A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about how I was done with Borderlands: Game of the Year edition (for now). I’d been in the mood for an over-the-top shooter and had Borderlands in my Steam library. As old as it is, and as new as my PC is, I figured it would run like a dream and I’d have some fun with it.

And I did have fun, but it never felt 100% comfortable. Even though I could run it at a high framerate, turning always felt a little jittery and long sessions would make me feel kind of queasy after a while. Additionally the UI felt overly fiddly and in some places, outright broken. I go over all this on the old post so I won’t drag it out too much today.

In response to that post my old buddy Dusty Monk told me that the games were designed from the ground up to be played via controller and suggested I try Borderlands 3 on the PS5. I thanked him and filed that away.

Fast forward to me watching Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and it putting me back in the mood for some wasteland-y shooting and looting. I could have gone to find the actual Mad Max game, which is excellent but which I’d played through already. Then I turned on the Xbox and they had a sale going. $30 for 6 Borderlands games: Borderlands Game of the Year, Borderlands 2, Borderlands the Pre-Sequel, Borderlands 3, and a couple of the Telltale “Tales of the Borderlands” games, plus a bunch of DLC. I figured at that price it was a steal so I snagged it.

Just for grins I installed Borderlands: Game of the Year edition first, assuming the experience would be similar to, or worse than, it had been on my $2000 PC. But boy was I ever wrong. The game plays beautifully on the Xbox Series X using a controller. It runs at 4K and is supposed to be 60 FPS though I can’t personally confirm that. It does feel super smooth though.

Granted this doesn’t solve other issues with the game, like the fact that all the zones kind of feel the same, but with it all running better that stuff seems to matter less. Or maybe I’m still in the honeymoon period. I got to level 24 on PC and am just at 10 on console.

Anyway. I just thought this was interesting and it just goes to show you, you never know for sure until you (or someone) tries these things. I guess it comes down to engine optimization or something. On PC I was playing at 1440P but Ultra-Widescreen and maybe that caused issues? I dunno. I mean clearly my PC is way more powerful than the Series X but in this particular case, PC was the wrong place for me to be playing. Which sounds crazy, right? Playing a shooter with controller on console is better than playing it on PC with mouse & keyboard.

Just proves anomalies do exist. And to be clear this IS an anomaly; before someone takes me to task I’m not trying to start a platform war or anything. Just in this one specific case the less capable machine actually runs the game better, and I thought that was worth sharing.