Launched in September 2019, the game has since been updated several times to fix its multiple technical issues – but a glitch that completely shuts down Xbox One consoles is not one of those things.
And it’s not because Gearbox or publisher 2K isn’t aware of it. According to Reddit, the studio had identified the glitch and was “working on a fix” within about a week of the game’s launch, but now it’s 2020, and Borderlands 3 is still shutting down Xbox One consoles. I know, because Borderlands 3 is still shutting down my Xbox One console. Not a standby shutdown, mind you, but a total system power-out equivalent to a hard reset.
Most of the time, the shutdown occurs when joining a co-op game, but it can also bomb when hosting a session, or even randomly, and the glitch has been reported on Xbox One X and standard Xbox One models. What exactly is prompting this hasn’t been determined by users (or, I guess, Gearbox’s team), and although the console is designed to shut down in the event of its hardware exceeding a maximum safe operation temperature, some people claim it’s happened in minutes of loading the game. And others claim, even more worryingly, that their consoles were subsequently busted.
Even now, the game’s Xbox One support forum includes multiple recent complaints about the glitch – but for whatever reason, Gearbox isn’t responding.
HOT TAKE
A glitch like this, while perhaps not unprecedented or super common, would be kind of, maybe, making-games-is-complicated-okay excusable at launch. But four months on? That’s absurd, this sucks, and I miss being on holiday.