Borderlands 4 Performance Woes: Why Resetting Every Hour Isn’t Acceptable

The release of Borderlands 4 was meant to be a triumphant return for Gearbox’s looter-shooter franchise. Instead, it has sparked heated debates about performance, player expectations, and developer accountability. Tech specialists at Digital Foundry have now delivered their verdict on the state of the game, and their findings highlight problems too significant to brush aside: framerates consistently degrade the longer you play, even on high-powered consoles like the PlayStation 5 Pro and Xbox Series X. Their conclusion is blunt – restarting the game every hour just to restore performance is unacceptable for a big-budget AAA release in 2025.

According to Digital Foundry’s Tom Morgan, each console is prone to sizeable, sub-60fps lurches given enough time on the clock, and it’s just a matter of how long you’re willing to keep playing before deciding to reset. In other words, no matter the system, if you play long enough you’ll face heavy framerate dips, sometimes as low as the mid-30s. The only current workaround, as confirmed by Gearbox head Randy Pitchford himself, is to quit and relaunch the game. While that temporarily resolves the issue, Morgan slammed the idea that such a measure should be considered a standard part of gameplay. For a title marketed as a cutting-edge Unreal Engine 5 showcase, this kind of instability is a major blow.

These issues echo the problems seen with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, another UE5 project where memory management caused slow but steady performance collapses during extended sessions. The prevailing theory is that a memory leak or poorly cleared system cache is at fault, gradually choking the system until a restart flushes it out. If true, this points to fundamental engine-level inefficiencies rather than just isolated bugs.

On PC, the situation is no less controversial. Borderlands 4 currently sits on a mixed rating on Steam, with complaints centered around stutter, crashes, and poor optimization. Digital Foundry advises PC players to avoid the ‘Badass’ preset altogether, noting that even high-end rigs struggle under its load. Gearbox has acknowledged PC issues as a top priority and published an Nvidia Optimization guide to help users tweak settings for stability. However, many report only modest improvements. Worse, the studio’s advice to keep playing for at least 15 minutes after any graphics change so shaders can recompile has been criticized as tone-deaf, coming across as an attempt to downplay problems instead of solving them.

The backlash is magnified by Randy Pitchford’s increasingly combative online presence. Instead of calming fans, he has fanned the flames by suggesting players who dislike the product simply get a refund, dismissing concerns about the lack of a console FOV slider, and even sarcastically telling critics to code your own engine and show us how it’s done. He also declared Borderlands 4 a premium game made for premium gamers, a comment that has only fueled accusations of arrogance. Some gamers point out that telling loyal customers to walk away isn’t a fix, and others note that blaming users for wanting a polished launch is out of touch in an era where game prices continue to rise.

The frustration is understandable. Borderlands 4 arrives six years after its predecessor and is powered by Unreal Engine 5, a toolset promoted as the future of blockbuster gaming. Yet despite all the advancements, it repeats the same problems haunting recent UE5 launches like MGS Delta and Oblivion Remastered. Performance instability, visual bugs, and inconsistent optimization have become recurring complaints. For a series that once defined smooth and chaotic co-op fun, this is a bitter pill for fans to swallow.

It’s not all doom and gloom. Beneath the technical chaos, Digital Foundry praised Borderlands 4 for its ambition. The new visuals, expanded environments, and fresh gunplay ideas point toward a game that, if stabilized, could shine. Some console players also report fewer issues, with smoother sessions lasting two to three hours before dips become noticeable. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that no console title should expect resets as part of normal play. As one critic put it, this was the kind of workaround players tolerated in niche Eurojank games of the early 2000s – not from a billion-dollar franchise in 2025.

Players’ patience is wearing thin. The gaming industry’s reliance on fix-it-later culture has created a landscape where massive releases often ship in half-broken states, only to be patched into shape months later. Cyberpunk 2077 eventually redeemed itself, but at what cost to players who paid full price at launch? Many commenters now openly advocate waiting a year for Borderlands 4 to be bundled with expansions at half price, expecting by then the game will finally run as intended.

What’s most concerning is how normalized this has become. Launch-day issues so common they’ve become memes are not the hallmark of a healthy industry. As one commenter ranted, in no other industry but the software space is this acceptable and it has to change. He’s not wrong – if cars or home appliances shipped in such condition, consumers would demand recalls, not patches.

For now, Gearbox promises more fixes are coming, with the next emergency patch targeting memory leaks and console stability. Whether that will be enough to win back goodwill is another question. Borderlands 4 still has the bones of a great looter-shooter, but unless performance stabilizes soon, its legacy may be defined not by innovation but by the simple fact that playing it too long breaks it.