What is the buggiest game that you have ever played? - "They're not bugs, it's part of what makes the game SpEcIaL!"

cyberpunk at launch,
i got soft locked several times when text boxes failed to load preventing me from progressing,
in one of the first missions you are chased by goons in a van, when you lean out to shoot at them my gun didnt draw, but it didnt matter because the car is scripted to blowup
cyber punk also featured on of the funniest glitches of all time in the beginning scene montage where you and whats his face are running around buying shit and killing people. the animations failed to load so everyone was t-posing during the duration of the scene.
 
The NES game called Nemo’s Dreamland or something. It was actually a really fun game when it worked, you’d transform into different animals to progress. Also Krusty’s Funhouse on NES was pretty buggy as well IIRC but very fun. I think glitchiness on the NES didn’t really matter a lot as other consoles
 
The first gen Pokemon games. Even Daggerfall doesn't have fansites just for its glitches. If you mean random glitchy, Daggerfall is definitely the king of that.
 
Cyberpunk 2077 isn't even CD Projekt's buggiest release. The first Witcher game was borderline unplayable without bugfix mods.
There's a reason the first thing they assured people of when announcing a remastered edition was coming is that it would run on Unreal Engine instead of the mutilated version of Bioware's engine that the game released with.
 
it would run on Unreal Engine instead of the mutilated version of Bioware's engine that the game released with.
Ah ah ah... it's Unreal Engine 5.
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Streets of SimCity was a game that Maxis rushed out using a modified 3D engine they used to develop SimCopter. SimCopter also had its own sets of bugs and was prone to crashing, but Streets was even worse at those things. The driving physics were completely laughable compared to almost EVERY other racing game, old, current, or new. The graphics were also hard to look at and didn't age well, and the game was more of a crashfest than SimCopter was. And yet, I still somehow managed to have fun with the game, since the Music was awesome, and the Radio Commercials were hilarious and would inspire other games like Grant Theft Auto.
Streets of SimCity was so amazingly glitched. I think AI behavior might have been tied to CPU cycles of the time, causing them to hop constantly on newer systems. Everything that wasn't bugged was half-baked, with the exception of the radio.

This Russian guy created patches for SimCopter and Streets:

High quality versions of the music (without the hissing) have appeared since EA uploaded tracks to Spotify. I think a couple are still missing.
 
I played a ton of janky PC garbage when I was a kid but one game that stuck out in my mind despite it not being nearly as buggy as other games I've played is UFO: Aftershock, purely due to the most bizarre progression bug I've ever experienced. The bug is pretty simple - a piece of research never shows up but it's one of those research items that progress the story, so you can never beat the game. Back in the day, you actually had to send the save file to the devs for them to fix it for you. They're long gone now but thankfully the modding community made a tool which allowed you to fix your save file yourself and nowadays from what I know the unofficial patch just fixes it outright.
 
Outside of random abandon ware/slav jank it would probably be a tie between a Brazilian game called Toren that I had to completely restart several times due to bugs that softlock the game by just trying to play it. Onirism, which to be fair is STILL in early access, but I experienced every bug under the sun, from random crashes, softlocks due to enemies loading below the level geometry, random acceleration glitches that shot me across the the over world. And finally Cyberpunk 2077 at launch which was borderline unplayable, and even with the patches had several softlocks, loading errors, weird teleporting objects, quest markers in the wrong places etc, etc.
 
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If DLC counts, the Atlantis expansion for Titan Quest was a buggy mess when it first came out. Quest giving NPCs would disappear, the game would crash randomly every few minutes, plot important items wouldn’t drop, it was awful. It’s fixed for the most part now, but it was a major pain in the ass when I first got it.
Even now Atlantis is fascinating in how much of a drop in quality it is under the hood compared to the old stuff & ragnarok/embers. It'll still be the only place I ever crash in a playthrough.
 
  • Agree
Reactions: Jason Wynn
Skyrim was an amazingly buggy mess, even after all the patches. Sometimes the glitches were benign – a guy in The Companions that was supposed to die as part of the questline later just randomly came back from the dead and kept hanging around their headquarters.
Sometimes they were genuine softlocks – in the Dark Brotherhood questline, there was a Khajiit trader I was supposed to assassinate, but he was for some reason marked as an essential NPC – and not even unmarking him via the console did anything.
 
Cyberpunk 2077 was definitely the buggiest thing I ever played. One of the cut scenes was extremely framey and all of the NPCs were t-posing or locked in awkward positions while the dialogue continued to play. I played it at launch and didn't try it again until Edgerunners came out.

Bugthesda games have always been bad for me. Skyrim for the 360, even with all the patches and bug fixes, was terrible. My game would soft lock me out of the main quest, Delohine would fight me, NPCs wouldn't acknowledge me, etc.
A buddy of mine had a terrible time with New Vegas. Any time he was on Discord with FNV open, I could stream my screen and crash his computer. It took about 5 times before he figured it out. His rig sucked back then.
 
Pound for pound, it's probably a tie between KOTOR2 and VTM: Bloodlines in their respective vanilla versions. Bethesda may be absolutely rife with glitches, but these were actually infuriating ones, like consistent game-breaking bugs, or being unable to progress certain fairly major quests because they were completely bugged.
 
Action 52. but I think that goes without saying. But it's hard to see how horribly programmed it really is without playing it yourself. Truly a thing of wonder. And the actual Cheetahmen game, Cheetahmen II, is somehow even worse than the Action 52 prequel. No wonder the sequel sat in a warehouse unreleased until someone found it and opened the Pandora's Box that had so far kept the world from being cursed with its ungodly presence.

A few of the games like Bubble Gum Rosie, Cheetahmen, Evil Empire and Lazer League actually try to be somewhat of a playable game. But they are still bad. I actually played Evil Empire a lot and found it kind of addicting despite the flaws.
 
I remember playing the original Rome Total War. This was back before games didnt update on their own, so I never bothered to patch it. Well, the original version of the game had a major bug in it where archer units's range attack damage was also applied to their charge defense, so if you charges any unit into an archer, the archers would always massacre them. Reason why egyptians were so broken in the game since they had the best archers plus that bug.

Then of course you advance nearly a decade later and Rome 2 Total War is one of the worst games ever made with non-existent AI.
 
Ghost Song really frustrated me because it was pretty neat. Problem was that it crashed randomly all the time so I had to play certain sections over and over again, this turned the game into a speed run where everything hinged on save point routing. I gave up eventually...
 
The buggiest game I ever played was Fallout 2. It was the early 2000's and a friend of mine was given a copy of the game ( a literal copy on a blank CD) and he made a copy for himself and gave me his old copy. This was the 1.00 version of the game. Fallout 2 was buggy as fuck on launch. This game was made in 1998. I was playing through the game over the summer while out of high school. It was so buggy when I went down into this underground location to complete a quest the game would lock up and crash. No matter what I did I couldn't complete the quest. I just moved on. There was also this exploit you could do in the NCR where you could keep fixing this robot for never ending XP and I did that and got my character up to the max level you could reach in the game. I basically went through the Enclave oil rig like walking death. The end boss was super easy. I even did things to make it even easier. I made Horigan look like a bitch.

I wouldn't find out till years later that there was a patch for Fallout 2 that fixed most of the bugs and I could have just downloaded it. It's about this time I found out about the unofficial patch as well by Killap from No Mutants Allowed. Fallout 1 is pretty much perfect and is nearly bug free from I understand.

These days everyone who gets the game on a digital platform gets the game with all the patches and fixes installed.
 
More than half of the stuff in Arcanum didn't work as intended. Charisma and its skills were pretty much useless. Arcanum was one of those games where the core elements had less priority over things like side quests and the lore. That said, playing as a retard was pretty fun.
 
Fallout New Vegas is the buggiest shit ever

I really wanted to play it again 15 years later. Figured I'd enjoy it even more now because everything nowadays is gay or retarded. But for the love of God, I cannot get it to stop crashing. I literally have tried everything: mods, console commands, moving the files around, running it in low specs (despite having a space station PC), etc. It's a shame too because I really am enjoying way more now than when I was iny early 20's.
 
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