'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're going to be disappointed'

Drink up me hearties.

Not so fast, mate! Here there be Denuvo.

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.

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

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.

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.

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. >.>’

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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?

Ram is cheap

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.

PC gaming ladies and gentlemen.

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?

I don’t follow. Borderlands is on all consoles too isn’t it? At least the older ones are?