Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford Tells Borderlands 4 Critics: "code Your Own Engine"

I was somewhat shocked when I saw that BL3, a 2019 game, barely even booted on my 2015 gaming desktop. BL1 and 2 were playable on my dirt cheap Dell Vostro laptop with integrated graphics, 4GB RAM and a low power Core i3 processor. I thought it was possible because the BL series' graphics are quite cartoony compared to the ultra-realism of something like Battlefield. But I'm looking at BL4's graphics and they mostly look....the same?

> The exec also said "less than one percent of one percent" of players are filing customer service tickets about performance issues

Okay, and how many refunded the game on Steam?

> The exec also said "less than one percent of one percent" of players are filing customer service tickets about performance issues, and asked people to "code your own engine and show us how it's done, please."

???

Why wouldn't we just use your competitors engines instead.

Show me a good Unreal Engine game? Supposedly it can be optimised to be decent but so many of these games don't even run properly on top end hardware.

Mutahar with RTX5090 made a video where he can't get the performance from the game either.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0TKmVXcypc

The whole situation feels to me like buying an Audi R8 and after not being able to get over 150kmph,complaining about it and CEO of Audi would tell me to build my own engine when I don't like R8's

Borderlands 4 has a cartoonish art style that doesn't require photorealistic graphics, so it's unforgivable that the game runs so poorly. It has stutters and low FPS on the most expensive hardware available to buy.

The game really doesn't perform great, but it's not impacting the fun I'm having with it, so I decided to stick with it.

What I don't get is why Randy Pitchford seems intent on alienating the player base further by doubling down again and again on there not being a problem. Emotionally, I understand being defensive of one's work, but at a certain point it might be financially advantageous to show some humility or simply ... not say anything. Then again, he's free to do as he pleases.

"code your own engine" , is that license?

not very well thought out indeed, risking someone will actually roll thier own and everyone will get one.

> If you are so attached to the idea that DLSS is bad for your game experience because of something you saw or read on the internet, I am sorry" he wrote. The CEO also said he believed humans cannot detect any input lag in a blind test, though he seems to be talking about DLSS rather than frame generation.

I'm torn on how I feel about frame gen.

On one hand, it's mostly "free" frames. In MS Flight Simulator 2024, with the details cranked to the near maximum, it turns my somewhat choppy 45 fps (When flying over dense cities like NYC or London) into a buttery smooth ~150 fps.

On the other hand, it's allowing game developers to get lazy with optimization. They're being allowed to target lower frame rates under the assumption that frame gen will pick up the slack, which leaves players with a 3000-series GPU, which isn't that old, in the dust.

When running a brand new game most savvy gamers don't expect 120fps 4K HDR native on an 3+ year-old hardware. But they might reasonably expect 60fps at 2K native. So, apparently, the CEO - or the PMs that report to him - decided to ship with a performance level which surprised their customers negatively. The most obvious mistake here is if they weren't very clear and upfront with the fact it would require an unusually high spec system and/or synthetic pixel/frame gen to reach resolutions and frame rates customers might expect based on prior experience.

Performance optimization in AAA games is hard and time-consuming. Some game developers believe chasing ever higher visual fidelity will increase sales due to the 'curb-appeal' of the game play trailer. Maybe they're right but it's a double-edged sword because management loves the killer visuals but then will reduce the minimum required frame rate over slipping the schedule to permit performance optimization. Yet marketing will still insist on a game play trailer showing Ultra settings, so it ends up being made with lots of synthetic pixels and frames being inserted because they know YouTube streaming compression will hide much of the degradation. As someone who cares about visual fidelity and frame rate, I've learned to not trust YouTube streams of game play anymore and wait for a technical analysis by someone like Digital Foundry.

It's pretty clear how this keeps happening. The dumb thing is a CEO going on social media trying to argue their customers shouldn't want what they want. The right way to respond is pointing to where they made the higher system specs and requirement to use synthetic pixel & frame modes super clear in the specs, demo videos and other marketing. Synthetic generation can be useful in the right context but companies need to stop acting like it's something they don't need to fully disclose. Being either "artfully vague" or misleading in their marketing is unethical. Much like how in streaming video 'resolution' is meaningless if you don't know the bit rate, in AAA games on modern GPUs resolution and frame rate are now meaningless if synthetic generation tricks are being used.