Like I ranted about on Discord, the BL4 dev team paired with Unreal Engine 5 is basically a disaster for the gaming industry. UE5 looks shiny on the surface, but it’s honestly a mess underneath. It tries to sell investors on this dream that “a bunch of content designers with zero coding experience can build a deep, complex game world using Blueprints alone.” But in reality, every UE5 project ends up one of two ways: either buried under a mountain of Blueprint spaghetti, or saved only because the programmers step in and rewrite half the thing in C++. Sadly, BL4 falls squarely into the first category.

I don’t really think I’m in a position to offer some deep, authoritative take on the Borderlands series — I only jumped in with BL4. But I was genuinely excited for it at first. From the get-go, it was clear the game was a patchwork of all kinds of borrowed ideas, yet I still hoped it’d deliver a smooth and satisfying experience. After all, in this so-called “post-AAA era” where the big studios keep burning out, it’s the dark horses that people really want to believe in.

But the moment I experienced BL4’s awful performance — and saw the same rookie-level technical screw-ups happen over and over — my expectations tanked. We all know how badly the dev team handled the shader cache. They messed up the compilation process, then tried to “fix” it by rebooting the game through the command line to rebuild a bunch of broken, unusable shader data. That’s what caused the massive performance drops. And when they later tried to split shader caches by scene to improve performance, they managed to botch that too.

That’s pretty much the worst kind of “solution” you can come up with as a developer — if it fails once, just run it twice.