Another day, another Borderlands 4 update aiming to smooth out more of the performance problems which have plagued the looter shooter since launch, especially on PC. Unfortuntely, this latest patch looks to have led to an uptick in stuttering for some players, with Gearbox recommending some shader messing around as a potential fix.
In fairness to the studio, you can’t say they haven’t been working hard to get Borderlands 4 running a bit more smoothly since problems in that department became apparent, with this being the third post-launch patch targeting performance in the past couple of weeks. One of them was confusingly noteless, but hey.
Anyway, this one has notes, and delving into them you’ll find a few tweaks to weekly activities being granted top billing before things descend into fix territory. The weekly big encore boss has been swapped to a tougher version of another existing boss and will offer more loot. The weekly wildcard mission’s changed and Maurice’s Black Market Vending Machine has been moved.
In terms of fixes, Gearbox cited the rectifying of “various instances of hitching, low FPS, and crashes” as well as “infinite loading screens during crossplay”. Characters should also load up faster in menus, and their animations have been updated to match the fixes. Sadly, it seems that the update’s actually led some players to experience more performance problems, with Gearbox acknowledging this in a follow-up tweet.
“Stuttering issues should resolve over time as the shaders continue to compile in the background while playing,” they wrote. “If you’re still experiencing issues after 15 minutes of continuous play, you can also clear your shader cache via your video card manufacturer’s approved method.” If problems persist, you’ll have to file a support ticket.
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That aside, studio have also made some changes to rewards and progression with this update, plus some minor tweaks to individual vault hunters. On top of that, there’s a bit of gear balancing, with the tweaks as follows:
- Hellwalker: now always spawns with Fire element
- Tediore weapons: +10% Damage and +10% magazine size
- Order Pistol Lucky Clover (Rocket Reload): increased fire rate
- Order Sniper Rifle Fisheye: increased Damage
Borderlands 4 creative director Graeme Timmins has revealed in a tweet that the game’s next patch’ll be much heavier on the balancing tweaks. “As a note, we had too many Vault Hunter buffs to safely fit into today’s big update,” he wrote. “Instead, we broke up them into their own balance update that we’re targeting to release early next week instead.”
Here’s hoping that Gearbox can get their shooty thing running nicely soon, especially since yapping CEO Randy Pitchford thankfully looks to have stopped giving impromptu setup advice on the socials. As for the game itself, Jasmine Mannan gave it a go for us and generally liked what these four bordered lands had to offer.
