AAA game? Performance issues and crashing on release? Why I never.
- 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 - 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. 
 
- 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. - I could play the gorgeous KCD2 - 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 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’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. 
 
- 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. 
- 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. 
 
- 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. 
 
 
- That franchise hasn’t been good since BL2 - 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. - 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. 
 
- …and then they turned it into spinoff game with Wanda Sykes’ voice constantly grating your brain into shredded cheese 
- 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. 
 
 
- 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. - Let’s be honest, the only story missions we ever cared about were those starring Handsome Jack. - 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. 
 
- Such a great big douchey motivator! 
 
- 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. 
 
 
- 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. 
- 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 
- 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?” 
 
 
- BL3 had some fantastic DLC though. Loved that. 
- 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. 
 
 
 
- Also… why now? BL games always get 90% off eventually, lol. 
- 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. 
- 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’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. 
- 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. 
 
 
- 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 
 
- It literally crashed while Conan was doing a Clueless Gamer promo for it. 
- And it still has the loss of focus in the inventory screen bug that’s plagued the game since the first one. 
- News at 11, sky still blue. The series ended with 2. 
- denuvo strikes again 
- 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. 
- 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? 
 
- Put it on GoG. 
- 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. 
 
 















