Borderlands 4 breaks franchise records on Steam, but negative user reviews pile up

Gearbox is enjoying a massive launch for Borderlands 4, with the Steam version alone setting series records. The user reviews are not happy, though.

The fourth entry in the Gearbox Software-developed looter shooter series Borderlands released yesterday and immediately broke all player records for the franchise on Steam. Just an hour into launch, Borderlands 4 had 150,000 concurrent players enjoying the latest Vault Hunters and the "billions" of weapons. Prior to this, Borderlands 2 held the record at 124,678 concurrent players.

Before the day was over, the new entry's concurrent peak had already passed 200,000 players, and it's not even the weekend yet.

Despite the massive success on the platform, the Steam user review score has been continuously trending downward, with it sitting at 62% 'Mixed' at the time of writing this.

Almost all the negative reviews seem to be stemming from the horrendous performance that players are experiencing in Borderlands 4. It looks like even users with high-end cards are struggling to reach 60FPS using upscaling, with many reviewers going on to blame Unreal Engine 5 for the mess.

Per the developer, the minimum system requirements were aiming for 1080p at 30FPS gameplay, while the recommended set was targeting 1440p at 60FPS.

Gearbox has also published an Nvidia-specific settings guide for players to look over when tweaking the game's graphics options. Even with the 1080p optimization guide for the RTX 5090, the studio recommends using Very High settings and DLSS to play at "60+ FPS". Installing the latest graphics driver from Nvidia, AMD, or Intel, depending on what hardware is present, is recommended.

"It's a big, bold, new, seamless world and I'm sorry to say that older hardware may not provide buttery smooth performance for the latest gen AAA games, as has always been the case since the dawn of PC gaming," said Gearbox chief Randy Pitchford in a social media post a few days ago.

Borderlands 4 is now available across PC (Steam and Epic Games Store), Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5. A Nintendo Switch 2 release is also planned to land later in 2025.