Last week, Borderlands 4 received a Steam Deck Verified badge. This should imply that the game is a great experience on Valve’s portable PC. But that’s not the case. And worse, Gearbox removed the option to adjust the game’s advanced visual settings on Steam Deck for some strange reason.
It’s no secret that when Borderlands 4 launched late last year, it had all kinds of performance problems on both console and PC. Patches helped a lot, but those first weeks were rough, with frequent crashes, FPS drops, and other issues making it hard to enjoy the open-world looter shooter. Since then, things have improved a lot. I’ve been replaying the game on PC and have had a great time. So I was hopeful that the recent news that Borderlands 4 is now Verified on Steam Deck meant it would be a great way to play the game away from my desk. Well, that ain’t the case at all.
As documented by a few different channels on YouTube, Borderlands 4 on Steam Deck is technically playable, but looks extremely rough, features plenty of input lag, runs poorly at its default settings, and doesn’t at all seem worthy of Steam’s Verified badge. That’s supposed to signal to players that a game will be a great experience with no tweaking needed on the aging portable PC. But that’s simply not true of Borderlands 4 on Steam Deck.
But the weirdest part of Borderlands 4 on Steam Deck is that for some odd reason, Gearbox has removed the advanced visual settings submenu from the game when playing on the portable PC. Yeah. I don’t know why Gearbox would do this, as it just makes it trickier for your average user to tweak Borderlands 4 and make it possibly run a bit better on the Steam Deck. You can’t change the game’s resolution, shadow quality, draw distance, etc. It’s a baffling choice that makes an already bad way to play this game even worse.
While Gearbox deserves some blame, I also think Valve needs to overhaul or update its Verified system. It’s becoming more and more common to find Verified Steam Deck games that don’t seem to deserve that green checkmark at all. And as the Deck gets older, this problem is only going to get worse.
Seeing how Borderlands 4 runs on Steam Deck might provide some insight as to why Gearbox and 2K have indefinitely delayed the Switch 2 port that was announced ahead of the game’s launch. Maybe that version will one day see the light of day, but if it does, I really hope it looks and plays better than what I’m seeing on Steam Deck.
