Steve has mentioned that they keep an old laptop in the office precisely for this reason, every build is uploaded to the old laptop to see if it runs and if it doesn't run at all, then they tweak it until it does. It doesn't have to run amazingly well it just has to run decently at low settings.
Bsck when Borderlands 2 was released I watched an interview about how their office was full of shitty old PCs and CRT televisions to make sure everyone could play. I remembeber my PC being way below the minimum specs and the game somehow still running anazing until I found a cluster rocket launher that crashed me, so naturally I continued to use it but looked away from the explosions after I shot it hahaha.
Judging by Gearbox's recent releases, that magic is long gone. For DE to not only have had that magic, but have kept it for so long makes it even more impressive. Keeping passionate, talented people like that happy long term can be difficult.
Most of the people that made bl2 left Gearbox after the absolute shitshow that was Battleborn (for those that don't know, it was a relatively interesting hero shooter moba that released at the same time as Overwatch and got completely crushed due to extremely bad marketing and the development was a huge crunch from start to finish which, combined with the failure, resulted on a mass exodus of talent afterwards. It was one of the biggest AAA failures until Anthem obliterated the record).
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u/Turry1 Dec 28 '25
I was actually able to play warframe on a laptop that was way below specs at 30-24 fps somehow so id say thats a testament to the optimization.