Borderlands 4 boss tells players "please get a refund from Steam if you aren't happy" as Randy Pitchford continues his very public crashout over the FPS's performance woes
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Never heard of the guy before
Lucky you. Randy has a long history of being an insufferable asshole
Pretty much. Can’t remember what he did that ticked me off like 8 years ago.
I stopped buying and surprise surprise, got everything after Borderland 2 for literally free or like $2-3 at some point.
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I don’t get it. Borderlands 1 ran at like 720p (less?) on native hardware (Xbox 360) and it looked great, mostly because of the cel-shaded graphics. Cel-shaded was code (maybe still is) for low-res and it covers it up well. So I feel like anyone trying to push 4K Borderlands (Gearbox, or players) is in the wrong here and that may be part of the problem. Now if Borderlands 4 can’t run at 1080p or 1440p on good hardware… that’s Gearbox’s problem to fix. Trying to run Borderlands at 4K sounds about as stupid to me as Animal Crossing at 8K — apparently that has been accomplished with a very powerful computer and an emulator. (AC for Switch is not performance locked to hardware, it’ll scale up to whatever you can run it on.) But it just begs the question “fucking WHY?”.
I feel like the discourse around Borderlands 4 should be “is it fun” followed at a great distance by “is the story compelling enough to draw me in?” I did not have plot expectations for the first one, and it exceeded them.
Disclaimer: played and beat BL1 and all its DLC. Dabbled in 2 and 3. Have not played BL4 yet. Looking forward to a Siren play on my Series X at some point, but not now.
Trying to run Borderlands at 4K sounds about as stupid to me as…
On the contrary, it should be perfectly runnable at 4K because its a 2025 FPS game and the cel-shaded graphics should be easy to render.
‘Unreal Engine’ is no excuse either. Try something like Satisfactory rendering literally thousands of dynamic machines on a shoestring budget with Lumen, like butter, on 2020 GPUs, and tell me that’s a sluggish engine.
This is on Gearbox, who’ve developed on Unreal for 2 decades. And ‘sorry, we’ll work on it’ would have been a fine response…
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Seems like the kind of guy I’d want in charge of my company. “Don’t buy my stuff” is some next level 4D marketing.
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Can someone find an excuse for how this behaviour is not just extremely short sighted / plain stupid? Never heard of the guy before, but he seems to behave like a petty little child throwing a tantrum for something that is obviously his or some of his near colleagues fault. Comparable level of stupidity to “Do you guys not have phones?” lol.
I think they would be better of by just ignoring or at least appeasing the crowd with something.
Edit: I read into some of his key moments as a person and comments he made on the topic. Yikes. Maybe he is trying to appeal to edgy kids so they nag their parents to buy better hardware. Maybe his brain got quadruple-A-fried over the years. But then again, maybe he is just another CEO asshole and has always been lol. It’s a shame, Borderlands 1 and 2 were great games back then. Just let a good game rest in peace, there is no need and no sense in milking every last drop out of every successful series. /rant
But then again, maybe he is just another CEO asshole and has always been lol.
When you fire everyone that disagrees with you, it doesn’t take long to loose the ability to handle criticism.
Like, there’s a very good chance this guy has had absolutely nothing but praise while “working” on this game. So now that people whose job doesn’t depend on making him feel like a genius are giving feedback, it literally breaks his brain.
He most likely genuinely believes the game is perfect and all the criticism is from “trolls and haters” who are just lying because their jealous of his genius.
There’s a reason this attitude is so pervasive among the wealthy.
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Trying to run Borderlands at 4K sounds about as stupid to me as…
On the contrary, it should be perfectly runnable at 4K because its a 2025 FPS game and the cel-shaded graphics should be easy to render.
‘Unreal Engine’ is no excuse either. Try something like Satisfactory rendering literally thousands of dynamic machines on a shoestring budget with Lumen, like butter, on 2020 GPUs, and tell me that’s a sluggish engine.
This is on Gearbox, who’ve developed on Unreal for 2 decades. And ‘sorry, we’ll work on it’ would have been a fine response…
My understanding is that Unreal is a garbage engine for optimization at face value, it has a lot of useful tools and a lot of incorrect/dated documentation for those tools some of which are also just kind of configured wrong as their default settings. If effort is put into optimization to configure things correctly and only use the various tools like nanite or lumen in their actual use cases (rather than just throwing them on everything) you can get some pretty fantastic optimization.
TLDR: Good but complex tools marketed as low effort with bad defaults and exagerated marketing.
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Trying to run Borderlands at 4K sounds about as stupid to me as…
On the contrary, it should be perfectly runnable at 4K because its a 2025 FPS game and the cel-shaded graphics should be easy to render.
‘Unreal Engine’ is no excuse either. Try something like Satisfactory rendering literally thousands of dynamic machines on a shoestring budget with Lumen, like butter, on 2020 GPUs, and tell me that’s a sluggish engine.
This is on Gearbox, who’ve developed on Unreal for 2 decades. And ‘sorry, we’ll work on it’ would have been a fine response…
Right because Cyberpunk looks amazing in 2025 and it ran like shit five years ago at launch.
But 4K gaming is more demanding than people realise and gaming companies shouldn’t be getting so much flak for it.
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Right because Cyberpunk looks amazing in 2025 and it ran like shit five years ago at launch.
But 4K gaming is more demanding than people realise and gaming companies shouldn’t be getting so much flak for it.
Honestly Cyberpunk’s raytracing runs like poo compared to Lumen (or KCD2 Crytek) compared to how good it looks. I don’t like any of the RT effects but RT Reflections; both RT shadows options flicker, RT lighting conflicts with the baked-in lighting, yet doesn’t replace it if you mod it out.
Most of Cyberpunk’s prettiness is there from good old rastarization, more than most people realize.
PTGI looks incredible, but it’s basically only usable with mods and a 4090+.
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My understanding is that Unreal is a garbage engine for optimization at face value, it has a lot of useful tools and a lot of incorrect/dated documentation for those tools some of which are also just kind of configured wrong as their default settings. If effort is put into optimization to configure things correctly and only use the various tools like nanite or lumen in their actual use cases (rather than just throwing them on everything) you can get some pretty fantastic optimization.
TLDR: Good but complex tools marketed as low effort with bad defaults and exagerated marketing.
Gearbox has developed on Unreal Engine since 2005. They have ~1,300 employees.
I’m sorry, I know game dev is hard. But if small, new studios can get it to work, Gearbox should get it to fly. They have no excuse.
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That would be comical. Breaking the 4th wall, boss talking shit. Get a refund punk you suck at this, while you’re at it throw your PC in a lake, fish play better.
Dude that’s some serious Sans stuff
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Dude that’s some serious Sans stuff
Oh, Sans is smarter than that; he’d say how you can’t refund because you’ve already played for way more than 2 hours to get this far. If anything, he would mention your actual playtime statistic in his dialogue.
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Never heard of the guy before
Lucky you. Randy has a long history of being an insufferable asshole
He’s the poster boy for being successful while being the dumbest guy in every room he enters.
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This guy is why PR consultants and Social Media teams exist. Some people just should not have contact with the public. However good he might or might not be in his work on the project itself, someone should have told him to sit down and shut up and let someone who knows how not to damage the entire game with a single statement handle the communication.
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Yeah, I’m a longtime Borderlands fan who follows what’s going on with the franchise, and Randy just acts like a child who inherited a video game company. He usually says this dumb shit with a smile on his face, so I think he’s intending it to be in good fun, but it just does not come across that way.
right?
Randy Pitchford has been this way for years.
I guess its news to some people Randy shooting off his mouth.
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He’s right. Refund it and don’t bother supporting him again. Simple!
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Dude that’s some serious Sans stuff
The games called Serious Sam.
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Can someone find an excuse for how this behaviour is not just extremely short sighted / plain stupid? Never heard of the guy before, but he seems to behave like a petty little child throwing a tantrum for something that is obviously his or some of his near colleagues fault. Comparable level of stupidity to “Do you guys not have phones?” lol.
I think they would be better of by just ignoring or at least appeasing the crowd with something.
Edit: I read into some of his key moments as a person and comments he made on the topic. Yikes. Maybe he is trying to appeal to edgy kids so they nag their parents to buy better hardware. Maybe his brain got quadruple-A-fried over the years. But then again, maybe he is just another CEO asshole and has always been lol. It’s a shame, Borderlands 1 and 2 were great games back then. Just let a good game rest in peace, there is no need and no sense in milking every last drop out of every successful series. /rant
Can someone find an excuse for how this behaviour is not just extremely short sighted / plain stupid?
It’s not. It works because he’s always operated like this and keeps getting away with it. People keep sucking up his garbage games so why should he change?
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Overrated franchise has dogshit legacy sequel. More news at 11.
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Can someone find an excuse for how this behaviour is not just extremely short sighted / plain stupid? Never heard of the guy before, but he seems to behave like a petty little child throwing a tantrum for something that is obviously his or some of his near colleagues fault. Comparable level of stupidity to “Do you guys not have phones?” lol.
I think they would be better of by just ignoring or at least appeasing the crowd with something.
Edit: I read into some of his key moments as a person and comments he made on the topic. Yikes. Maybe he is trying to appeal to edgy kids so they nag their parents to buy better hardware. Maybe his brain got quadruple-A-fried over the years. But then again, maybe he is just another CEO asshole and has always been lol. It’s a shame, Borderlands 1 and 2 were great games back then. Just let a good game rest in peace, there is no need and no sense in milking every last drop out of every successful series. /rant
I think they would be better of by just ignoring
I mean the best thing they could do is to acknowledge that the game could use some optimization and promise to continue working on it. Even if they have no intention of doing so. But that might get them in trouble with Nvidia since they slapped an “Nvidia optimized” badge on it.
The worst thing they could do is say “buy a better PC”.
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[Gabe Dislike That]
Gabe not even noticing from 1 of his 6 superyachts
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Pretty much. Can’t remember what he did that ticked me off like 8 years ago.
I stopped buying and surprise surprise, got everything after Borderland 2 for literally free or like $2-3 at some point.
There was his crashout before Borderlands 2 where Gearbox accepted a boatload of Sega money to help finish Colonial Marines, and instead outsourced the project. Gearbox kept the money in spite of the failure, and allegedly used it as funding for Borderlands 2. (They were sued by Sega for keeping the cash, but later dropped the suit)
He also crashed out during the Borderlands 3 leadup.
Groped the Claptrap VA 6 years ago because he was tired of voicing Claptrap “as a favor” and when offered normal market rates wanted more because Claptrap is iconic. Pitchford cornered him at the hotel elevator, grabbed the VAs junk and said “youre gonna do what I tell you to” -allegedly.
Other than that, about the same time, he left a thumb drive at a Medieval Times that had company secrets and squirt porn on it. Same thumb drive. Brother apparently can’t afford 2 thumb drives to keep his porn separate from his company secrets.
Pitchford is the problem with Gearbox, but as a whole he’s a far cry from being Rockstar or Nestle, so it doesn’t cross people’s Ick threshold to trigger boycotts.
