Another one of 2025’s big games is off to a tenuous beginning, and unsurprisingly, it has to do with its performance on PC.

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Following in one of gaming’s most unfortunate recent trends, Borderlands 4 is getting blasted on Steam for a myriad of issues when it comes to performance on PC. The game launched on Steam this morning ahead of consoles tonight at midnight, and gamers are reporting a variety of problems across different hardware.

Screenshot via Gearbox

BL4 is off to a “Mixed” rating on Steam reviews in its first few hours, with some gamers saying that they refunded the title due to crashing issues, poor performance, and even an inability to get past the beginning of the game without crashing.

Those who can play the game are happy so far, with improved gameplay and a new location in the Borderlands universe to explore. But it appears that some widespread issues are preventing a lot of others from experiencing what the new sequel has to offer.

“Game is buggy as hell on release,” said one review. “Game crashed during the into sequence… After that, game would not even load, claiming ”Steam must be running’ (it was). Steam verified the install files were good. I deleted my saved game and then the game loaded, but fell back to 3440×1440. I selected Windowed Fullscreen and the game crashed. Relaunched the game and it came back up in the correct mode, then crashed while trying to select a character (I skipped the cutscenes to get there). Not a good start!”

Another reviewer said the game has “terrible optimization” as “another Unreal Engine 5 casualty,” and claimed that it’s “not worth buying in its current state unless you have a NASA PC.”

I’ve had BL4 for a couple of weeks, and I’ve experienced a wide array of performance issues on my aging PC. Last week, my power supply died, and when I replaced it the game started to run more smoothly. After today’s day one patch, running on some specifically Low settings, it’s as smooth as it’s ever been for me.

My only suggestion is to run the game at the lowest settings possible and work up from there, but I can also share my current settings as an example of how I’ve gotten it to run smoothly for me. For those who are crashing, that’s a huge yikes, and I hope that some stability patches are on the way for that.

Hopefully, this evening’s console launch is way smoother than this, because there is a great game inside of BL4 if you can get it to run properly.

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