Borderlands 3 has twice as many players as its predecessor

midian182

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Why it matters: After months of anticipation and hype, Borderlands 3 finally arrived on September 13. While not everyone was happy with the decision to make the FPS an Epic Games Store timed exclusive, that hasn’t stopped it selling well. According to Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, the game is seeing the "best numbers in Gearbox history!"

Borderlands 3’s PC version, which is available exclusively on the Epic Games Store until April 2020, saw almost twice the number of concurrent launch day players as the all-time peak player count of Borderlands 2, tweeted Pitchford.

As noted by PC Gamer, Borderlands 2’s Steamcharts data showed the game peaking at 123,596 players when it launched seven years ago, while SteamDB estimates 124,678 players. Doubling those numbers gives somewhere between 247,000 – 249,000 concurrent players for Borderlands 3.

"Best numbers in Gearbox history! No promises, but we *might* be ready for me to try a SHiFT code test with the Golden Key system tomorrow. If we do, it will probably be a time-limited key," wrote Pitchford, in a follow-up tweet.

Pitchford didn’t mention how Borderlands 3 was performing on consoles, though it’s safe to assume the game is pulling in plenty of Xbox One/PS4 players, too.

Borderlands 3 has received almost entirely positive reviews from critics. Metacritic shows that its only ‘mixed’ score came from PC Gamer, who gave it 63. It’s a slightly different story when it comes to player scores, however, with the PC version gaining a user-score of 5.2 from 1280 ratings—partly due to some of its performance issues and bugs.

Make sure to check out our Borderlands 3 benchmark tests here.

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...That's it? Comparing concurrent players from a game that's 6+ years old? Why not also say something about the most recent stuff?

Sounds more like they're trying to convince people that their game is doing better on PC than implied...
 
...That's it? Comparing concurrent players from a game that's 6+ years old? Why not also say something about the most recent stuff?

Sounds more like they're trying to convince people that their game is doing better on PC than implied...

They're comparing each game's launch day numbers
 
Anyone playing this? I'd be interested in hearing an honest evaluation rather than from Metacritic's masses who are filled with fanbois or fanhaters and score the game either a 10 or a zero depending on which side they fall on.
 
Anyone playing this? I'd be interested in hearing an honest evaluation rather than from Metacritic's masses who are filled with fanbois or fanhaters and score the game either a 10 or a zero depending on which side they fall on.

I played for about 45 minutes at my buddies house on Saturday. I was super let down by the performance on PC, he could barely keep a solid 60 fps with a GTX1080 at 1080p. The game is fun, but I don't know if it's worth 60 dollars to me as I could get the same enjoyment playing the borderlands prequel that I barely touched years ago. I'll definitely pick it up once the price is right.
 
Did you read the article properly? They specifically compare B2's "all time peak concurrent players" to B3's launch numbers.......

so that would be the max BL2 players ever, rather than just limiting it to launch day. Seems like would be even harder for BL3 to beat, which is why it is impressive
 
If you liked 2 and 1.5, it's more of the same, gameplay wise. The performance on PC is pretty damn bad, though. There's no reason that a game would look like this and perform this poorly.
 
so that would be the max BL2 players ever, rather than just limiting it to launch day. Seems like would be even harder for BL3 to beat, which is why it is impressive
And did you even read my first comment? The game they're comparing it to is 6+ years old. There have been more Borderlands games/bundles out since then, and I hope a far off sequel sells more -_-
 
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Just to note here, the Console versions also perform really quite bad. In "performance" mode consoles cannot hold 60fps at 1080p, even on the pro and X.

I know me and a lot of my friends are just waiting for it to come out on Steam. Happy to wait until it's on a platform that's not rubbish and all the bugs will hopefully have been ironed out by then as well...
 
If you liked 2 and 1.5, it's more of the same, gameplay wise. The performance on PC is pretty damn bad, though. There's no reason that a game would look like this and perform this poorly.

The Game Itself looks great. I never experience any performance issues TBH, game seems to keep a steady framerate even with a lot of things going on. Play in DX11 Mode not 12.

volumetric fog is a big performance hog in BL3. Turning it down to Medium should give good boost in fps. And it still looks about just as good as ultra.

I play on a 3440x1440 ultrawide with a gtx1080. All set to Badass other than volumetric fog at medium. I avg in the 50-60fps+ range. Seems fine to me.

Only bug for me so far was to Disable FidelityFX sharpening. Otherwise cutscenes were cutoff.

Game has been a blast so far.
 
Just imagine how many more players they would have had at launch had they release the game on Steam as well...

I know me and a lot of my friends are just waiting for it to come out on Steam. Happy to wait until it's on a platform that's not rubbish and all the bugs will hopefully have been ironed out by then as well...
I'm also waiting for the game to be available on the platform I want to play it on.

What's truly surprising is how terrible the game seems to be running, how demanding can a cell shaded style game really be? It looks like a higher resolution BL2 with some improved lighting and shadows, really can't see why a game like this is making such high end GPUs struggle.
 
Just imagine how many more players they would have had at launch had they release the game on Steam as well...

I know me and a lot of my friends are just waiting for it to come out on Steam. Happy to wait until it's on a platform that's not rubbish and all the bugs will hopefully have been ironed out by then as well...
I'm also waiting for the game to be available on the platform I want to play it on.

What's truly surprising is how terrible the game seems to be running, how demanding can a cell shaded style game really be? It looks like a higher resolution BL2 with some improved lighting and shadows, really can't see why a game like this is making such high end GPUs struggle.

I think the big problem with Borderlands performance is how the game renders textures, It's MADNESS, items usually don't load textures until you're walking on them. I'd imagine there are items out the world being rendered we arent seeing, but that's a guess, I'm no expert.

I was blown away how poorly the game was running on a 1080p panel.
 
Anyone playing this? I'd be interested in hearing an honest evaluation rather than from Metacritic's masses who are filled with fanbois or fanhaters and score the game either a 10 or a zero depending on which side they fall on.

It's worse then BL2 and there are performance issues (thanks to denuvo and poor optimization). They added some more mechanics to the guns and sliding / ledge grabbing but that's about it. The story is a huge step back. Gun itemization is still complete trash and so is skill tree balance, like the previous two games. Sure, there are a ton of guns but there are few that are actually usable.

The reason there is such a big gap between the user and official reviews on meta critic is because Gearbox only gave select reviewers access to the game before launch for review. They cherry picked people who they knew would give a good review. In addition, there was that time gearbox sent bounced to the house of a guy who gave a bad review just recently....Gearbox just loves controversy. Randy pitchford is just an arse, I wouldn't believe anything he says.
 
The Game Itself looks great. I never experience any performance issues TBH, game seems to keep a steady framerate even with a lot of things going on. Play in DX11 Mode not 12.

volumetric fog is a big performance hog in BL3. Turning it down to Medium should give good boost in fps. And it still looks about just as good as ultra.

I play on a 3440x1440 ultrawide with a gtx1080. All set to Badass other than volumetric fog at medium. I avg in the 50-60fps+ range. Seems fine to me.

Only bug for me so far was to Disable FidelityFX sharpening. Otherwise cutscenes were cutoff.

Game has been a blast so far.

You may want to get in touch the HWUB guys then. You've somehow managed, by changing 1 setting, to get 20% more performance at a higher resolution from the same card. They only manage 44/50 for min/max at regular 1440p using a gtx1080.
 
The Game Itself looks great. I never experience any performance issues TBH, game seems to keep a steady framerate even with a lot of things going on. Play in DX11 Mode not 12.

volumetric fog is a big performance hog in BL3. Turning it down to Medium should give good boost in fps. And it still looks about just as good as ultra.

I play on a 3440x1440 ultrawide with a gtx1080. All set to Badass other than volumetric fog at medium. I avg in the 50-60fps+ range. Seems fine to me.

Only bug for me so far was to Disable FidelityFX sharpening. Otherwise cutscenes were cutoff.

Game has been a blast so far.

You may want to get in touch the HWUB guys then. You've somehow managed, by changing 1 setting, to get 20% more performance at a higher resolution from the same card. They only manage 44/50 for min/max at regular 1440p using a gtx1080.
In Gears 5, the difference between ultra and medium for volumetric fog at 4k on a 2080Ti is 30% increase in frame rate. So actually, kinda makes sense.
 
In Gears 5, the difference between ultra and medium for volumetric fog at 4k on a 2080Ti is 30% increase in frame rate. So actually, kinda makes sense.

In B3 it's about 25% at the same resolution. He's claiming 20% better performance while increasing the resolution by almost 30%. The numbers would.make sense if he stayed at standard 1440p. Not at uw 1440p.
 
In B3 it's about 25% at the same resolution. He's claiming 20% better performance while increasing the resolution by almost 30%. The numbers would.make sense if he stayed at standard 1440p. Not at uw 1440p.

My GTX1080 is not running Stock Clocks either... I have a nice OC on my 1080.

I get a avg of 52 in the games built in benchmark. Could probably be higher if I had a better CPU, i7 2600k @ 4.8ghz.

Puts me in line with what one would expect with my settings. Badass mode for graphic settings, but volumetric fog at medium. 3440x1440. Also had to disable FidelityFX sharpening for cutscenes to not get cutoff.

I'm sure future driver and game updates will improve this. Overall game runs great for me so far.
 
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