Borderlands 4 Developer is Keeping an Eye on Bleed Damage, Won’t Make Knee-Jerk Nerfs

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Since the release of *Borderlands 4*, players are experimenting with different character builds. Some have noticed potential issues with how the game calculates damage from the bleed status effect. A video shared by social media user Haderaxe demonstrated bleed being unusually strong, allowing a player to defeat a boss with a single shot and letting the bleed effect finish the job in just a few seconds.

After players discovered some incredibly powerful character builds, *Borderlands 4* creative director Graeme Timmins assured fans that Gearbox won’t rush into making changes to balance the game. He explained the power likely came from a bug in the game’s damage calculation for bleed effects. Timmins also pointed out that the studio had already fixed similar bugs with the characters Harlow and Rafa before the game officially released, as those bugs could cause the game to crash.

Don’t worry, everyone, we’re not overreacting,” Timmins wrote. “It looks like an old bug we fixed with Harlow and Rafa before the game launched might be causing damage and crashing the game or freezing the screen. We’re looking into it – it could be a real stability issue.

A player pointed out that the problem shown in the video probably happens because bleed damage can repeatedly trigger itself. Here’s how: bleed can start with a critical hit, and some skills make bleed damage also count as a critical hit. This can cause a new bleed effect to start *from* the bleed damage, creating a loop. This repeated stacking of bleed on a single enemy is likely an unintended bug.

Just released last week, *Borderlands 4* has quickly become a huge hit. The PC version, available on Steam, had the biggest launch ever for the series, reaching over 288,000 players at the same time over the weekend. That number has since climbed even higher – as of today, *Borderlands 4* has reached a peak of over 304,000 concurrent players on Steam, according to SteamDB.

As a big fan of the Borderlands series, I remember when *Borderlands 2* was at its peak – over 125,000 people playing at the same time! It’s interesting to compare that to *Borderlands 3*, which topped out around 93,820 concurrent players. While *Borderlands 3* was still really popular, I think being stuck as an Epic Games Store exclusive for a whole year probably kept a lot of people from jumping in.

I’m so excited! Borderlands 4 is finally here, and I can play it on my PC, PlayStation 5, or Xbox Series X/S. If you’re a Switch fan like me, there’s even better news – they’re planning to release a version for the new Nintendo Switch 2 on October 3rd! I’ve already checked out a review to get all the details, and it sounds amazing.

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2025-09-15 17:11