A new Borderlands 4 update is rolling out today, bringing a highly requested FOV slider for PS5 and Xbox Series X players as well as miscellaneous bug and performance fixes for everyone.
The update is a staggering 11.2GB on PC, and from the patch notes, it sounds like consoles have gotten some hefty downloads of their own.
The PS5 and Xbox Series X FOV slider is the headliner, though Gearbox is quick to warn that "increasing the FOV past the default could cause some dips in performance."
Increasing FOV may hurt a game's performance; it remains to be seen how heavily an expanded FOV may impact Borderlands 4's frame rate. It doesn't need a massive FOV bump on console, for my money, but I don't think anyone wants to pit frames and FOV against each other when plenty of other games give you both.
Additionally, "Vehicle Field of View settings will now be changed for both users when playing in splitscreen."
The good news is that Gearbox says it has "addressed various instances of hitching, low FPS, and crashes" and made various "improvements to stability and performance." Once again, we are lacking specifics here and still need to see the real-world performance.
"We are continuing to investigate and will make further improvements to stability and performance," Gearbox adds, affirming that the battle is not yet over.
Creative director Graeme Timmins separately addressed the highly disruptive memory leak seen on console. Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford's suggested workaround of regularly restarting the game shockingly didn't suit everyone.
"We believe we've made significant improvements there, but we're still investigating data to make sure any remaining issues continue to be resolved," he said on Twitter. "We're confident that today's update makes a big difference though, and we're excited to get feedback/data on it."
With this being a weekly update, the encore boss, black market vending machine, and wildcard mission have been rotated, serving up new loot for players who hunt them down.
A few balance changes were thrown in, too, and everyone can let out that breath because it seems nobody has been majorly nerfed. A few abilities, like Harlowe's Ground State capstone and Amon's Firewall skill, have been "corrected" to ensure intended behavior, but that seems to be it.
The balance changes are mostly bug fixes, like one that stops Harlowe from healing the enemies or another targeting inconsistent buff uptime on Vex. Borderlands 4 creative director Graeme Timmins said Gearbox is monitoring balance discourse, but isn't looking to patch out anyone's busted build right now, and so far players are free to go hog-wild with guns that deal so much damage the game can't even quantify it.
In fact, there's a blanket buff to specific weapons in this patch. Tediore weapons received 10% more damage and magazine size, suggesting players weren't really vibing with them.
Under visual fixes, Gearbox confirmed that "carryable objects" for various quest objectives should stop "disappearing or appearing in the wrong location after being picked up." Personally, I'm waiting for a fix to the 'all your guns are invisible now and enemies don't have health bars' problem that I've run into many, many times on PC.
Here are all the Borderlands 4 Shift Codes and how to redeem them for Golden Keys.
