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Borderlands 4 Launches To Mostly Negative Steam Reviews Over Performance Issues And Crashing
(www.thegamer.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2025
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I briefly watched Jackfrags video on it. The graphics aren't even anything special, the world isn't overly populated and I can't imagine there would be any overly complex calculations running in the background and it performs like shit.
Fuck these fucks.
It's Unreal Engine 5, so the bad performance is included by default. I've played 4 UE5 titles in recent months and all of them ran terrible even though they were far from groundbreaking graphically.
Hell, I could play the gorgeous KCD2 on high settings at a buttery smooth 60FPS but apparently I need to set everything to the very lowest and down to 720p to get the same result on much worse looking Unreal games.
UE5 performance is fine these days if the game developer actually utilizes the tooling in place to catch problematic assets, sequences, blueprints, and more. Now, those tools may not be the easiest to use, but they do exist, and, with official documentation. It's got challenges, but the tooling exists. In 5.5 there was even an expirmental plugin released that's supposed to help with the burden of integrating this work, so it's obvious there's effort being put into providing tools for developers to make performant games
The problem is that takes additional time in a production pipeline, and is uaully pushed off to the side til the end of a game's dev cycle instead of the beginning, if it's done at all. And due to the way that many game studios are funded and operate, it's not uncommon for product quality to follow the model of delivering features first to meet funding milestones instead of focusing on making sure the work that's being introduced is also performant.
When listening to the dev commentary of Valve games, they talk about how much work goes into level design planning even just for the sake of optimization, like clearly delineating barriers between major regions (doorways) so the engine can unload objects from other areas.
I get the impression the “First step easy” setup from UE5 may have made it so that more people can give us unoptimized messes, but still only a few rare devs understand proper optimization at all levels of development.
The only ue5 game I have played with good performance is satisfactory and that's because good performance is necessary for a game like that (so they put a lot of effort into it)
Thing is, you absolutely CAN make UE5 games perform well, but all the shit they advertised as making photorealism performant, Nanite, Lumen, Megalights etc... Can be used wrong and make performance worse instead of better. Or so I keep hearing. Nanite in particular is only good if you have REALLY detailed assets, in which case it helps perform better.
Threat Interactive on YouTube explains a bunch of things that are often done wrong.
As someone looking in from the outside, the problem is with the way UE5 markets itself, (people using UE5 can correct me). The appeal of UE5 is that it does all the boring stuff for you. For example, instead of buying a good light system off of your engine's marketplace or making your own you can just use lumen. Any system marketed as something you can "just use" is going to get implemented wrong because its appeal is supposed to be that it is low effort.
^(no shame to devs that do think like this, game development is hard and having solutions like this just gives more time to make the game you want)^
But it does make sense that it can be used correctly, UE5 is way to mainstream for it to be built on systems that never work.
Now is a great time to play it again. The newest DLC just dropped. Henry gets his own forge. I'm liking it a lot so far.
I love that game so much i played like 30 or 40 hours and hardly did any main missions. I haven't been to the wedding or anything. The game is almost too overwhelming to play for me. I really wanna play the dlc, but i think i have to start over and play like a normal human being.
I bought at release played 60hrs so far barely touching the story.. I haven't even saved Haans yet but decided to stop and wait for all the DLC drops then play the shit out of it in its completed glory.
Kinda there with you. Just bought the base game, played through it once, ~70% through a hardcore Henry playthrough, and then I’ll wait for all the DLC to get that and do one more playthrough.
I'm kinda waiting for all the DLCs to be released for my next playthrough. I've already spent hundreds of hours on the first one alone.
Wayfinder uses ue5 and runs just fine.
That is the only example I have.
Clair Obscur and Hellblade 2 also ran great on my Steam Deck. And I suspect Fortnite does as well.
My guess is that developers of the other games just pour in high def assets without using any of UE5's crazy LoD techniques.
Yes, that's the thing. UE5 CAN run well, if you don't use most of its fancy features. But then what's the point of that dumb engine?
Just because it can load in high quality assets doesn't mean that everything has to be 4 billion polygons. You use it sparingly for where it will make the most impact. That doesn't mean that a mountain in the background that you'll never get near has to be of the same quality.
I don't think that's really the engines fault.
I thought the entire point of nanite was to allow developers to throw in high quality assets without having to worry about the performance hit.
Well you can do that but then it isn't going to run on a steam deck, whether or not you as a developer think that's a problem depends on what hardware you are targeting.
But you've still got the problem of file size. I've noticed that if the asset is really big you actually run into streaming issues when loading it in. It looks fantastic, but you probably don't want your rock to take 10 seconds to load in. If you go look at the matrix demo you'll see they have a lot of asset reuse because of that.
Nanite isn't magic it's neither going to enable you to just throw in 16k resolution textures and just not worry about it there's always going to be a trade-off. But it's insane to say that it isn't a useful feature or that you should never use it.
It probably doesn't work with interactable objects and other edge cases. And it for sure doesn't work with trees because they highlighted in the Witcher 4 showcase how they created a version specifically for trees.
But ot does work with foliage though.
Maybe they think they can do a better job, but it definitely does work with plants. It didn't used to, when it first came out it was limited to just static objects, and it didn't work on terrain at first which I was thought was a weird restriction, but it works on pretty much everything now.
Expedition 33
I’ve played two games (off the top of my head) that run UE5. Remnant II and Payday 3. Both have performance problems.
Remnant II is just overall poorly optimised. Payday 3 has weird random hitches. Granted they seem like they might be server side because when I get them my friend does too, almost simultaneously, and vice-versa.
I played Remnant 2 on my rtx 3080 and had no issues with it performance wise. I think I had one instance of getting stuck on world geometry but that was it really. Mostly in multiplayer too, played the whole thing with 2 friends.
I also had great experiences with Claire Obscur, Split Fiction, Tempest Rising, The Alters, and Talos Principle 2. All of them are UE5. I dont really like Epic or Tim Sweeney so I wouldnt normally defend them, but its more that I wouldnt be too quick to blame the engine when all these other devs can do it right.
I don’t have bugs with Remnant, it just doesn’t perform all that well without all the AI up scaling and whatnot. I think it’s more of an optimisation problem than anything else.
I’ve a friend who experiences problems after ~40 minutes of play time though, the frame rate just tanks.
I will admit I had to fiddle with some settings to get it smooth on a few of these games. Par for the course on PC. One thing that I've turned off is actually that frame gen stuff - it makes my frames choppy. I think its weird because if I had a variable frame rate normally my gsync monitor handles that but with frame gen it seems to really fuck it up. Otherwise I always set to my monitor resolution and 100% scale, DLSS on, and crank everything to epic. Cant remember if Remnant had RTX but thats one thing I set to medium or low usually, that shit is a hog in almost every game.
Yes, those are lagspikes from the server IIRC.
Same. My graphics card upgrade did little to help out performance on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2.
The weirdest thing to me is that the graphics settings don't make much of a difference. There's like a 20 FPS gain between "Ultra" and "Lowest" and I could barely tell which one it is just based on the visuals alone. How do Unreal devs mess up their optimization so consistently across many games? Surely the problem must be somewhat related to the engine itself.