Gearbox has released a new update for Borderlands 4 “to help improve stability for a wide range of PCs.” However, the developer failed to provide patch notes for the update, leading to confusion about what it actually does.
Borderlands 4 launched last week and hit a peak of over 300,000 concurrent players on Steam alone — a figure significantly higher than any Borderlands game released on Valve’s platform. However, Steam reviews are ‘mixed,’ with most of the complaints revolving around PC performance.
In response, Gearbox posted a Borderlands 4 Nvidia Optimization guide on Steam, advising players how to optimize their graphics settings for “better performance and framerates” on PC with the Nvidia app.
Gearbox then issued a piece of advice to PC gamers that to me reads like an effort to prevent players from making knee-jerk reactions to the game’s performance as soon as they’ve changed their settings: “Please note that any time you change any of your graphics settings, your shaders will need to recompile. Please keep playing for at least 15 minutes to see how your PC’s performance has changed.”
Over the weekend, Gearbox posted on Steam to signal the release of a new game update in frustratingly vague terms and with no patch notes, leaving players to try to work out what it did, and if their performance had improved. As the Steam user review rating suggests, results are mixed, but that’s anecdotal evidence at best.
“We hope you’re having a blast in Borderlands 4. The team is loving seeing you all shooting and looting your way through Kairos,” Gearbox said. “Today we’re releasing a new update to help improve stability for a wide range of PCs.”
“There is no patch notes. Is this really just a blog post for an unhelpful optimization guide?” wondered redditor wtfwasthatdave. “The patch did not fix my crashing issues,” added PBKrunch. “Game runs horribly, still runs horribly after the patch and the people saying it runs fine are using both frame gen and super sampling to achieve their ‘frames,'” said drummerdude41.
Borderlands 4: All Vault Hunter Skill Trees Ranked
Borderlands 4: All Vault Hunter Skill Trees Ranked
Gearbox went on to repeat its advice to wait 15 minutes before making any performance calls after tweaking settings, saying: “Please note that any time you change any of your graphics settings, your shaders will need to recompile; it may take up to 15 minutes for this process to fully complete.”
“Thanks again for joining us on this journey, Vault Hunters — we’re just getting started,” Gearbox continued. “We’re continuing to read your feedback, planning additional updates and will have more details to come.”
If you are delving into Borderlands 4, don’t go without updated hourly SHiFT codes list. We’ve also got a huge interactive map ready to go and a badass Borderlands 4 planner tool courtesy of our buds at Maxroll. Plus check out our expert players’ choices for which character to choose (no one agreed).
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
