When Borderlands 4 released last year, the game was lambasted for its poor performance, especially on PC. As the first Unreal Engine 5 game in the series and the first entry to be set in a proper open world, the effects-filled looter-shooter suffered from some annoying framerate issues that some players simply couldn’t ignore.
As Gearbox releases the first DLC for the game, Mad Ellie and the Vault of the Damned, Borderlands 4 has seen a major optimisation boost that improves performance on all platforms, but that wasn’t an especially easy task.
In an interview with IGN, managing producer Eli Luna said that “Borderlands hasn’t had this seamless world before”, explaining that “there was a lot of stuff that we were trying to do”. Working to improve performance on the open world game after launch was “a little stressful”, but the game now runs about 20% better on all platforms according to the team.
“We’re targeting the best approach that we can for this,” they continued. “Could it be 120 frames at a higher resolution? Yeah, I mean, those things are always going to be a challenge to hit, because we’re also wanting to make sure that we hit a wide audience of players as well, which is why we have our min spec and our rec spec.”
The producer explained that the Gearbox team “worked really hard to try and make that a playable experience” on launch. On the other hand, they also claimed “that the expectations of players, especially nowadays and moving forward with how quickly hardware is coming online, that’s always going to be a challenge just to stay on top o, like trying to get everything in line for all these new features, but at the same time, not abandoning out min spec players and our rec spec players”.
Lune explained that “on the console it’s a little different”, although Borderlands 4 also suffered from poor performance on Xbox Series and PlayStation 5 as well. Nevertheless, the studio is trying to balance the feedback they get from players “especially on the PC side”, which harbours a massive portion of the Borderlands fanbase.
While this new DLC does bring some huge performance improvements to the game, Luna is keen to state that it will not be the final optimisation pass for Borderlands 4. “Obviously, we want to continue to fine tune as we go,” they continued, “but we also don’t want to hold the entire thing back just because of certain aspects of it”.
Borderlands 4: Mad Ellie and the Vault of the Damned is out right now with a new story, expanded level cap, a new playable character, new bosses and minibosses, a new map zone and, of course, new guns to find. Right now, the game sits at a mixed reception on Steam.
