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'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed'

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Submitted ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨mintiefresh@piefed.ca⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/borderlands-4-is-a-premium-game-made-for-premium-gamers-is-randy-pitchfords-tone-deaf-retort-to-the-performance-backlash-if-youre-trying-to-drive-a-monster-truck-with-a-leaf-blowers-motor-youre-going-to-be-disappointed/

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Comments

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  • lystopad@mbin.twink.men ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    is there that much difference between 2015 and 2025 hardware? (like now people are saying moore's law is dead and stuff)

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  • kepix@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    the fact, that steam reviews were on mostly negative on launch day, and it suddenly got mostly positive means steam has once again tempered with the statistics. fuck valve as well.

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    • pat277@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Steam tampers with statistics of the reviews? Is there like proof of that part specifically? Im just seeing people thumbs up and complaining about performance

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      • kepix@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        big companies call it review bombing when they fail to meet consumer expectations. in these cases valve doesnt count negative reviews within a time period.

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  • Pondis@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’m an ok gamer, maybe even good, but premium? I don’t know… I guess this game isn’t for me. Better spend my money on other games then.

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  • C1pher@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The problem is Randy.

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  • CrowAirbrush@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’ll say it here again, i have an 7900xtx i expect it to run silky smooth.

    If it doesn’t, that’s on you brother.

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    • REDACTED@infosec.pub ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Premium gamer spotted

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    • Gladaed@feddit.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Sounds like it works on your machine. What’s your point?

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  • TwinTitans@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    PC gaming ladies and gentlemen.

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    • cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I don’t follow. Borderlands is on all consoles too isn’t it? At least the older ones are?

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      • TwinTitans@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Seems to run fine on console.

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  • Professorozone@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Did not read the article. I have a 3070 graphics card (windows 10)and the game ran fine. I had a problem with not being able to select a different weapon until I messed with it quite a bit and my friend had one crash. He has a 3050.

    Frankly I expected much worse, but this is just not a good response. Is he using this as an excuse NOT to fix it?

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    • Flatfire@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      While I have no desire to defend Randy, Twitter is as Twitter does, and unless you spend time looking at his whole timeline, it sounds like he’s saying only stupid shit like this. He did actually acknowledge the issues, and stated that they’re working on them but also that for now the best way to play is with FSR/DLSS and frame gen.

      I disagree with this deeply. He makes arguments about the imperceptibility of latency in frame gen, but that’s only true when the base framerate is high enough. DLSS is probably fine, but it’s also pretty fair for those who are using an 80 or 90 class card to complain about struggling at 1440p native, let alone 4k.

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      • billwashere@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        How dare you have a reasonable response when we all just wanna be pissed. /s

        But seriously some people should just not interact with the public. It’s a thankless job and you have to have very thick skin and the patience of a saint. I also have a theory that a large percentage of CEOs are sociopaths/psychopaths so …

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      • Professorozone@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Thanks.

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  • cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This reminds me of the “AAAA” game thing.

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  • Bobylein@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Well now I am giving even less of a fuck about this series that should’ve ended after the second title

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  • Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    “we haven’t optimised this at all, lol, $80 please”

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  • whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Same argument Sony gave when EverQuest 2 launched with stupid high required specs. World of Warcraft launched a month later you could run on any video card from the last 5 years and the whole franchise still hasn’t recovered.

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  • Nikls94@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Eh. I didn’t even finish borderlands 3. won’t bother getting 4

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  • TheObviousSolution@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That’s the thing, Randy, we aren’t interested in a monster truck, we just need a car. A 5090 is not a leaf blower, and your game looks more like a clown car than a monster truck given the way it runs. Thanks for telling us that you are basically only interested in whales, although I can’t imagine they are happy either regardless of how they’ve probably thrown money at you already.

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  • vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    He’s just giving mega chuds ammo for their flame wars.

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  • zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    What a total dick. Lots of people with high end PCs are all saying how it runs like shit, so what’s the next excuse?

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    • ivanafterall@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      They’re not premium gamers. It’s about what’s inside your soul, not the kind of PC you have.

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      • zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Ah, my mistake. If only our souls were as pristine and premium and Randy Pitchford lmao

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  • pyre@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    it’s wild to me that there are people who still not only let this man talk be first place, but write down the shit that come out of his stupid face and report on it.

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  • DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Such a bad argument. There is no reason for the game to not support lower end hardware except for lazy development. Not a good sign for the future of borderlands. This is also the type of game that really sucks if you don’t get a locked 60 FPS. Borderlands 3 is still a laggy mess on my steam deck. Sometimes it just stutters forever. Constantly generating shaders or something. There is no reason for it to be that way and lowering the setting has almost no effect on the actual performance. This is 100% the fault of the devs. They are pushing half complete products to market not the consumer.

    Also as many other have stated, not everyone has $4000 to drop on a PC. My most powerful machine is a Skylake processor with a 1070. It runs most games fine, it’s just the handful of unoptimized unreal engine games that run badly. I have nearly limitless options to buy other games from devs who actually care about us poorer folk.

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    • tal@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Ram is cheap

      Kind of divering from the larger point, but that’s true — RAM prices haven’t gone up as much as other things have over the years. I do kind of wonder if there are things that game engines could do to take advantage of more memory.

      I think that some of this is making games that will run on both consoles and PCs, where consoles have a pretty hard cap on how much memory they can have, so any work that gets put into improving high-memory stuff is something that console players won’t see.

      checks Wikipedia

      The XBox Series X has 16GB of unified memory.

      The Playstation 5 Pro has 16GB of unified memory and 2GB of system memory.

      You can get a desktop with 256GB of memory today, about 14 times that.

      Would have to be something that doesn’t require a lot of extra dev time or testing. Can’t do more geometry, I think, because that’d need memory on the GPU.

      considers

      Maybe something where the game can dynamically render something expensive at high resolution, and then move it into video memory.

      Like, Fallout 76 uses, IIRC, statically-rendered billboards of the 3D world for distant terrain features, like, stuff in neighboring and further off cells. You’re gonna have a fixed-size set of those loaded into VRAM at any one time. But you could cut the size of a given area that uses one set of billboards, and keep them preloaded in system memory.

      Or…I don’t know if game systems can generate simpler-geometry level-of-detail (LOD) objects in the distance or if human modelers still have to do that by hand. But if they can do it procedurally, increasing the number of LOD levels should just increase storage space, and keeping more preloaded in RAM just require more RAM. You only have one level in VRAM at a time, so it doesn’t increase demand for VRAM. That’d provide for smoother transitions as distant objects come closer.

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      • DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        You can divide stuff up into memory however you want, into objects, arrays, whatever. Generally speaking the GPU memory is used for things which will run fast in the streaming processors of the GPU. They are small processors specialized for a limited set of tasks that involve 3D rendering. The types of thing you would have in GPU memory is textures, models, shader scripts, various buffers created to store data for rendering passes like lighting and shadow, and the frame buffer.

        Other things are kept in the ram and are used by the CPU which has many instruction sets and many optimizations for different types of tasks. CPUs are really good at running unpredictable code. They have very large and complex cores which do all kinds of things like branch prediction( taking several paths through code ahead of time when there is free time available) it has direct access to the PCI bus and access things like the south and north bridge, storage controller, io devices, etc.

        Generally on a game engine most of the actual logic is happening on the CPU because this is very complex and arbitrary code that is calculation heavy. Things like the level data, AI, collisions, physics, streaming data and stuff is handled by the CPU. The CPU prepares frames by batching many things into one call to the GPU. This is because the GPU is good at taking a command from the CPU and performing that task many times simultaneously. Things like pixels for example. If the CPU had to send every instruction to the GPU in sequence it would be very slow. This is because of the physical distance between the GPU and CPU and also just that a script would only do one thing at a time in a loop. Shaders are different. They are like running a function across a large data set utilizing the 1000 + cores in an average modern GPU.

        There are other differences as well. The CPU has access to low latency memory where the GPU prefers higher latency but high bandwidth memory. This is because the types of operations the GPU is doing are much more predictable and consistent. CPUs are very arbitrary and often the CPU might end up taking a path that is unusual so the memory it has to access might be scattered and arbitrary.

        So basically most of the game engine and game logic runs in memory because it’s essentially a sequential program that is very linear and arbitrary and because the CPU has many tools in its tool boxes for different tasks, like AVX, SSE, and stuff like this. Most of the visual stuff like 3D transformation and shading and sampling take place on the GPU because its high bandwidth and highly parallel yet with some cores, yet you have many of them that can operate independently.

        Ram is very useful but is always limited by console tech. It is particularly important in more interactive and sandboxy type games. Stuff like voxels. It also comes in handy when running sim or rts games. Engines are usually designed around console specs so they can release on those platforms. It can be used for anything even rendering, but it is extremely slow compared to GPU memory in actual bandwidth, which is usually less then an inch away from the actual GPU and has a large bus interface, something like 128-512 bit. This is how many physical wires connect the memory chip to the GPU. It limits how much data you can send in one chunk or cycle. With a 64 bit interface you can only send one 64 bit word at a time. Many processes can pack 4 of those into a 256 word and send them at once getting a 4x speed increase.

        So you have higher bandwidth, high latency memory on a wide bus which feeds a very predictable set of many simple processors. Usually when you want to load memory into the GPU you have to prepare it with the CPU and send it over the PCI bus. This is far too slow to actually use system ram to augment the GPU ram. It’s slow in latency and ram, so you GPU will be sitting idle 80% of the time waiting on packets, and then it will only get a 64 or 128 bit packet from the ram, not to mention the CPU overhead.

        Having high ram requirements wouldn’t be the worse thing in the world because it’s cheap and can really help some types of game which have large and complex worlds with lots of physics and things happening. Ram is cheap. Not optimizing for GPUs is pretty bad especially with prices these days. That will not happen much because games tend to be written in languages like C++ which manage memory in a very low level way, so they tend to just take about as much as they need. One of the biggest reasons you use a language like C++ to write game engines is because you can decide how and when to allocate and free memory. This prevents stuttering. If the system is handling memory you tend to get a good deal of stuttering because the CPU will get loaded for half a sec here and there as it tries to free 2 GBs of memory or something. This tends to make games engines very structured when it comes to the amount of memory they use. Since they are mostly trying to reuse code as much as possible, and are targeting consoles, they usually just aim for the amount of ram they know they will have on consoles. Things like extra draw distance on PCs and stuff can use more memory.

        LODs can be generated in real time but this is slow. You can do nearly anything with code. It’s just if it’s a good fit for your application. In a game engine every cycle is precious. Generating LODs is just something that isn’t done unless needed for some reason, like dynamic terrain or voxel terrain. In a game that is mostly static geometry there is not really any reason to give up that compute time when you can just pregen them.

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    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Hell, I don’t know many people willing to drop 4k on a gaming rig. Most people I know with a gaming computer are in the 1-2k range and miss when you could get decent performance under 1k. Like, if I can’t get playable performance out of a several years old mid range computer I’m not buying your game, especially not for $70

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      • DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        That was a reference to a video I saw, something like, trying to play borderlands at 60 FPS on a $4k computer.

        2k is about the minimum these days for a full system when you include taxes and shipping. That will get you a midrange system. You can get lower end stuff or buy a used graphics card. Personally I’m still rocking a 1070 and it’s excellent for like 99% of games. I’m lucky that the handful of games that won’t run on it I don’t care about anyways.

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  • Evotech@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Battlefield 6 ran like butter. What’s your excuse

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  • Taldan@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    There aren’t enough monster truck owners to support his game. If he gets his wish, Gearbox is going to lose a whole lot of money

    The reality is that it is a mass market game. It needs mass market adoption. Currently much of the market is locked out due to performance issues

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    • ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Everyone without a 5090 should immediately refund the game and use these remarks as the justification.

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      • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Can we please standardize a pc parts price point?

        Like, “it doesn’t matter where technology is, $600 gets you ‘low’, &1000 gets you ‘high’, and $2000 gets you ‘ultra’.”

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  • umbraroze@slrpnk.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    There aren’t that many Premium™ Gamers®, and trying to pretend that that is, like, a legitimate target demographic to pander to is just sad, folks.

    (The funniest gamer influencer backlash I’ve seen lately was against some YouTuber who blew ~$2K on gaming desk and a chair and called it a “minimalist” setup. People at large rightfully went “are you shitting me”.)

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    • Evotech@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I mean minimalism is a style, not your budget

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  • Bennyboybumberchums@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Anyone who bought this game, is a moron. No ifs, no ands, no buts. Randy is a fucking prick, and made no secret of his feelings towards gamers right before the game came out. No one should have spent a single penny on this dogshit.

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  • Surp@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Unfortunately it doesn’t matter what any of us say…the damage is done. I saw something like 200k online on steam. Unless most of them refund the negative reviews are meaningless. Pretend it was only 200k on steam and they bought just the “shitty” $70 version. …who knows how many bought on other platforms as well. They made a lot of money already is all I’m saying and I wish they didn’t. Games junk.

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  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Make it perform well, then we can talk premium.

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  • ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s basically the “AAAA-game” bit again

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    • Evotech@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      AAAA gamers

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  • chrislowles@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Randy looks at Borderlands 4 actually performing somewhat well critically and says NOT IF I HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH IT

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    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s what he does best.

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  • zebidiah@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    …is he trying to promote the game by acting like one of its shitty characters?

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  • SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s more akin to trying to drive a semi truck with a semi truck motor but then something drops and there’s a ton of friction like an unintentional tractor pull. Even the best chips on the market display subpar performance.

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  • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I can’t decide if the explanation that “our shitty game is made for premium gamers” is more or less absurd than EA charging 80 bucks for a game with most of its characters still locked would “provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment”.

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  • PieMePlenty@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    So anyway, you guys excited for Hades 2?

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    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s hard to be excited with how much I’ve played the early access, but yes. Amazing game, I really should’ve paced myself

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    • Yupa@ani.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Hell yeah! Recently finished Clair Obscur, now playing Silksong, and waiting for Hades 2, this year is packed with awesome indies!

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      • C4551E@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Hell yeah indeed! Shape of Dreams just dropped too, and is awesome (if you like the genre). Incredible year so far.

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  • MrJ199414@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    They toned down the humor, which imo wasn’t the problem they needed to write better jokes, and write better villains.

    The entire plot feels like an extra long side mission which is basically, “Go Rescue Lilith.” They have been teasing something “big” is coming and that they need to prepare for war since the pre sequel. We have gotten now two new main installments, two “tales”, and a fucking spin-off since then. Yet they still keep teasing this “big” thing. I wish they’d move the narrative along already.

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    • luciferofastora@feddit.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Once that big thing happens, they can no longer milk the anticipation

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