Borderlands 3 won’t support preloading on the Epic Games Store at launch
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In thoroughly unsurprising news for those keeping track of the Epic Games Store’s barren update schedule, Borderlands 3 will be launching next month with any support for preloading the game.
The news has been confirmed by Epic CEO Tim Sweeney himself, who responded to fan asking if they’d be able to play Borderlands 3 at midnight the night of release with “I’m sorry, we won’t have support for preloading in the Borderlands release timeframe.”
Behind-the-scenes, Epic has implemented support for file pre-loading but “isn’t certain it’s up to the demands of a blockbuster like Borderlands [3]”. I’m no expert although I’d presume preloading is a fairly complex task to get right, particularly in terms of security and scale. Still, Epic surely has plenty of resources and manpower to get it up to speed with smaller titles first. Why not let us pre-load the free games they give away each week, for example?
Preloading has been a feature on Steam, Uplay, Origin and more for longer than we care to remember, allowing players to download a game ahead of launch and be ready to play just as soon as it unlocks. As a feature, pre-loading is particularly useful for those with slower internet connections, sometimes giving them as long as a week to get the game downloaded and ready for launch day.
While we haven’t been notified of the Borderlands 3 system requirements just yet, Borderlands 2 with its HD texture pack was already creeping up past 20GB and that’s a seven-year-old game. We’re expecting Borderlands 3 to be a 50GB download at minimum. Suffice to say, it’s going to be some wait for those with slower net connections can play the game they’ve pre-ordered. The best bet would seem to be to wait up till midnight, set the download, and toddle off to bed, safe in the knowledge Pandora awaits next morning.
Considering Borderlands 3 is quite easily the Epic Store’s biggest third-party game launch in its history, it’s really quite disappointing they haven’t found a way to add such a crucial feature in time for release.
Borderlands 3 is out in exactly one month, arriving on September 13th for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
