Gearbox said that they would be prioritizing buffs over nerfs in Borderlands 4 for a while, despite many broken interactions and insane one-shot builds. And while they are delivering on that promise, fans are annoyed that new patches to improve performance are coming with big asterisks, and some of the most annoying bugs in the game remain.
Gearbox did deliver some buffs and at least one new, hugely requested feature, which was in effect a buff to consoles, which now have an FOV slider. Not a bad turnaround time for that, but you have to wonder why it didn’t launch with it. But in terms of gear buffs:
- Tediore weapons: +10% Damage and +10% magazine size.
- Order Pistol Lucky Clover (Rocket Reload): increased fire rate.
- Order Sniper Rifle Fisheye: increased Damage.
- Hellwalker: now always spawns with Fire element.
That Hellwalker change is sort of a nerf, actually, as it makes it more situational than when it was kinetic, but Hellwalker was always fire and should still be fire, so Gearbox listened to fans.
Those other two exotics must have been dramatically underperforming to get buffs before dozens and dozens of others, so we’ll see if they’re strong enough to make it into any meta now. I wasn’t aware Tediore weapons were lagging behind, but it seems data suggests they were.
But the patch that was meant to help performance was rolled out with at least one complication, that on PC, fans were having immediate problems. From Gearbox:
“We’ve received reports that some players are experiencing reduced stability after downloading today’s update. Stuttering issues should resolve over time as the shaders continue to compile in the background while playing. If you’re still experiencing issues after 15 minutes of continuous play, you can also clear your shader cache via your video card manufacturer’s approved method.”
I have never played a game that has made me mess around with shaders and my shader cache at all, much less to this degree. So far I have:
- Removed and reinstalled shaders with a Gearbox-given command through a Steam launch as the game was unplayable without this. I’ve done this twice now, including once in the review period.
- Had to change my NVIDIA shader cache to 100GB as the most effective performance fix today.
- Now, possibly, need to go into NVIDIA and clear the shader cache that way (I’m not clear if this is akin to the first thing I did).
On top of that, Gearbox left some of its most annoying bugs in the game, namely the trash-marking inventory bug and the default sorting bug that make the already not-great inventory management even more of a pain. And there are a dozen other quality of life issues that should be on the plate. For now, they appear to be focusing on performance and crashes, but these fixes, some of which still involve manual video card shenanigans, are ridiculous.
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