“The game is pretty damn optimal” – Randy Pitchford responds to Borderlands 4 PC performance complaints

Gearbox Software boss Randy Pitchford has been busy defending Borderlands 4 against complaints of poor game performance on PC. He said the game was “pretty darn optimal” and that people shouldn’t expect to be able to run it in huge resolutions at max settings and get incredible frame-rates.

“Every PC gamer must accept the reality of the relationship between their hardware and what the software they are running is doing,” Pitchford wrote on X. “We have made an amazing and fun and huge looter shooter campaign game. The game is pretty damn optimal – which means that the software is doing what we want without wasteful cycles on bad processes.

“With Borderlands 4, every PC gamer has a LOT of tools to balance their preferences between FPS, resolution, and rendering features. If you aren’t happy with the balance between these things you are experiencing, please tune to your preferences using the tools available to you.”

It’s “absolutely reasonable” for a looter shooter like Borderlands 4 to focus on achieving 60 frames-per-second at recommended settings, he said, presumably meaning rather than anything higher. But you can’t have it all. If you want all the visual effects and a very high resolution, you’ll have to trade-off against frame-rate, he said, and vice versa.

“It is a mistake to believe or expect that PCs between minimum specification and recommended specification can achieve all of extremely high frame rate, maximum/ultra features, and extremely high resolution,” Pitchford wrote. “If that last post makes you have a negative reaction, I bet you have emotions and expectations that you feel aren’t sufficiently attended to. I’m sorry.

“But please accept that the game is doing a lot and running pretty optimally and that you may have to either accept some trade offs between fps, features and resolution as your preference or you will continue to be disappointed.”

For its part, Gearbox is doing “significant” work on PC performance, Pitchford said, and it’s fixing the “few real issues” affecting a “very, very small percentage of users” there are. In the meantime, Pitchford recommended lowering resolution or using a scaling resolution solution like DLSS to improve the performance of your game. “The game was built to take advantage of it,” he said. “This is not a competitive FPS.”

Poor PC performance of Borderlands 4 led to a glut of negative Steam reviews during launch weekend, where the game currently sits on an overall review average of “Mixed”. It has, however, had a seemingly very popular opening weekend, reaching a high of just over 300K concurrent players.

But it’s not just the PC version of Borderlands 4 that’s having some technical headaches. Console players have been struggling with a lack of customisable control over the game’s field of vision (FOV) – a setting players have control over on PC – and are finding it too zoomed in, and it’s making people feel sick.

Pitchford responded to these concerns by first claiming there is no motion blur in Borderlands 4, as some people had thought there was. Then, bizarrely, by explaining that the reason there is no FOV slider in the console versions isn’t due to performance issues but because “it might affect fairness”. But what he meant by that wasn’t entirely clear. “I can’t really talk about it yet,” was all he said. Though he did later add: “Be aware – you have no idea what the team and I were planning and how FOV slider might affect fairness with such a thing.” Some kind of competitive multiplayer mode, perhaps?

He then posted a poll to gauge how much people wanted a FOV slider in the game. The result was overwhelming: nearly three quarters of all poll responders chose the strongest affirmative answer – “FOV slider or GTFO!”

Borderlands 4 was released at the end of last week, but as we weren’t supplied with game-code ahead of the release, we had no review for you. We do now have a review in the works but, as we want to be thorough, it may take a few days.