You may have heard a little (well, a lot) about the technical problems that are plaguing Borderlands 4 on both PC and consoles, one being addressed with patches or weird out-of-game fixes like changing your shader cache size. But there’s going to be one major casualty of all this: The game’s Switch 2 release.
Late Tuesday, Gearbox took to Twitter to announce the move, which comes just over a week before the game was supposed to launch on Switch 2 on October 3. Here’s what they said:
“Greetings, Vault Hunters – We need to share that the release of Borderlands 4 on Nintendo Switch 2 is being delayed. We do not take this decision lightly, but are committed to ensuring we deliver the best possible experience to our fans, and the game needs additional development and polish time to do that. Our hope is to also better align this release with the addition of cross saves, which we are working on and recognize is very important. We will update you all on the new release timing once we’ve fully adjusted our plans.”
They go on to say that this means Nintendo requires them to cancel all digital pre-orders, which will happen automatically this Friday, September 26. For physical copies, you have to contact the retailer.
Why this is happening is no great mystery. Borderlands 4 only released on next-gen consoles, Xbox Series X/S and PS5, and those versions have significant problems. The Switch 2’s performance is more on par with the Series S, at best, or possibly even a last-gen PS4 Pro, so you can see what was probably about to happen here. Gearbox does not need any more upset players or negative press about how badly Borderlands 4 is performing. Current consoles need a lot of work (and an FOV slider!), and I do not imagine Gearbox wanted to add the Switch 2 to their plate when there was probably a zero percent chance it would launch without issues.
As for me, after the shader cache change (in my NVIDIA backend, where I put it at 100 GB), that has gotten the game to work much better on my 3080. I am still having problems with frequent crashes, however, and I’m not sure when that will be fixed.
Gearbox has released at least one major performance patch for Borderlands 4, but their most recent announcement was about gameplay, in that they’re not nerfing a bunch of powerful, broken builds right now, but focusing on nerfs. Fans also hope they focus on a large number of bugs and quality-of-life issues, but no word on that yet.
As for the Switch 2? Who knows when that may show up, as there’s not even a window now. For a truly great game, it’s such a bummer there are so many tech issues here.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.