Randy Pitchford Snaps Back at Borderlands 4 Criticism: 'Code Your Own Engine'

Oh, I was unaware randy coded unreal engine all by himeself. I take back every negative thing i ever said about the fucking Twat

Yeah, fucking what?
What the fuck does that even mean?
Randy is... what... when was the last time this asshat even wrote any code, much an less engine?
20 years?
No, seriously, when actually was the last time he wrote any code?
He founded Gearbox in 99... and by 2005, they liscensed UE 3.... prior to that, they'd been working with UE2... and Source...
I think you have to back prior to Gearbox, to Duke Nukem 3D and Lo Wang, to find somewhere Randy may actually have contributed to game engine code.
In conclusion: Fuck you Randy.
- You'd think since 2005 they'd be experienced enough to know how to work with UE but noooo...

Randy Bitchford cries about a problem he created, More at 11.

I can't believe I've somehow never seen 'Randy Bitchford', but that's his new name now, christ what a fucking diva.
- I've been calling him that since he got all whiney about the Duke Nukem forever flop, Glad that there are now 2 of us.

Yeah I'm pretty sure for $70 a functional engine should be the bare minimum.

What a fucking chode.

I mean... You first?

I think that's exactly his point.

I've read reports that people can't get more than 30fps on low settings on 4000 series cards. I'm definitely not one to expect sweet 120fps on ultra on launch day, but a 4000 card not even getting low settings? They failed. Hard.

Hey guys, you know what we really need for a IP property that is famous for a rather simplistic cel shaded art style?
The most complicated realtime lighting and rendering engine in the world.
... I could smack him with a fucking book, holy shit this is so stupid.
- Don't you know that gamers demand hyper realistic graphics? Even when there is a defined art style it doesn't matter. Realism.
  It's famously why comic books failed to captivate anyone, and cartoons are never successful.
I’m definitely not one to expect sweet 120fps on ultra on launch day
I fucking am. I didn't pay $1700 for a graphics card to have potato graphics. I'm glad there's been plenty of bad press on this, not that I would have bought it this close to launch anyway.
- No, I disagree with that. It's always been perfectly normal to have ultra graphics a bit out of reach so that the game will look great on future graphics cards, and 120fps is a ridiculously high number that should never be expected even with top of the line graphics cards for a brand new release. (Assuming 2 or 4k)
  However, a 1 generation out of date graphics card should be able to easily play most things on High settings at a decent framerate (aiming for 60) on 4k settings, which Borderlands failed at horribly. Medium to low settings on a 4000 series card sounds like a gutpunch to me.
On 3440x1440 with a 4080 I get around 50-60 FPS on very high, with DLSS Quality.
- They've released some updates, I'm not surprised if it's gotten better

I wasn't going to buy this game at all, but now I really won't buy it.

What an ass.

I was gonna buy it when it was 50% off with the dlcs included. Now, gotta see that performance first.

I don't need to personally be an engineer to call out a train wreck when I see one...

I'm not a pilot, but if I see a helicopter upside down in a tree I'm pretty sure someone fucked up.
Randy isn't even an engineer, he just owns a train.

Gonna keep repeating it until it sticks:

Don't touch Gearbox shit. They showed their true colours when they embezzled Colonial Marines.

Pitchford's brain dead takes killed any chance that I was going to play Borderlands 4.
I think it should be taken a bit further and just don't buy anything from 2K if you can.
- 2K can actually release a functional game though. The problem is they get greedy after the fact.

Randy pitchfork is a piece of shit that needs to stfu

Cheaping out on optimization is one thing, telling customers to basically eat shit if they have a problem with it is… something that‘s not gonna have any major consequences nowadays, I guess lol

What a time we live in

The 'true fans' will find a way, apparently.

I have. Oddly enough, I don't remember any Gearbox game with a Gearbox engine?

I don't need to be a three star Michelin chef to realize that the plate of shit I have just been served is in fact a plate of shit. Similarly, I also don't need to be a game developer to see that the buggy mess of a game gearbox just released is not worth my time.

My friend with a RX 7900 XT can barely run it.

At 1080p.

On Medium.

Shove it up your ass, Gearbox.

Is he running with antialiasing on?
Looking at their system settings page:
https://borderlands.2k.com/borderlands-4/news/amd-optimization/
Their settings for every single GPU listed there seem to have antialiasing off.
It may be that current hardware can't do that at a reasonable clip
- They have AA off because they recommend upscaling on literally everything. Upscaling sorta acts like AA and they are not used together.

God this guy is so impossible, hes a fucking cartoon character.

Anything ever come of this creep and his "favorite magic tricks" usb drive?
- I think I'm out of the loop on something here…

unreal engine game developer here: it's your fuckin' responsibility to debug and optimize your game, not unreal engine's.

You gave them a hammer and their nail has not gone in straight?
Clearly your fault. And the hammer's.

Take your own advice? What games do they have not on some other developer's engine? Other than their initial expansions for Half-Life, which are basically mods for Half-Life, all the games I know they have done were built on various iterations of Unreal Engine.

They did port Halo CE to PC with its own engine. They fucked up a lot of it in the process though.

Randy, you molest your employees with that mouth?!

If your engine is crap then you don't get brownie points because it's custom.

After all, Starfield is on a custom engine, and it had exactly the same problems as Borderlands 4.

Starfield ran pretty good. The game was just not fun. I tried having for 120 hours. I really did try. The shipbuilding was nice tho.
- Have to partly disagree. The loading screens, whilst usually brief, were very annoying.
  Elite Dangerous, No Man's Sky or Space Engineers accomplish similar tasks without needing those, or having to limit the accessible planet area.
  I understand that those were limitations of the engine, but it could just be speculation.

Coffee Stain managed to get UE5 to keep window settings between sessions, but what do they know? Certainly not how to not fix an inventory screen bug that's been in 4 games at this point.

Shade aside, I do think more developers should make their own engine. Yes it takes time and resources, but those are spent on exactly what you need instead of on getting what you want out of an engine that was made to do everything but focused on nothing.

I mean I sort of agree, but I've both used custom engines and seen people trying use custom engines and you have this problem where the engine was designed for a game, rather than for any game. So if the original game didn't have a particular feature the engine has no capacity to do that thing, so every time you want to make a new game in that engine, you basically have to rewrite the engine.
It works if you build an engine to be an engine, but as you say that's extremely expensive and time consuming and you probably am not going to get any benefit out of it. You could try selling the engine, but you're unlikely to make much progress unless there is a significant improvement over the other options already available.
This kind of thinking is what caused all the issues for cyberpunk 2077 release. You need people who can actually use the engine. If you have to train every dev that on boards on your custom engine and all its quirks and customizations youll mever be able to release on time. Its why theyve switched to working with unreal. You can actually get people who are familiar wirh all the systems without spending weeks or months training them.
It also sucks for the devs trying to leave since youve now spent months or years working on systems and code that dont work anywhere else. So whoever hires you will again have to retrain you with their systems.

Now watch as some determined lunatic codes a new engine and somehow ports all of BL4 to it.

And gets hit with a C&D the day before release

Yo, Randy, eat your own shit! Don't forget to swallow!

this is unreal

Don't you guys have ~~phones~~ 90-series graphics cards?

Yeah, i could. Or you could optimize your assets and figure out how to add performance profiles instead.

I feel like they'd make more money if they targeted lower end machines. My friend has a potato laptop and would enjoy borderlands, so they're out of luck. They're not going to spend any money on a new gaming toy because it's not that big a hobby for them. I imagine there are many such people.

I'm ready for the article announcing Randy takes back his statements. As is the cycle.

Greasy bastard.

I did

^It ^sucked, ^but ^I ^won't ^buy ^your ^game ^regardless

He's just mad that he's not as good at making game engines like Id, Valve and even Epic did.

I remember when 3 came out, i still had a ps4. The game was literally unplayable, like literally crashing every 2 minutes. Couldn’t get past the first 10 minutes of the game. Im not surprised that even on ps5 the new one is crap. It’s like they gave up after part 2

I don't understand how Sony would allow a game on their platform that doesn't actually run. Like surely they will require to provide some kind of advanced copy for them to review?
- I’m pretty sure they allow anything that hits 30fps.
- There's a process called certification you need to pass in order to release on a console where they test your game against a list of criteria outlined in the developer agreement to validate stability, minimum performance,and conformance with platform standards. Nintendo pioneered this process (the Nintendo seal of quality) in response to unauthorized developers releasing cartridges which ran poorly and could freeze or even cause damage to consoles.
  For a while, console manufacturers pretty strict about certification requirements but as time goes on they've been granting more and more exceptions to large publishers willing to pay fees and pinky-promise to fix the issues post-launch.

@inclementimmigrant borderlands 4 running like dogshit on a 5090 is going to make me crash out in the most legendary way

I'm not doing anything that chat GPT can't do

No

Randy is such a bitch boy chode meister.

Maybe I'm just wildly crazy here, but I think a $70 game from a big studio should run well.

We're not talking some $15 early access title here that lacks optimization because it's like 2 guys making it in their free time.

for real though why don't more companies license idTech

Seems fine in performance mode on PS5. Windows users having trouble?

It’s funny given they use unreal.

I run a 7800X3D on and X870 mobo, 64gb ram and an RTX3090, and couldn't run it at my native 7680x2160 resolution and have a playable framerate. It was fine at 3840x1080, but randomly crashed to desktop (at 1/4 my normal resolution, that I can even play Star Citizen at.)
I refunded it after 3 hours. This was before Randy's ridiculous response to the criticism. I was planning on buying again later when it's fixed, but now I'm not so sure. The man is his own worst enemy.
- He's a bell end. He's always been a bell end. I had the dubious pleasure of meeting him when I was working as a games press outfit's tech monkey over a decade ago at Gamescom in Cologne.
  Every other word out of his mouth was a business buzzword, he's smarmy and smug, my skin crawled the whole time he was present.
  It looks like he's as high on his own farts now as he was back then.

Does borderlands really "need" some bleeding edge engine?

Its not a terribly complex game? And nobody gives a shit if its a bit janky.

Borderlands, like its movie, is the kid who gets an ant farm for his birthday, pulls out the tubes, shoves one end up his ass and starts sucking the farts out with the other.

Yes, its entertaing, but nobody expects it to be high-class.

Is he wearing a barong Tagalog?

I think so too
- Bai!

Lol. I bet he has no idea how many people actually can do that

hmmm, that kind of statement makes me long for my ol' eyepatch

Obligatory dril tweet about how you never "Gotta hand it to them"

But yeah. It is infuriating how often people just spew nonsense about "it is Unreal so it runs like shit" just like it was when "It is Unity so it runs like shit" and so forth. I very much do not think people need to "code (their) own engine" to understand things but... it would be a good idea to to do some basic research on the topic.

I can't speak for blands 4 specifiaclly. But with a lot of these games? People don't realize that the game is very much being optimized with upscaling and even framegen in mind. You can say you hate that if you want to. But these studios aren't targeting 120 FPS at 4k. They are targeting 120 FPS at 2k or even 60 FPS at 2k. In large part because... there still isn't a lot of value in actually targeting 4k on any console or even most PCs. So it gives them more or less a "single" target. And some techniques don't scale anywhere near as well (also 2k to 4k is not linear).

It is just that people grew up in the golden age where everything was targeting a PS4 and kind of has been for almost a decade at this point. So the idea of futzing with your graphics settings and checking the different AA (now upscaling) models is kind of anathema to a lot of users. And consoles STILL try to hide all of that.

If I buy a 1000 dollar graphics card I'm expecting it to run any game at max settings with NO upscaling. Because that was the norm for over 35 years.
Upscaling is supposed to be used to EXTEND the life of lower end graphics cards, not be the new fucking normal.
- It’s a PC. It could run one thing great and another like total dog shit. A games performance hinges on so much more than just a graphics card.
- You can expect whatever you want. That isn't what is being sold. That's why so much of the nVidia bullshit insists that reviewers and partners report upscaling and framegen as the "normal" results (and why outlets like Gamers Nexus are on their shitlist).
  And the "norm for over 20 years" was that games targeted a specific range of hardware "power". That is why so much work was put into engines to support higher res models in first person view that would only be one per scene and lower res models that other characters have. And scaling detail based on distance and so forth. But it also meant that we didn't have the ridiculously high res hero models that might only exist for cutscenes because no computer of the era would be able to run that performantly in real time.
  Personally? I would LOVE if more effort were put in for scalability (which Unreal is ironically really good at because it targets film). But that gets back into what the target audience is and if it is worth putting the effort in for "Mega Ultra Super Epic" settings when nobody is going to use them. And... considering that one of the biggest issues is people refuse to put more research in than "I set it to High"... yeah.
  But also... that isn't NOT what we have now. We have the games that are designed to look good at 4k asset wise. And, in a couple years (maybe longer, maybe never) we will have the oomph to actually run those natively at 4k/120 and it will be BEAUTIFUL (and have less weird fur textures appearing out of nowhere or weird cape physics when the model barfs). Which isn't TOO different than building a new PC, playing Dwarf Fortress because it is funny, and then booting up a Total War and losing your mind for a bit.