Yesterday several online publications its reviews of Borderlands 3 - the RPG shooter currently has an average score of 85 - but as it turns out, only a select handful of journalists managed to play it. All because of a strange decision by the game's publisher, 2K Games.
To explain, reviewers typically work with retail copies of games provided by the publisher. They can be both digital and physical, but these copies are absolutely identical to those that you would buy in a store. Sometimes publishers send very early builds of projects that run only on debug consoles (devkits) - but these days this is already a rarity. Simply put, usually reviewers play the same copy as everyone else, just a week or two earlier.
In the case of Borderlands 3, which is coming out this Friday on PC and consoles, 2K Games did not send codes, but gave journalists special Epic Games Store accounts with early builds of the project. According to Kotaku, the portal has not encountered this before.
“2K Games and Gearbox did not send a code for Borderlands 3,” Polygon journalist Ben Kuchera. “Instead, they created new Epic Games Store accounts with the game unlocked and warned us that the game was still in development. They, for example, asked us to stay away from enabling DirectX 12 and said that the progress in this build may not carry over to the final version of the game.
As a result, Kucera and his colleagues encountered several serious technical problems, including random crashes and the loss of six hours of passage.
Portal Kotaku contacted a representative of 2K Games. He cited a security issue and said that the rest of the media will receive a code for Borderlands 3 the day before the release, on September 12th. Perhaps the caution of 2K Games and its parent company Take-Two Interactive is due to a month ago when a YouTube user illegally posted information about the game.
Borderlands 3 will be available on PC (Epic Games Store), PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on September 13th.
Source: 3dnews.ru