I’m not really a gamer, so I’m just curious. I bought Borderlands 4 a few days ago and have been playing it on my Linux desktop every day since then, and every day I run it, it downloads another 2GB patch. Every. Day. I have to make sure I don’t start it when anyone else wants to use the WAN, and I have to start it a half-hour before I want to play, and I’m just curious if this is normal? Is it Linux? Is it Borderlands? Is it Steam? I’ve read that you can’t fully disable these updates under Steam, but you can if you buy through Gog; perhaps I made the wrong choice of platform.
I’m just a bit baffled at the idea that Borderlands is releasing a new 2GB patch (and it’s never less than 2GB) every 8 hours, or that every patch is necessary. I also know that Borderlands 3 did not have updates this frequently on the PS3. But I accept that, perhaps, I have something set up wrong. As I said, I’m not really a gamer.
Is this par for the course, now?
Edit
It seems disabling the shader caching fixed it. The first time I ran it, it took a long time to get through “resurrecting”, which is where it compiles shaders, but after that first time it doesn’t take much longer to get to playable, and I haven’t had it force download assets yet.
I see a couple of comments about the game itself being buggy. I’m several hours into the campaign (level 15) and haven’t had any issues. I have problem with the Linux bluetooth stack glitching on the PS4 controller (kernel CRC errors from the driver) but I haven’t had any crashes. I did encounter a glitch where a creature wasn’t being rendered, but moving around brought it back and nothing yet has affected gameplay. I don’t know if the creature glitch was related to disabling the cache, but… FWIW, the game seems to run as well as BL3 on my PS4.
I mean, it’s generally possible to make steam games run without steam
Is it? I thought a game purchased through Steam was managed by Steam. I’m sure there’s a way to launch it directly with Proton, but is it straightforward?
I’m talking about softwares that emulate steam to disable their DRMs. I know that they’re generally seen badly as they are linked to less legal ways to get games, but I’ve been using those to avoid having to run steam everytime I want to start a game, and I would say that it works in most cases. Especially useful when you cannot afford to have a reliable internet connection, and steam decides to be a bitch about it.
Even though Borderland could be one of these games with extra DRM protections, then yeah it might not work.
Obviously, GoG is generally better and makes everything much more straightforward.