Borderlands 4's vanishing world bosses are its most baffling design decision

It's early days, but I'm having a great time with Borderlands 4 so far. The UE5 performance struggles are agonizing, but ever since I was able to lock in settings that worked, I've felt an increasingly broad smile spreading across my face the more I play. At its heart, it reminds me of my true series love, the 2009 original, especially in its early areas. But Gearbox has clearly picked and chosen some of the best bits of every entry, including Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, and the result is something I can see myself playing for a long, long time to come. There's just one big frustration right now: its mysteriously disappearing world bosses.

While the performance woes have left Borderlands 4 rather bruised in the Steam ratings department, it doesn't appear to have dissuaded players, with active concurrents on the Valve platform alone peaking at over a quarter of a million. As one among them, I will attest that Gearbox's suggestion of 'wait 10-15 minutes for shaders to optimize' does make a difference, although it's far from perfect. Actually playing it, however, has been a delight so far - except for the special Borderlands 4 bosses you can find dotted around the map.

Taking its cues from the best open-world games, Gearbox has expanded its environments to vast stretches of land sprinkled with all manner of quests, events, and incidental collectables such as Vault symbols. Among these are the world bosses - encounters marked by a circle that will immediately spawn in a major threat to fight. In concept, this is a great feature, and it mostly works. However, if any player so much as brushes the outside of the dome's radius, the boss instantly vanishes, as if blipped by Thanos.

Having to fight a challenging foe in an enclosed space is a strong test of your skills, but the border is far too sensitive. It's easy to get knocked out of the area by an attack, or slide slightly past the boundary in the heat of dodging incoming fire. It takes all the adrenaline of the moment and stamps on it, and it's already happened enough to wind me up a little. Fortunately, I'm not alone in my thoughts; a Reddit thread discussing the issue is one of the hottest topics on the Borderlands subreddit right now, and quite a few players describe it as their biggest single frustration.

Even more bothersome is that some of these enemies will quite happily break the contract themselves, yet you're still bound by Borderlands 4's laws. As many suggest in the thread, I'd be quite happy with a short cooldown period to return to the zone. Even better, embrace Borderlands 1 in full and transform it into a Thunderdome-style arena that you literally can't escape from until either you or your opponent falls.

That's all for today's rant; Gearbox, if you're reading this, you might have delivered one of the best FPS games of the year, but I'd really love some sort of concession on this particular feature. In the meantime, I'll go back to my happy place of using my Harlowe build to slam badasses bodily into walls, floors, barrels, and their own teammates.

If you need some guidance on where to go next, we've updated our Borderlands 4 missions list along with plenty of other handy guides, such as how to increase Borderlands 4 inventory space.

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