This could be a fun game if it respected my time. Unfortunately I have no idea how this got through QA and they thought it was fine. It is badly optimised so you need reasonable hardware just to run it. I struggled through the first several character levels with the lowest settings and it looked horrible. I ended up saving up and buying a new GPU just to play it at reasonable framerates and be able to see grass. While that made a difference going back to the game has been like this:
Go back to the game in Steam, oh goodie there is a 48GB update! The game now takes up a whopping 178GB of my precious SSD storage space. Devs need to learn to optimise their games, not just in terms of performance but also in how much space the game takes up. 178GB is ridiculous. Especially in this climate of RAM and SSDs costing a small fortune thanks to AI.
Game finally updates, go into game, spends several minutes compiling shaders. Checks for patches, finds new patches, downloads and applies them then "reboots"!
Game launches again, and then starts compiling shaders again. Finally get to title screen again but the resolution is off. My bad, I had to replace my old 1080p monitor which had display issues and now have a 1440p monitor. No problem, I'll go into settings. Changed the resolution to 1440p and then it compiled shaders, again.
That finally finishes, then I got in to the graphics options to to an auto detect on my newer GPU. This lead to, yes you guessed it, more compiling of shaders.
Eventually I get into the game. I am finally having a great time shooting tons of stuff and picking up loads of loot. I am reminded of why I bought the game in the first place and I am finally having fun after taking age to actually get to this point.
20 minutes into having fun where I rescue Zadra, we end up in a room where I kill all enemies but then she just runs around in circles and not opening the damn door like she is supposed to. A quick search shows that the AI can bug out and there could be ghost enemies. Spend ages spamming grenades in to nooks and crannies but Zadra is still stuck.
Another search tells me that the game is full of bugs like this.
How does this get through QA?
I so desperately want to recommend this game, it is fun (apart from the bosses just being complete bullet sponges, that gets old but it isn't the only game that does this) but the bad optimisation and mission breaking bugs makes this very difficult to recommend. The game doesn't respect my time or my wallet enough for to recommend. It is a shame as I have enjoyed the other Borderlands games, and there is a good game here trying to get out. But it has been sabotaged by lazy developers (who think resources are infinite), poor QA and awful management who just want to line their pockets while releasing a game that needed more work and a lot more QA.
