Borderlands 4 has had some time to brew in the public consciousness, and the general consensus—one I agree with—is that the story is just… fine. If anything, it's a little too middle-of-the-road, but given my key enjoyment of the game has a lot to do with the shooting and very little to do with the dialogue, I was happy to let inoffensive text warble in the background.
Given what we've had before in Borderlands 3, it was still a big improvement, and I even found myself charmed by one or two character moments. Not a terrible swerve from the outdated-on-launch memes, all told.
The folks at Gearbox are happy with the feedback, too—Sam Winkler, the game's narrative lead, comments at a dev panel in Pax Australia 2025 (thanks, GamesRadar+): "It's been great! It's been really good—I'll be honest, I'm really happy with it." And hey, you know what, Winkler isn't wrong to feel that way.
Even when I'm at my most critical of videogame stories, I try to appreciate that game development is an utter nightmare—with the constant changing of hands, direction, and narrative most studios endure, it's more of a miracle that we have any good stories in the first place.
Then Randy Pitchford hops in and I get a little more cynical: "Isn't it weird to ship a game where the biggest complaint isn't how we fucked up the story?"
Not to drag out Gearbox's history, but Aliens: Colonial Marines was a thing. Even recently, PCG contributor Rick Lane described it as "one of the most infamous misfires of gaming history". Filled with bugs and terrible AI, a disaster so big that Gearbox was part of a lawsuit over it which, to be fair, Gearbox was later dropped from.
I'm absolutely nitpicking here, and this foible was from over a decade ago, but I'm also not sure I'd say something like this were I the CEO in charge of one of the most infamous videogame flubs of the medium's history.
Pitchford continues: "We're wondering, like—what is going [on?] Everyone's like nah, story's awesome, character's awesome, we love it, gameplay's great. And we're like ok, we'll get technical. Cool, that's cool. I'm happy to live in that world … You and the team just crushed it on the storytelling, Sam."
This happiness is likely a new development, given Pitchford spent a considerable amount of time after BL4's launch… well, let me just drum up a few direct quotes from the guy:
- "Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers. Just as Borderlands 4 cannot run on a PlayStation 4, it cannot be expected to run on too-old PC hardware."
- "I know a lot of you are dead set on playing at 4K with ultra max settings and using two or three-year-old hardware"—I was actually playing on low and still getting major stutters, and even players with high-end PCs (including our own hardware writers) were struggling.
- "Less than one percent of one percent (0.01%) of customers [are] using CS tickets for valid performance issues." In defense of said performance issues.
This is less about frames, but Pitchford also recently said that the inventory system—which I devote an entire segment of my Borderlands 4 review complaining about, because it's by far the game's worst flaw—is "a gratifying loop. It’s a gratifying decision. Our brains need to do it, and our brains like doing it. And we’re better off when we do it." Mm.
Mind, this was also in a very long ramble about "what separates our species from a lot of others, and how we developed language and how we developed all kinds of high levels of consciousness and cognition that allow us to analyse the"—I'm just going to stop here, it goes on like this for a while, and if you want to read the full thing you can read the article linked above.
Point being, I would not have described Pitchford's behaviour post-launch as being "happy to live in that world." Though to be fair, earlier in the panel, he does seem to've changed his tune on performance specifically:
"I come from a time where we cared about fidelity, and we cared about resolution, and I also came from a time where we kinda had to learn—I was a programmer, we're all programmers—but you know what? Not everybody is gonna tinker with all the settings, doesn't matter that we give all the settings.
"And if you buy a really high-end video card or if you have a system that performs, some people really want high framerate, and so performance is a priority for us and it's a priority for customers."
I mean, hey. At least he's found a way to get there. And I don't doubt for a second that Gearbox (the studio) has been working hard to get things sorted, even as Pitchford tweeted over them. I've already noticed improvements, and there's likely more to come.
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