The existence of “virtual laziness” is either profound commentary on the degradation of human nature or an example of poor game design. We've discussed it before: Laziness developing within games is common, especially where backtracking or repetitious, unnecessary combat inhibit actual exploration of the game's world and story.

It's tough not to be hard on oneself when the prospect of holding “w” for a few minutes – because walking across a moon's surface requires shockingly little use of “s” – becomes too much to bear. It's too much work, too far to walk, and that pit of lava is looking rather inviting right now.

Our experience with Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (BLPS) began with innocent GPU benchmarking, but struck enough of a chord to warrant a full review. This is in similar fashion to our Watch_Dogs experience. After hours of enduring backtracking, dull character progression, a lack of motivating storytelling, juvenile jokes, and forced, mind-numbingly boring traversal of desolate environments, we're here with the review: Borderlands is boring.

We're currently in the process of GPU benchmarking Lords of the Fallen, a game that our own Nick Pinkerton previewed back at PAX Prime 2013. The game hosts impressive graphics technology in partial thanks to partnership with nVidia, who offer their GameWorks graphics SDK freely to game developers.

Developers CI Games and Deck13 utilized GameWorks (detailed here) to introduce physics-responsive particle effects, soft body (cloth, fabric) physical effects, volumetric lighting that responds to transparency and surface opacity / reflectivity, and destructible environment effects.

It's not often that I get a break from benchmarking games so that I can actually play them. That's normally Nick Pinkerton's job, our Senior Editor tasked with handling our game content these days. Civilization is an interesting game to benchmark; it's always been regarded as CPU-intensive due to the heavy processing done between turns and has GPU-intensive buffer requirements for map movement. For some unknown reason, GN staff decided to actually play the game.

We've certainly done worse.

Sorta.

The release of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel saw our staff benchmarking the game's framerate performance across various graphics cards, as always. We'd already previewed the gameplay mechanics of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel at PAX, but now that the game's released, it's time to resolve some of the most common crash fixes. This is something we do regularly for major releases, including Watch Dogs and Titanfall in previous launch cycles.

As with most major launches these days, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel suffers from some flickering, crashing & CTDs, black screens, freezes, and PhysX issues. This guide will help resolve a few of the issues we've uncovered thus far.