I downloaded this game as soon as it came out yesterday with the intention of playing with my room mate all day. I have an older dell gaming laptop with a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti. I know it’s older but it should be able to handle borderlands at this point and I don’t usually have issues running games like pubg, league, overwatch etc.

I had some difficulty with the download at first. The icon was on my desktop and I opened the game, but it immediately crashed after the opening credits and said something about an issue with graphics. I rebooted my computer and tried again and now the icon was gone from my desktop. However, I opened the Epic Games launcher and was able to start playing the game just fine. At about level 8, the game crashed again and gave me a bug splat/error report message. Now, my desktop looked buggy too. Icons were huge and the wallpaper was wrong, like the resolution has been turned way down. Additionally, there were some off colored pixels in a square in the center of the screen. I rebooted my PC again and when I opened Borderlands (which was totally fine and opened fine), my character was gone. I tried to rejoin my room mate but it had me go through the process of creating a whole new character as it just said “Character Pending” under my name. Just choked it down, remade my character, got to level 7, and it happened again. Same exact way. I gave up and just uninstalled and reinstalled the game but haven’t gone back to it since. I’ll be at work today but I’m going to try again tonight.

I know my computer is relatively old (~5 years) and if I didn’t provide something that could help I’d be happy to. I’d really like to fix this problem, but if the answer is to upgrade my laptop with an SSD or just to buy a new rig, that’s fine too. Any help is greatly appreciated.

TL;DR - PC bugs out in the middle of gameplay, Borderlands crashes, when I reopen it my character is completely gone.