Borderlands 4’s launch was supposed to be a victory lap for Gearbox. Conversations after release were filled with technical problems and upset PC fans.
Those frustrations spilled into reviews, pulling the game into “Mostly Negative” in no time.
For many, it feels like the most troubled PC debut in the series’ history, if not Gearbox’s worst launch outright.
Was Borderlands 4 Doomed From the Start?
Even ahead of release, Borderlands 4 made headlines for the wrong reason when Conan O’Brien’s Clueless Gamer clip went viral after a mid-demo crash.
While the studio tried to laugh it off, the stumble foreshadowed what many players would face once they got their hands on the game.
Players were already unsettled after Pitchford openly admitted the game wouldn’t be playable on rigs under the minimum requirements.
How Bad Are the Performance Problems?
As soon as it arrived on PC storefronts, reports poured in about everything from hard crashes to major lag and stutter issues.
On top of that, some rigs that technically met or exceeded the listed minimum requirements still couldn’t maintain stable frame rates.
Many reviews called the game a “stutter-ridden mess,” with frame drops even in quiet sections.
Ironically, even ultra-powerful machines weren’t spared, as testers running RTX 5090 cards with high-end Ryzen chips still saw disappointing results.
At 4K on ultra, performance stayed around 40–80 FPS but was interrupted by constant hitching and some crashes to the desktop.
The fact that even top-of-the-line rigs needed DLSS or FSR cranked to “Performance” mode just to stay playable raised questions about optimization.
For a game that doesn’t look radically better than its predecessor outside of being open-world, the workload felt heavier than it should have been.
Or Is It Just Bad Optimization?
The tech blame has splintered across a few culprits, as Unreal Engine 5 has been scapegoated once again, with critics pointing out that other UE5 titles have launched in shaky condition.
Some argue that Denuvo DRM introduces needless performance strain.
Still, many players and developers argue that the engine itself is not the issue, but that optimization and CPU load-balancing were not prioritized during development.
Whatever the case, it’s hard to ignore how poorly the game scales across different setups.
To Gearbox’s credit, a day-one patch and several hotfixes did cut down on some of the crash-to-desktop bugs and smoothed things out slightly.
But for most players, it wasn’t enough. The shared advice is to update drivers, move the game to an SSD, turn off overlays, cap FPS, and use DLSS or FSR.
That’s a rough sell, though, when earlier Borderlands entries ran far more smoothly on similar hardware.
How Bad Does It Rank Against Past Borderlands Games?
Borderlands 4 ends up being a story of opposites, with a messy technical side hiding a game praised for its gunplay, loot, and world-building.
The strain is so heavy that even strong PCs falter, leaving players battling the system instead of the game.
For that reason, many argue this could indeed be Gearbox’s roughest PC launch to date.
Whether patches can redeem it is still uncertain, but Borderlands 4’s debut already shows how ambition, poor optimization, and rushed timelines can collide in disastrous ways.
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