'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you'
(www.pcgamer.com)
from mintiefresh@piefed.ca to games@lemmy.world on 15 Sep 15:30
https://piefed.ca/post/223071
from mintiefresh@piefed.ca to games@lemmy.world on 15 Sep 15:30
https://piefed.ca/post/223071
threaded - newest
I love Borderlands, but I really wish Randy would just shut the fuck up.
B1 is a bit slow, but quite fun, B2 is brilliant, BTPS is similar to B2, but the crafting stuff is annoying, B3 was too chaotic with a too cluttred UI and a damn annoying story, B4, I have no idea
Have you tried Wonderlands? I really liked it, and would love a sequel/more of that one.
The TIny Tina game?
I tried it, didn’t like it and uninstalled it.
I am not saying it is a bad game, just that at the time it wasn’t game I liked.
Favorite in the series. But I’m just getting started with BL4 so my opinion may change.
I liked that one but weirdly there’s no NG+ and the DLC kind of sucked. I finished it with a friend and we were like, “that’s it?”. It’s not very long, and it ends shortly after your end of skill tree powers become available.
What crafting?
I’ve been playing B4 for a few hours now and it’s been pretty good. Definitely getting more B2 vibes than B3.
Allegedly B4 is much better than 3, aside from the abysmal performance. I can wait until they fix it and get it for $15 on sale.
I’m waiting for it to become “free”, no idea how long that’ll take though.
Good assessment. I agree completely!
I’m not very far in, but so far I’m enjoying B4 more than TPS, and MUCH more than 3.
I think he thinks he’s Jack in The Pre-Sequel, but really he’s Jack in Borderlands 2.
Jack in BL2 was funny and entertaining tho.
Probably not if you lived on Pandora.
I hate borderlands, and I also wish Randy would shut the fuck up!
I have a simple rule - Not touching anything that has grease marks on it.
I think it was a really good game originally. The writing has gotten really fucking bad though, and the gameplay hasn’t really evolved with the times. (I can’t speak on the new game.)
The new one feels like progress so far. I’m not very deep in, but the story and dialogue are not nearly as annoying as 3 was. The biggest difference has to be the movement. In previous games it often felt like you were trudging forward until you found an enemy and then running backwards so they didn’t catch you before they die. Grappling hooks, double jumps, and gliding add a TON of movement and gives you those John Wick moments where you’re bouncing around the area and blasting people from every direction.
I really don’t understand the open world though. I don’t think that’s the direction they needed to go. I think the best looter-shooter I’ve played recently is Roboquest. It has all the movement you said (and more), but it’s in tight rooms, so the devs have more control of the design. Open worlds means the devs have essentially zero control of encounters and it becomes too easy. The only thing they can do is crank up health of enemies so they don’t die as quickly.
I can see that.
I’m not far enough to have settled on an opinion on the open world yet. I did find it tedious in other BL games that I had to walk through the same areas in the same order over and over again to access the end game or start a new character.
That being said, I often don’t know where to go or what to do in BL4. Thank Torgue they added the Echo objective finder, that’s pretty much the only way I’ve been able to stay on track at all.
Yeah, I just have a bias against open world games at this point. Damn near every game thinks they need to be open world, and most of the time it just makes things more tedious and boring. It takes a ton of dev time to make just for players to run past 99% of it. There are some games it really works for, but most would be better off with a tighter design (and it’d also save time and money).
I understand your worries. I was was also concerned about the openworld first, but so far they have nailed the open world part pretty well. Travelling has been fun. There has been always fast travel near when i have wanted to use it. There is enough hidden jokes and easter eggs that i feel rewarded to look around.
I dont really understand your point. Devs still curate where you meet the enemies. Its not like its procedurally generated map where everything is random.
I cant remember single time in my 20 hours of gameplay where i have tought that i hate fighting here, or that these enemies dont fit here.
I haven’t played it, so maybe they’ve done something to control it. I doubt it though. If you can come from any direction, that makes encounters much harder to design. Think about older Borderlands games when entering a compound. You’d come through one main gate and enemies would be set up with cover and you’d have to fight your way through. With open world you could do something like fly into the middle of the compound, and that’s has to be accounted for.
Check out Roboquest, for example. It has some really impressive movement options, but it’s choice of rooms let’s them restrict how much you can abuse them. You’ll always be fighting through the enemies from an expected direction.
This isn’t what I meant. There’s nuance between liking something and it being the best possible thing. It can be good and still be possible to be better. My biggest issue with open worlds is, like you mentioned at the beginning, fast travel. It takes so much time and resources to make an open world, just for players to fast travel past most of it. Is it really worth the that? Did it add that much to the experience? We could have more cheaper games with tighter designed experiences instead of games that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. (BL3 cost $140m, and for cost “more than twice” that, so minimum $280m.)
I don’t think people understand that everything is an opportunity cost. If you make an open world game, that’s at the expensive of so much more. At minimum, it’s going to be less game to play (or longer between games and more expensive). Is getting a lot of space that you hardly interact with worth it?
The thing about open world is, you can make those smaller contained spaces you keep mentioning with Roboquest inside of some structure with a single entrance and boom, we have your preferred formula.
Sure. You can make those, but you have to spend a lot of money and time making the open world just to make places for the rooms to live. Is that worth it? Everything is opportunity cost. Did doubling the cost improve the game that much?
It depends on the game. Could a Sonic game be fun in open world? Yes, and it was. Would The Hunt? Or Supermeat Boy? Probably not. I’m just pointing out you can still design for your movement abilities in an open world.
For sure, you can. However, every modern game is trying to be an open world game. It’s stupid. We get ballooning budgets and dev cycles for games that don’t really get anything from being open world. I’d rather get three great less open games than one open world game that is sacrificing things to make the open world work.
I will agree theres a lot more. Theres just a lot more games in general. Pick up the Solium Infernum remake, or Windblown, or Wizard of Legend, or even Helldivers 2 isnt open world. Plenty to choose from. But I do emplore you to play Sonic Frontiers. Shit was dope. Also Sword of the Sea just came out, another fine addition to the atmospheric collection. Theres just a lot more now. So you’re gonna see a lot more and you’re gonna see a lot more terrible games.
It’s not even just about the games being terrible. The ballooning costs is just unsustainable. It’s the reason we’ve seen so many layoffs, and it sucks. It’s just mismanagement. The executives are the ones telling the developers to make open world games, for the most part. They don’t understand how that effects the rest of the design, or how much it ends up costing. They just see a trend and tell the studios they need to follow it.
If it was just that we got some shitty games I wouldn’t care. However, it’s effecting people’s lives. We need a more sustainable industry of smaller budget games that know what they are and plays to its strengths. We’ve got too many games trying to be everything games. It’s the reason studios ramped up the price to $70, and then, quickly after, $80. Soon they’ll be Charing $90-$100 because they let costs get too high to maintain.
So… I shouldn’t plan on playing this on a Steamdeck when it gets down to $19.99?
Not the current one, no. The Steam Deck is closer to a PS4 spec, and even if there weren’t optimization problems, this is built to a PS5 spec.
Someone smarter than Randy will figure out tweaks and optimisations to allow it eventually.
For better or worse it’s unreal engine 5 (AKA volumetrics: the engine), so it’s got some easy performance gains here and there with engine.ini tweaks and maybe some mods to remove stuff if denuvo isn’t too bad about it.
I'd watch reviews first.
Borderlands 3 works excellent on the deck though.
Ran dis Pitchfork into his mom last night.
That’s the highest level argument this guy deserves.
I haven’t looked at the performance reviews per system yet but I recall the complaints for Borderlands 3 mainly came from people trying to run it on an old i5 with a 1060 or similar. You need a high end system, that much is clear. Or you need to get comfortable with 30 fps.
I’m not saying Randy is right to strike that tone, but you can’t deny there is a point to saying that some games are meant to be played on powerful systems and won’t accept anything less.
Sure, but powerful systems don’t run it too well either. Especially given how mediocre the game looks visually.
People with high end systems (5090s etc) are apparent having a lot of performance issues, and are unable to run the game at 60fps/4k without AI upscaling or frame generation.
There’s also a lot of complaints about stuttering, and the game wouldn’t launch at all for a lot of people when it first came out.
It’s even better when you realize that the performance degrades the longer you’ve been playing that session. It’s unoptimized and leaky.
My complaint about borderlands 3 was the cringe main antagonists. Like I’m happily shooting stuff and they hop in with painfully mediocre snippets of whatever they’re supposed to be doing. Also they killed off one of the best characters. The gunplay felt nice, the music and graphics were good. I didn’t have any real technical issues.
Sure, in theory. In practice we're talking about 3k machines struggling to hit 60FPS (dropping as low as 30fps on occasions) on max settings with DLSS on. A 3k machine gets you high setting low 70 FPS with DLSS on. If a 3k machine is not a high end system what the fuck is a high end system? And the bigger issue is what exactly are we paying for here? Borderlands 4 doesn't even look significantly better than Borderlands 3. There's no reason for the game to be this performance heavy when it looks like a game from 2019.
You have a point in some hypothetical scenario but in actuality this is a case of Randy being full of shit.
Its a recent AAA game on a modern game engine, so it probably runs awful even on top of the line hardware.
Basically every game that comes out these days in the AAA space is a horrible unoptimized mess.
It's sad that a lot of devs just make their game and then slap frame-gen on it and then release it. Like who cares about optimization. Not that I blame them, people still buy those games full-priced, so...
Who even has time to play full price games? I have enough unplayed games piled up in my steam/epic/gog libraries to keep me busy for decades.
Well a surprisingly lot of people. Just a guess but maybe this is the main or only hobby for a significant amount of buyers?
Even so, the steam hardware survey seems to indicate that the vast majority of users wouldn’t reach specs to enable developer-approved framegen anyway. (Unless you count Lossless Scaling).
We’re kind of going full circle back to the paradigm of “You are judged on your entry level as much (or more) than your high end [gameplay performance]”.
Wait, does nobody pirate games any more? I don’t think I bought a single game until I turned 25.
How does someone with such a shitty personality and dress sense get so smug?
If I looked and acted like him I would want to punch myself in the face
Lots and lots of money.
He has top of the line security details to do that for him.
And they keep failing up. Your job qualification is what you have done, not how well they were doing.
he has reached enough wealth, rules do not apply anymore
Maybe try optimizing your game before releasing it?
Please try optimizing your pc before purchasing BL4. \s
That’s probably the best how copilot could optimize it.
Nah I’m not gonna pay $80 for unoptimized copy-paste spyware my man thanks
I guess I'm not premium enough to give you my money, Randy.
I feel like we've long reached the point where the benefit of top-of-the-line hardware just isn't worth it. IMO, Switch 2 ought to be enough to target, and any game that can't fit on that can probably stand to be scaled back.
Someday, the industry is going to realize that while transistors might still be getting smaller, they aren’t getting cheaper for it. Which was the original formulation of Moore’s Law; cost of integrated component gets cut in half every x months.
Not just games, but the whole tech industry. Even in so far as faster hardware exists–and it just plain might not in this case–people can’t afford it.
Is Borderlands really all that popular still? Like I remember seeing the first few games everywhere, and people talking about them, but that was years ago. I realize I’m biased but I would expect to hear something about them…
1 was fresh and new
2 was fantastic
prequel was OK
3 tried too hard and was generally average to poor
Maybe he could try to make another TV series.
Does 1 get better? I have 1 and 2 from a bundle years ago and started the first game. It’s sooo boring, like all the bad stuff from an mmo but single player. I don’t want to walk from a Hub to place A multiple times and just the spawning mobs change based on the quest.
Or if 1 doesn’t get better, can I play 2 without losing to much?
yeah it’s a little bare bones, it’s not worth more than a single playthrough really. Because the events of 1 are expanded on in 2 and some of the story beats land a little better if you knew the characters from 1 it’s worth playing once for novelty - but it being a 16 year old game it shows its age.
After what they did to my boy claptrap they can eat it. It’s obvious that the voice acting department is going to go out of the way to deservedly sabotage this series until it finally gives up.
2 was where the series really peaked. The first did some new things, and brought some fresh life into the shooter genre.
2 expanded upon it, and had a much better story. It was also in the heyday of matchmaking game lobbies, so it was easy to boot up the match finder and jump into a game with someone. Probably half of my Steam friends list came from playing this game and just vibing with people on voice chat while we ran through the side quests.
The prequel was… Alright? I’d put it about on par with the first game. It didn’t bring anything new or exciting to the table, but it was good at what it did.
Then 3 was just bad. It felt really cringey, in a “how do you do, fellow kids” kind of way. Like it was trying too hard.
And now 4 sounds like more of 3. The game sounds rushed, and the CEO’s attempting to cover for that rush makes him sound woefully out of touch. There’s no good reason that cel-shaded graphics should require a 5090 to run smoothly.
I’ll avoid any controversy by not buying the game, and spending elsewhere.
I’m so sick of bad performance from all the big engines these days. Even unity makes simple 2d games chug.
That’s just the inherent cost of going with general purpose engines. They’ll always perform worse than specialized tech, but modern games are so complicated that custom engines aren’t really feasible anymore.
Unreal is the king of bloat. Rather than “general purpose” they strove for “all purpose” - Unreal Engine tries to do literally everything out of the box with as many bells and whistles attached as possible. The result is that Unreal Engine games require tons of optimization to run well, and even the editor itself consumes tens of gigabytes and runs like crap.
Unity is simply a mess of poor decisions and technical debt. Their devs seem to reinvent a crucial development pipeline every few years, give up halfway, then leave both options exposed and expect developers to just automatically know the pitfalls of each. Combined with horrific mismanagement and hostile revenue-seeking, Unity has lost a ton of goodwill over the past few years. It’s a major fall from grace for what was once the undisputed king of Indie dev engines.
Godot is tiny, decently performant, and great for simple games, but it’s very bare-bones and expects developers to implement their own systems for anything beyond basic rendering, physics, and netcode. Additionally, the core developers have a reputation for being incredibly resistant to making major changes even when a battle-tested pull request for a frequently requested feature is available. Still my personal pick though.
Some studios are able to use these major engines very well, others not so much. It seems like there is a level of expertise needed to make well-oiled games.
On the contrary, custom engines have been bombing.
Look at Starfield or Cyberpunk 2077 or basically any custom engine AAA. Look at what happened to things like ME Andromeda.
…Then look at KCD2. It looks freaking fantastic, looks like raytacing with no raytracing, runs like butter, and it’s Crytek.
Look at something like Satisfactory, rendering tons of stuff on a shoestring budged and still looking fantastic thanks to Unreal Lumen.
There’s a reason the next Cyberpunk is going to be Unreal, and its because building a custom engine just for your game is too big an undertaking. Best to put that same budget in optimizing a ‘communal’ engine, polish, bugfixing and such.
Borderlands 4 is slow because the botched optimization, not because its Unreal.
Message received. Never pay for this game.
How tf do companies get to say this shit and still be in business?? Are there that many people who just blindly bend over and take it?? Don’t people have standards anymore?
Most of their customers don't listen to them. Not hear and disregard, never listen in the first place. Have no interest in game industry gossip.
Yes. It’s in the top selling list in Steam and have 300k concurrent player top. People give him power to say that.
So a 4070 is a leaf blower to this asshole.
Well I’ll gladly not buy this game then.
The game runs fine on my 4070 Super ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
At what resolution, frame rate, and settings? Trying to get a good grasp of the performance if I ever buy it.
5120x1440p
60-80fps
I followed this guide from gearbox for the settings, except I turned off volumetric cloud shadows and turned up DLSS to Quality
Nice. Thanks for the info. I’ll probably grab it in 3 years lol
Lol hell yeah
In other words:
“We don’t want to put resources towards optimising our product. We don’t care if the methods we built our product with make it more difficult to use, while regressing in several key visual aspects. The burdon of our shortcomings will be placed on the end user, who will have to spend their resources to out-power them.”
Hot take, Borderlands was never really a good franchise. Yeah I played through the second game, but i did so once, and never wanted to return to it afterwards.
.
there was something special about playing through 1 for the first time knowing nothing about what to expect. Then when 2 came out I liked it alright but already felt like it was a big tonal departure. funny to see the discussion shift over time to 2 being the benchmark and 3(+) going too far.
Well to me, borderlands 2 was the most fun I’ve had with a shooter since half-life 2 or CoD4. It’s one of the funniest games I’ve ever played as well. I think the writing in general is really top notch (props to Anthony Birch), the characters are memorable, the weapons and abilities are fun. All and all, BL2 really hit the mark in a lot of ways for me.
Borderlands 3 on the other hand, just wasn’t as good. It had a ton of great quality of life improvements, so that was nice. The player abilities were also largely really good, I liked most of the classes. But it had a ton of weaknesses… The level design was pretty awful, the much bigger maps really spread out the action absolutely killed the pacing. The story was pretty dumb, and while the villains were detestable, it was only in the way that all obnoxious teenagers are detestable. And the greatest sin, the loot was a mess. They actually threw way too many guns at you, so many that you never really get a chance to enjoy any of them. And way too many of them were uniques (with mysterious effects they never bother to explain).
Honestly that was how I felt as well. I remember being hyped the play bl2 and then getting bored doing meaningless quests over and over. Like am I supposed to feel anything for these people asking me to retrieve parts over and over? At least do some sort of quest where they can shoot people. I thought the combat system was better but I wasn’t compelled to play through it
Agree
The best game in the franchise is the Telltale game
That one is a gem, Gearbox can’t compete with this. B2’s only biggest asset is the voice actor, the animation when two character interact is worst than Oblivion.
I guess I will stick to my “non-premium” games made by devs who actually care about providing experiences worth experiencing, instead of a checklist-driven, committee designed and overpriced games that are most AAA games.
I sunk 90 hours into Silksong since launch, and now I’m going through Nine Sols and playing PoE2 on and off. I won’t lie I’m hearing good things about BL4 minus the performance, but I’m not giving Randy a single cent and I’m far happier not engaging in AAA dogshit.
You need to have $500 gpu to hit 60fps with 1080p native, this is hilariously bad.
I haven’t seen a $500 gpu in near a decade. Even used. If you see a $500 gpu today, I guarantee you it can’t run Borderlands 4.
That’s nice, he is kind enough to tell us that we should not buy his game if we do not have a monster gpu. He is only excluding a very small portion of gamers after all !
Let’s look at the Valve’s hardware survey.
Wait…
Most popular system RAM is 16GB, and VRAM is 8GB.
Wow! Powerful specs!
Only PCVR titles can even approach saying such things without looking like jerks. And even then, it’s probally counter productive.
An example, for those curious, is Microsoft Flight Simulator.
From my experience graphics doesn’t matter much in VR if FPS is fine. You can play HL Alyx on a what was sometime ago affordable gpu and get almost the same experience as with 5900.
You made this statement by using the most optimized high end VR title in existence. And the creators of the game their own engine!
Graphics do matter. That’s why you cited Alyx. Right? Because the game is impressive in many ways, graphics being a really big one. Graphics in VR have generally stagnated for the past 5 years since Alyx came out.
Graphics are why the interactions with bottles in that game are so impressive. Just to highlight one small thing.
You have a good point about Alyx. My opinion using VR is that there’s a point with graphics when it feels comfortable, any better doesn’t give much to the experience like if you see pixels your brain just thinks that’s how the world is. I don’t include objects being interactive into graphics here, but what people generally perceive as graphics ie textures, lighting and other stuff you need gpu for. Also there are very few such interactive objects in beat saber or superhot though you still feel being in vr.
I’ll play something cheaper then
I am a premium gamer; if you want me to play your premium game, you’ll need to subscribe to me for $29.99/month or $324/year (that’s a 10% discount from the month to month!)
Drink up me hearties.
Not so fast, mate! Here there be Denuvo.
So thats why it runs like shit.
When was the last time Randy Pitchford got through a day without being a prick?
I haven’t played more than about 30 minutes of a Borderlands game. But from clips I have seen of all of them over the years, they all look exactly the same. Sounds to me like it’s just a poorly optimized game, as is standard for new AAA slop releases.
It’s poorly optimized UE5 slop. Looks like shit, plays like shit.
Hard pass.
Stop using slop for non-ai things.
It’s still slop, just not ai slop.
You're not my real mom.
Guess my hogs will be going hungry.
Slop is a real word not made exclusively for ai
Slop has existed as a word far longer than AI has. Uses for the word slop include:
Unappetizing watery food or soup.
Spilled or splashed liquid.
Waste food fed to farm animals such as pigs.
Soft mud or slosh.
no. slop be sloppin whether it’s AI or not.
Stupid comment indeed but this is the gamer community as we know - thet feel SO entitled.
Listen, you can try the game for two hours and get a refund on steam. If you didn’t notice the performance issues on your rig within those two hours, well, what’s the problem? If did notice, then why didn’t you just refund on get on with your life? It’s because of this crazy feeling od entitlement thet gamers seem to have. Whenever something doesn’t live up to their arbitrary standards, the world must burn.
I don’t like BL games and I don’t like poorly optimized games. Doesn’t run like I wanted to? Fine, I refund, maybe try when I upgrade my hardware and the game is on sell. Lots more of these incoming because developers not being able to work with UE5 without optimization issues, e.g. the new Metal gear remake). Also, I know nothing about how devs deal game optimization.
Considering Randy REALLY wants you to pay $130 USD for this game, I’m not shocked his performance advice was “be less poor”
A game that looks like BL4 shouldn’t run like Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing turned on.
Sucker game made for sucker gamers.
Are you inclined to blame yourself for the obvious failings of a gaming corporation? Smash that buy button now!
I was planning on picking up B4 when the GOTY edition goes on sale for $20-30 couple years from now. I figured performance issues will be solved by then. Now I think I’ll pass.
Piracy, my friend. Fuck devs like this.
Probably not worth pirating, will still run like crap.
Forgetting about it is probably the best insult you can give it.
Bought it to try n Linux. I don’t have the greatest video card but I can play Dune: Awakening, Helldivers 2, Monster Hunter Wikds, Avowed, Black Myth: Wukong…
Borderlands 4 was stuttering on the barely animated character select. I lowered settings all as low as possible and it was still unplayable with delayed/missed input and stuttering.
I just got a new GPU, and they gave me a coupon for the game for free. My system should be able to run it great, but I’m not even sure how good it actually even is. All the reviews I see all look like paid reviews or early access folk, or people that claim to love it to justify their overpriced rigs.
I loved 1 and 2, and then the series went downhill for me. Now I guess I have 4 but might wait a while to play it because I know a ton of patches are coming. Besides, there are a ton of other great games on my backlog that I’d much rather play with my limited free time.
I played lots of borderlands 2 with my friends back in the day it was pretty fun.
Three came out, played it for a bit, but it was just more of the same and somehow worse. Then I watched that God awful movie.
I think I’m over the franchise, but maybe here in a few years I’ll pick it up for $5 in a summer sale.
I adored the presequel, did so many interesting things. The verticality, stomp attacks and oxygen masks were awesome. Also the low grav meant the maps could be way more varied and interesting.
Waited for the reviews for the third (never pre-order, always wait for reviews!) and it just seemed so… mid. Definitely happy I dropped out of that franchise when I did.
I found 1 and 2 were games I could both replay at least once. With 2 the only bad bit to replay is bricks area where the devs just spammed a ton of very spongy enemies in a big map. 3 had more fun vault hunters mechanically but even during the first playthrough so much of it feels like filler content (like literally ALL of Hammerlocks area) and the final boss is somehow even more dissapointing than BL1, trying to play through a second time is at least 2/3 “Oh god not this bit again”.
It was out free, but had some spyware or something, so I refused it for free…
lol
lmao
rofl
They toned down the humor, which imo wasn’t the problem they needed to write better jokes, and write better villains.
The entire plot feels like an extra long side mission which is basically, “Go Rescue Lilith.” They have been teasing something “big” is coming and that they need to prepare for war since the pre sequel. We have gotten now two new main installments, two “tales”, and a fucking spin-off since then. Yet they still keep teasing this “big” thing. I wish they’d move the narrative along already.
Once that big thing happens, they can no longer milk the anticipation
So anyway, you guys excited for Hades 2?
Hell yeah! Recently finished Clair Obscur, now playing Silksong, and waiting for Hades 2, this year is packed with awesome indies!
Hell yeah indeed! Shape of Dreams just dropped too, and is awesome (if you like the genre). Incredible year so far.
It’s hard to be excited with how much I’ve played the early access, but yes. Amazing game, I really should’ve paced myself
I can’t decide if the explanation that “our shitty game is made for premium gamers” is more or less absurd than EA charging 80 bucks for a game with most of its characters still locked would “provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment”.
It’s more akin to trying to drive a semi truck with a semi truck motor but then something drops and there’s a ton of friction like an unintentional tractor pull. Even the best chips on the market display subpar performance.
…is he trying to promote the game by acting like one of its shitty characters?
Randy looks at Borderlands 4 actually performing somewhat well critically and says NOT IF I HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH IT
It’s what he does best.
It’s basically the “AAAA-game” bit again
AAAA gamers
Make it perform well, then we can talk premium.
Unfortunately it doesn’t matter what any of us say…the damage is done. I saw something like 200k online on steam. Unless most of them refund the negative reviews are meaningless. Pretend it was only 200k on steam and they bought just the “shitty” $70 version. …who knows how many bought on other platforms as well. They made a lot of money already is all I’m saying and I wish they didn’t. Games junk.
Anyone who bought this game, is a moron. No ifs, no ands, no buts. Randy is a fucking prick, and made no secret of his feelings towards gamers right before the game came out. No one should have spent a single penny on this dogshit.
There aren’t that many Premium™ Gamers®, and trying to pretend that that is, like, a legitimate target demographic to pander to is just sad, folks.
(The funniest gamer influencer backlash I’ve seen lately was against some YouTuber who blew ~$2K on gaming desk and a chair and called it a “minimalist” setup. People at large rightfully went “are you shitting me”.)
I mean minimalism is a style, not your budget
Minimalist != minimal budget
There aren’t enough monster truck owners to support his game. If he gets his wish, Gearbox is going to lose a whole lot of money
The reality is that it is a mass market game. It needs mass market adoption. Currently much of the market is locked out due to performance issues
Everyone without a 5090 should immediately refund the game and use these remarks as the justification.
Can we please standardize a pc parts price point? (Not sure I’m saying this right)
Like, “it doesn’t matter where technology is, $600 gets you ‘low’, &1000 gets you ‘high’, and $2000 gets you ‘ultra’.”
$2000 gets you just a high end graphics card. >.>’
Yeah so, either the prices need to come down, or devs optimize for those price points. Or both. Because two thousand dollars for a gpu is ridiculous.
When everyone stops chasing cryptocoin and AI the prices will come down.
As long as people will pay 2k for a video card, they’ll charge 2k for a video card :(
The market doesn’t discern between gamers, cryptobros, and corporations.
I thought we were about to have a break when everything went ASIC, but that just didn’t last.
No one will ever stop chasing AI. It’s the holy grail of corporate efficiency, just you… your shareholders… and some unpaid robot slaves. The dream.
Eventually, the bubble will burst.
Venture Cap paid for the first round of hardware; it has to make real money for the second round.
Once the token price rises to the actual cost of buying the ephemeral hardware it’s running on, no one will want to use it for the hard stuff.
Most AI companies will die quite dramatically, but the big players will weather the storm and soak up all the rewards that come from monopolising on such technology. The ultimate product can turn to slop if you’re the only game in town.
What’s with this “you” middle man? Let’s just get rid of that and have shareholders-robots.
Battlefield 6 ran like butter. What’s your excuse
Such a bad argument. There is no reason for the game to not support lower end hardware except for lazy development. Not a good sign for the future of borderlands. This is also the type of game that really sucks if you don’t get a locked 60 FPS. Borderlands 3 is still a laggy mess on my steam deck. Sometimes it just stutters forever. Constantly generating shaders or something. There is no reason for it to be that way and lowering the setting has almost no effect on the actual performance. This is 100% the fault of the devs. They are pushing half complete products to market not the consumer.
Also as many others have stated, not everyone has $4000 to drop on a PC. My most powerful machine is a Skylake processor with a 1070. It runs most games fine, it’s just the handful of unoptimized unreal engine games that run badly. I have nearly limitless options to buy other games from devs who actually care about us poorer folk. A 4070 ti is like 800-1000 rn. Probably won’t even run this game well. This is in an age where we have had nearly 100% inflation in a few years. Most people can barely afford to buy a car without spending half of their paycheck. They should be trying to make their games work on older hardware now more than ever. Ram is cheap, there are some things you can work around. It’s usually not worth it to target low RAM devices, but there is really no good reason for you game to not scale well to lower end GPUs. You don’t have to have only 4k textures on disk. You can easily automate a process to create lower poly, and lower resolution textures, implement modest lighting systems. It’s pretty easy in relation to other things. Cpus are mid, you shouldn’t necessarily target 10 year old CPUs if it’s going to make the game worse but your game shouldn’t be so unoptimized that you need 5.5 ghz on a single core to get 60 fps. You should at least have a proper lod system in place so that you can support lower end GPUs in many cases where it’s not very difficult.
The issue with many of these modern triple AAA games is they are trying to avoid as much work as possible. They are trying to avoid targeting lower end hardware because it’s a bit of work and they are struggling to finish their games. They need to plan for these things from the start and work them into their process.
Hell, I don’t know many people willing to drop 4k on a gaming rig. Most people I know with a gaming computer are in the 1-2k range and miss when you could get decent performance under 1k. Like, if I can’t get playable performance out of a several years old mid range computer I’m not buying your game, especially not for $70
That was a reference to a video I saw, something like, trying to play borderlands at 60 FPS on a $4k computer.
2k is about the minimum these days for a full system when you include taxes and shipping. That will get you a midrange system. You can get lower end stuff or buy a used graphics card. Personally I’m still rocking a 1070 and it’s excellent for like 99% of games. I’m lucky that the handful of games that won’t run on it I don’t care about anyways.
Also a less known fact, real inflation, not government reported is probably close to 100% over the past 10 years. So really a $2000 machine today is the same as a $1000 computer 10-15 years ago. Our wages didn’t go up of course. That’s the whole point of a fiat currency and inflation! It’s a clever and sneaky wealth tax. It’s a way to cut your wages quickly in a way that 90% of people don’t understand. They just yell at the gas station clerk because their soda is nearly $5. Their poor little brains can’t conceive of a concept so sophisticated as they are actually being payed less, stuff doesn’t cost more. People aren’t going to make stuff for free and give it to them. It’s just not a simple number so it confuses them. If businesses had to adjust your pay to match real inflation, guess what?, there would be no inflation and no fiat currency. No reason for it to exist because they couldn’t screw us out of our wages without telling us to our face Just extra paperwork and time for managers, little fake economic growth and no unnatural bubbling of markets.
Kind of divering from the larger point, but that’s true — RAM prices haven’t gone up as much as other things have over the years. I do kind of wonder if there are things that game engines could do to take advantage of more memory.
I think that some of this is making games that will run on both consoles and PCs, where consoles have a pretty hard cap on how much memory they can have, so any work that gets put into improving high-memory stuff is something that console players won’t see.
checks Wikipedia
The XBox Series X has 16GB of unified memory.
The Playstation 5 Pro has 16GB of unified memory and 2GB of system memory.
You can get a desktop with 256GB of memory today, about 14 times that.
Would have to be something that doesn’t require a lot of extra dev time or testing. Can’t do more geometry, I think, because that’d need memory on the GPU.
considers
Maybe something where the game can dynamically render something expensive at high resolution, and then move it into video memory.
Like, Fallout 76 uses, IIRC, statically-rendered billboards of the 3D world for distant terrain features, like, stuff in neighboring and further off cells. You’re gonna have a fixed-size set of those loaded into VRAM at any one time. But you could cut the size of a given area that uses one set of billboards, and keep them preloaded in system memory.
Or…I don’t know if game systems can generate simpler-geometry level-of-detail (LOD) objects in the distance or if human modelers still have to do that by hand. But if they can do it procedurally, increasing the number of LOD levels should just increase storage space, and keeping more preloaded in RAM just require more RAM. You only have one level in VRAM at a time, so it doesn’t increase demand for VRAM. That’d provide for smoother transitions as distant objects come closer.
You can divide stuff up into memory however you want, into objects, arrays, whatever. Generally speaking the GPU memory is used for things which will run fast in the streaming processors of the GPU. They are small processors specialized for a limited set of tasks that involve 3D rendering. The types of thing you would have in GPU memory are textures, models, shader scripts, various buffers created to store data for rendering passes like lighting and shadow, zbuffers, and the frame buffer and stuff.
Other things are kept in the ram and are used by the CPU which has many instruction sets and many optimizations for different types of tasks. CPUs are really good at running unpredictable code. They have very large and complex cores which do all kinds of things like branch prediction( taking several paths through code ahead of time when there is free time available) it has direct access to the PCI bus and access things like the south and north bridge, storage controller, io devices, etc.
Generally on a game engine most of the actual logic is happening on the CPU because this is very complex and arbitrary code that is calculation heavy. Things like the level data, AI, collisions, physics, streaming data and stuff is handled by the CPU. The CPU prepares frames by batching many things into one call to the GPU. This is because the GPU is good at taking a command from the CPU and performing that task many times simultaneously. Things like pixels for example. If the CPU had to send every instruction to the GPU in sequence it would be very slow. This is because of the physical distance between the GPU and CPU and also just that a script would only do one thing at a time in a loop. Shaders are different. They are like running a function across a large data set utilizing the 1000 + cores in an average modern GPU.
There are other differences as well. The CPU has access to low latency memory where the GPU prefers higher latency but high bandwidth memory. This is because the types of operations the GPU is doing are much more predictable and consistent. CPUs are very arbitrary and often the CPU might end up taking a path that is unusual so the memory it has to access might be scattered and arbitrary.
So basically most of the game engine and game logic runs in memory because it’s essentially a sequential program that is very linear and arbitrary and because the CPU has many tools in its tool boxes for different tasks, like AVX, SSE, and stuff like this. Most of the visual stuff like 3D transformation and shading and sampling take place on the GPU because its high bandwidth and highly parallel yet with some cores, yet you have many of them that can operate independently.
Ram is very useful but is always limited by console tech. It is particularly important in more interactive and sandboxy type games. Stuff like voxels. It also comes in handy when running sim or rts games. Engines are usually designed around console specs so they can release on those platforms. It can be used for anything even rendering, but it is extremely slow compared to GPU memory in actual bandwidth, which is usually less then an inch away from the actual GPU and has a large bus interface, something like 128-512 bit. This is how many physical wires connect the memory chip to the GPU. It limits how much data you can send in one chunk or cycle. With a 64 bit interface you can only send one 64 bit word at a time. Many processes can pack 4 of those into a 256 word and send them at once getting a 4x speed increase on a 256 bit bus, or 8x speed on a 512 bit bus.
So you have higher bandwidth, high latency memory on a wide bus which feeds a very predictable set of many simple processors. Usually when you want to load memory into the GPU you have to prepare it with the CPU and send it over the PCI bus. This is far too slow to actually use system ram to augment the GPU ram. It’s slow in latency and ram, so if you were to do so, your GPU will be sitting idle like 80% of the time waiting on packets, and then it will only get a 64 or 128 bit packet from the ram, not to mention the CPU overhead of constantly managing the memory in real time.
Having high ram requirements wouldn’t be the worse thing in the world because it’s cheap and can really help some types of games which have large and complex worlds with lots of physics and things happening. Ram is cheap. Not optimizing for GPUs is pretty bad especially with prices these days. That will not happen much because games tend to be written in languages like C++ which manage memory in a very low level way, so they tend to just take about as much as they need. One of the biggest reasons you use a language like C++ to write game engines is because you can decide how and when to allocate and free memory. This prevents stuttering. If the system is handling memory you tend to get a good deal of stuttering because the CPU will get loaded for half a sec here and there a
it’s wild to me that there are people who still not only let this man talk, but write down the shit that come out of his stupid face and report on it.
What a total dick. Lots of people with high end PCs are all saying how it runs like shit, so what’s the next excuse?
They’re not premium gamers. It’s about what’s inside your soul, not the kind of PC you have.
Ah, my mistake. If only our souls were as pristine and premium as Randy Pitchford lmao
We can’t all be Randy Pitchford. I bet it runs so well for him. :(
He’s just giving mega chuds ammo for their flame wars.
That’s the thing, Randy, we aren’t interested in a monster truck, we just need a car. A 5090 is not a leaf blower, and your game looks more like a clown car than a monster truck given the way it runs. Thanks for telling us that you are basically only interested in whales, although I can’t imagine they are happy either regardless of how they’ve probably thrown money at you already.
Eh. I didn’t even finish borderlands 3. won’t bother getting 4
Same argument Sony gave when EverQuest 2 launched with stupid high required specs. World of Warcraft launched a month later you could run on any video card from the last 5 years and the whole franchise still hasn’t recovered.
“we haven’t optimised this at all, lol, $80 please”
Well now I am giving even less of a fuck about this series that should’ve ended after the second title
This reminds me of the “AAAA” game thing.
Did not read the article. I have a 3070 graphics card (windows 10)and the game ran fine. I had a problem with not being able to select a different weapon until I messed with it quite a bit and my friend had one crash. He has a 3050.
Frankly I expected much worse, but this is just not a good response. Is he using this as an excuse NOT to fix it?
While I have no desire to defend Randy, Twitter is as Twitter does, and unless you spend time looking at his whole timeline, it sounds like he’s saying only stupid shit like this. He did actually acknowledge the issues, and stated that they’re working on them but also that for now the best way to play is with FSR/DLSS and frame gen.
I disagree with this deeply. He makes arguments about the imperceptibility of latency in frame gen, but that’s only true when the base framerate is high enough. DLSS is probably fine, but it’s also pretty fair for those who are using an 80 or 90 class card to complain about struggling at 1440p native, let alone 4k.
Thanks.
How dare you have a reasonable response when we all just wanna be pissed. /s
But seriously some people should just not interact with the public. It’s a thankless job and you have to have very thick skin and the patience of a saint. I also have a theory that a large percentage of CEOs are sociopaths/psychopaths so …
PC gaming ladies and gentlemen.
I don’t follow. Borderlands is on all consoles too isn’t it? At least the older ones are?
Seems to run fine on console.
I’ll say it here again, i have an 7900xtx i expect it to run silky smooth.
If it doesn’t, that’s on you brother.
I also play on 1440p and it doesn’t reach a well enough framerate at ultra settings, i set it on high and adjusted some things to lower settings to get a better framerate.
Sounds like it works on your machine. What’s your point?
Premium gamer spotted
The problem is Randy.
I’m an ok gamer, maybe even good, but premium? I don’t know… I guess this game isn’t for me. Better spend my money on other games then.
the fact, that steam reviews were on mostly negative on launch day, and it suddenly got mostly positive means steam has once again tempered with the statistics. fuck valve as well.
is there that much difference between 2015 and 2025 hardware? (like now people are saying moore's law is dead and stuff)