read
Randy you didn’t fucking disappoint. This is exactly the game and the results I was expecting
Put it on GoG.
News at 11, sky still blue. The series ended with 2.
It’s a fun game, and I’m enjoying my time with it, but the fact that I’m getting 40fps at 1080p with a 5080 is frankly ridiculous. Unreal Engine 5 is such a curse on this generation of games.
Hey, I’m interested. Do you have frame gen on and dlss and still getting 40fps?
I am also curious about the answer, but either way that can’t be seen as acceptable for such an expensive graphics card.
Oh totally. Reason I ask is I’m running a 4090 with dlss and FG and running ultra (think it’s called something different) at 4k and getting 90 fps.
I should have bet money on that
I remember getting borderlands 3 for ps4 and it was literally unplayable, I mean literally it would crash every 2 minutes i couldn’t even make it through the intro. After about 6 crashes in 10 minutes I gave up and uninstalled it, never to try it again. I have a ps5 now but I am not surprised part 4 is the same crap
I bought borderlands 1 primarily for the co-op mode. It never worked, at least on PC, even though it was heavily advertised as having it. I never bought another Boarderlands
Yeah the whole series is geared towards co-op, though the first a bit less so than the sequels.
Gotta say I’m surprised people report so many challenges with the games. I’ve played all four mainline titles, three of them in co-op, and rarely had session troubles and never performance issues.
denuvo strikes again
People bought that overpriced crap with unnacceptable TOS? I guess I need to accept there is no hope after all.
you think people even read it?
Sounds like PC gaming.
I forgot they were even making this game. BL3 was kind of bad, the pre sequel was painful. The tiny Tina one was okay but weirdly had no ng+ and shitty dlc. Meh.
It is tiring that new games launch with such poor performance. But, good thing we have game logs to help protect us from this kind of thing. Should be able to just wait it out and pick it up later for much cheaper.
I was watching a streamer playing this game on AMD 9800X3D with RTX 5090 GPU on 1440p and was barely able to get 100 fps. All the settings were on medium with DLSS Balanced turned on. This game is definitely not optimized.