Borderlands 4 launches to 'mostly negative' reviews on Steam thanks to widespread performance problems and crashes

Borderlands 4 is out today, and it's been very well received critically, at least by those sites who received pre-release code—a list that does not include PC Gamer. It's a different situation over on Steam, however, where a whole lot of people are playing Borderlands 4, but the overall user rating is an ugly "mostly negative."

The problem, going by hundreds of user reviews that have already been posted, is almost entirely related to Borderlands 4's performance. Multiple Steam users report low frame rates and persistent stuttering, even at reduced graphical settings and on powerful hardware, and complaints about frequent crashes are also common.

"Terrible, terrible performance. Worst I've ever seen," Etikoo wrote in one negative review. "Turned it down to Low graphics presents and couldn't hit 60 FPS, even with FSR upscaling on my RX 6900 XT."

"30fps at native medium to high settings on 1440p with a 3080 TI," pirate135246 concurred. "It also looks worse than BL3 tbh. Idk how it runs this bad."

Some sites that reviewed the PC version cited performance issues as well: Windows Central's Michael Hoglund says Borderlands 4's fun gunplay was frequently undermined by "intermittent zone loading" and framerate drops.

Our hardware tester, Nick Evanson, has experienced similar problems in his initial testing today, although he noted that a 2.7GB post-launch patch helped reduce the frequency of crashes. That was presumably the day one patch Randy Pitchford confirmed a few days ago, though it seemingly didn't appear until after the game went live: There's no indication on the Borderlands 4 Steam page of a separate hotfix being rolled out.

Even some positive reviews are down on the game's performance: One such thumbs-up assessment states, "Game is good but the performance is not, frame gen + DLSS is almost mandatory if you do not have RTX 5090."

(Image credit: Steam)

We got a whiff of possible concerns about Borderlands 4's performance earlier this week, when Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford said gamers should have "realistic" expectations about how the game will run, especially on older hardware: "This is a big, open AAA game and lower-end and older hardware may not perform as well as higher-end, modern PCs," Pitchford said at the time.

That's good advice in general, but it also felt—to me, anyway—a bit like we were being prepared for the worst: And, well, here we are, not in a catastrophic state, but pretty far from ideal, too.

There's been no reaction yet from Gearbox about the problems, or indication of what it intends to do about it, but I would expect we'll see something on that front soon enough. It is very early, after all—Borderlands 4 only launched a few hours ago—and it takes time to react, even when things go south so quickly.

And while the user rating sure isn't great, the concurrent player counts are: SteamDB says Borderlands 4 is currently sitting at more than 192,000 players, far surpassing the previous games in the series (remembering that Borderlands 3 launched as an Epic Games Store exclusive) and likely to go up even higher over the weekend.