Borderlands 4 dropped a pretty hefty patch today, and before I tell you how Gearbox has screwed the pooch, I do want to be fair and at least highlight the positives while I roll my sleeves up:
Sort filters for your inventory now persist instead of auto-setting to "by manufacturer"; Your discovered locations persist when going from multiplayer to singleplayer; The combat radar now highlights legendary loot (well, it will. It's bugged right now); The "toggle junk" bug is fixed, and a bunch of performance tweaks and fixes have been applied. Including one where the "Ocean could occasionally fail to load." You can read the full list of changes in our Borderlands 4 weekly update.
These are all genuinely solid quality-of-life improvements, and I'm glad they're in the game; at least two of those made my laundry list of complaints in my Borderlands 4 review, and it's nice to see a game I otherwise really liked striking them out. Alas, we've also got to talk about the bad, because boy howdy is there some bad.
Firstly, Gearbox has kinda messed up the whole crit knife thing. In case you weren't aware, BL4 had a rather infamous knife that could insta-gib endgame bosses. Or, well, close enough not to matter—with certain builds, like Vex's bleed, you could trigger an infinitely stacking damage loop that would see them melt, like hucking a bucket of acid at a block of styrofoam.
As the patch notes read, Gearbox has "Reduced critical chance on Jakobs crit knife to 30%. Dev Note: It had to happen, you knew it was going to happen!" What players didn't know was that the knife would become an active DPS loss for some builds. Per Borderlands YouTuber Moxsy on X, who has done some testing, "The new crit knife sets your crit chance to a target at 30%, it DOES NOT ADD 30% Crit Chance."
So—let's say you have enough points in the relevant skills to ramp your crit chance up to, say, 70%. You throw a knife with the Penetrator Augment at someone. Your crit chance is now 30%. Your knife is sticking out of an enemy, and they are now somehow less vulnerable to your bullets. I guess because the handle of the knife is blocking them, or something?
In fairness to Gearbox, this is the most literal interpretation of the Penetrator Augment imaginable. It says your crit chance is 30% when you hit something with it, and that's exactly what it does. But it's also incredibly counter-intuitive—applying a debuff shouldn't reduce your damage. I've got no qualms with this thing if it doesn't stack, but that's just… silly.
Then there's the Halloween event, Horrors of Kairos. My fellow BL4 enjoyer and guides writer, Rory Norris, has plenty to say on this, but for now, let me sum up what the event does: You go to a specific world boss. A spooky orange filter floods your screen. You can get some so-so legendaries. That's it.
Given how comprehensive Halloween events have been in past titles, players aren't happy. So much so that the Borderlands 4 subreddit has had to quarantine complaints into their own megathread, which I've assembled some of here for your viewing pleasure:
"I would rather have had no event honestly, this is like getting a dead rat in a box for Christmas," writes one player. "BL3 gave us a new map, new boss, new music, new weapons that worked, new anoints, and a legit Halloween vibe. BL4 we get a red overlay on normal vanilla random boss fights if we can find them and two items that are garbage," adds another.
Even Moxsy's none too pleased: "Gonna be brutally honest this Halloween 'Event' is not it. Very underwhelmed. I know it's just a mini event but compared to what we had in BL3 it's a huge step down."
As a minor asterisk, also: Zed's machine doesn't reset your cooldowns anymore, which has been confirmed to be a bug, but it's another unfortunate wrinkle in a patch that should've been an easy slam-dunk for Gearbox and does, to the studio's credit, have some bright spots amidst the stumbles.
