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

Thiletonomics

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Games have always had their own sets of bugs, some being complete bugfests, while others pretty much work correctly as intended. Sometimes a bugfest game can be hilarious, while it can be a very frustrating experience at other times. What is the buggiest game that you have ever played?

For me, it would be Streets of SimCity and The Sims 4, since the Maxis games have always had their sets of issues.

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 novelty of driving around in your SimCity 2000 cities was great, the Music was awesome, and the Radio Commercials were hilarious and would inspire other games like Grant Theft Auto.

The Sims 4 was a different monster in terms of bugfest, since the game was hastily changed from being a multiplayer game ala The Sims Online, to a single-player one, after the 2013 version of SimCity had a disastrous launch. Changing a game's setting part way into development means that features will be compromised, and TS4 was SEVERELY barebones on launch, to the point that it didn't even had Swimming Pools until months after release, Toddlers were only added to the game 3 years later, Firefighters were only added 6 years later, and Burglars were only added 10 years later. The sheer amount of bugs TS4 has, i.e. the infamous Simulation Lag bug, where your Sims stands around doing nothing between animations (I think someone at EA even tried to make a spin comment by saying that the Simulation Lag was "the Sim is thinking") would make even the many bugs that The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 had look more manageable in comparison. It also went against EA's initial launch marketing for TS4 of "Smarter Sims, Weirder Stories", since the game proved to be neither. And unlike Streets, I didn't enjoy it as much as the past 3 Sims games, since the barebones nature of the game and the bugginess is too much to ignore.

And some of the DLCs of the game were also horribly broken, i.e. My Wedding Stories being released in pretty much a pre-Alpha state since almost EVERYTHING didn't work on launch, and For Rent introducing a literal game-breaking bug that corrupts game saves, some people have even reported that their YEARS old saves were made unplayable because of the said game corruption.

And yes, EA did actually make the "This is part of what makes The Sims special" spin comment in regards to My Wedding Stories's extremely bugged release:

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Probably Fallout 3 or Cyberpunk 2077. I didn't actually play Cyberpunk 2077 until the 2.0 patch (i'm not much of a gamer these days) but the early access version was a complete trashfire. Even to this day it remains very poorly optimized which is why you need a powerful rig to get any sort of reasonable framerate. Getting it to hit my monitor's refresh rate is nearly impossible without dumping the resolution and the graphic settings and relying heavily on frame-generation.

Fallout 3 was pretty badly coded, too, but not nearly to the level of Cyberpunk 2077. The 2.0 version of Cyberpunk is what it should have looked like at launch, which we didn't get until September of 2023, nearly a full 3 years after it's initial launch.
 
While it's definitely in a much better place, Warframe had a period of hell where updates were pushed out that didn't work. Most infamous being the Railjack (ship combat) update.
Thankfully, things a lot more stable since the change in leadership.
Fallout 3
Does the game still crash if you enter one of the houses in Ridgefield with multicore enabled? I've only played FO3 through TTW for years.
 
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SCP Containment Breach is a game I come back to now and again when I'm bored. As much as I love Containment Breath, the whole goddamn game is a bug. A sizeable chunk of playthroughs are doomed from the start due to map generation issues.
And on the topic of games with Breach in the title, while I have never and probably will never play it myself FNAF Security Breach is undoubtedly one of the buggiest high-profile games of the past decade.
 
Weirdly enough it was The Surge 2 which most people don't consider a buggy game.

I had seven separate soft and hardlocks where objectives wouldn't update or enemies wouldn't spawn in.

In fact I never finished it became at the climax an objective wouldn't update and restarting the game wouldn't fix it.
 
Ultima 9. My friend and I bought it day 1 and went to his house to play it (he had a voodoo card and a 466 while I was poverty and had a dogshit Pentium 2 so I couldn't run it. We were supposed to spend the entire weekend eating pizza and playing because his parents were out of town, we ended up (ick) hanging out with girls instead.

Also Master of Orion 3, such a piece of shit I only booted it up twice. I still play MOO2, that game is the last game I ever preordered.
 
Ultima 9. My friend and I bought it day 1 and went to his house to play it (he had a voodoo card and a 466 while I was poverty and had a dogshit Pentium 2 so I couldn't run it. We were supposed to spend the entire weekend eating pizza and playing because his parents were out of town, we ended up (ick) hanging out with girls instead.
Okay, but what's a paladin?
 
Does the game still crash if you enter one of the houses in Ridgefield with multicore enabled? I've only played FO3 through TTW for years.
I'm not sure, but last time I seriously re-played it I had a lot of issues with random crashes.

Fallout 3 really likes old intel dual core cpus and nothing else.
 
oblivion on the 360. the worst bug was that oblivion gates wouldn't close when you went up the tower and got that thing, therefore making the main quest unbeatable. you could walk around on paintbrushes and duplicate anything you wanted right from the tutorial sewers IIRC
 
Not the buggiest game ever, but doing glitches during online matches in Super Smash Bros Brawl was always fun, especially the ones that messed up the camera. You could tell who was pissed because they'd run at you full speed trying to kill you but end up running/falling off the stage being too ambitious. Then when the match is over they either leave or have a permanent vendetta against you for every subsequent match. Bites extra if you're better than them, kill them repeatedly, and continue to do the glitch.

Edit: Skate 3 is up there with Bethesda tier glitching.
 
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Years ago my dad had a ps3 but no internet. He had Skyrim and New Vegas but none of the updates. I remember going to visit him and watching him play them and it was just ridiculous. In New Vegas he had everything maxed out but he was still near the beginning of the game. He did something and he just kept levelling up and it wouldn't stop until everything was maxed up. He said it took the fun out of the game so he hadn't really been playing it. Skyrim was worse. Something fucked up every time he did anything. He managed to play it though. One time I brought my laptop and showed him the modded PC version of the game and he was fairly jealous.

The worst for me was Aydin Chronicles on the n64 though. It was a slow, annoying kind of shitty game as it was that tricked me into thinking it was good by being the only game like it on the n64. It crashed and froze pretty regularly but I powered on getting decently far into the game. Then one day I was playing it and it froze and crashed. I turned off the n64 and turned it back on only to find my save file was gone and strangely enough it said the controller pack was empty. I thought the game was just fucking up but no. It not only erased the Aydin Chronicles save file but all the save files on the controller pack. Pretty much every game I owned that didn't save directly to the cartridge was on there. There was a bunch of games we just stopped playing after that because all the shit we'd unlocked was gone. It really sucked. I wasn't even sure what happened. I thought it was just random or because I had a third party controller pack. I didn't find out it was a known bug in the game until years later.

Also on the n64 I got Space Station Silicon Valley at some point but I ended up not being able to finish the game because of some bug that pretty much stopped your progress and ended up trading it in for something else.
 
just uninstalled neverwinter nights 2 because my reputation file got corrupted so every guard in the city attacked me and a faggot that I was supposed to rescue tried to kill me and got killed by my party
 
Years ago my dad had a ps3 but no internet. He had Skyrim and New Vegas but none of the updates. I remember going to visit him and watching him play them and it was just ridiculous. In New Vegas he had everything maxed out but he was still near the beginning of the game. He did something and he just kept levelling up and it wouldn't stop until everything was maxed up. He said it took the fun out of the game so he hadn't really been playing it.
I had a very similar experience playing unpatched New Vegas on an Xbox with no internet, sunk many hours into it but some of the bugs were pretty bad. Frequent quest markers that would make you route through buildings in the middle of fucking nowhere that have nothing to do with the objective, NPCs that don't spawn, don't have dialogue, or bugged pathing that would make them stand in place forever or wander off into the wasteland to get killed for no reason, hideous load times and frequent crashes on entering and exiting buildings, casinos not giving you back your weapons, followers that would set themselves to wait at random fucking spots. There were ones I found that were kinda cool, one of my favorites that I discovered was VATS checking with an anti-material rifle with incendiary rounds would apply fire DOT when you backed out, you could kill any NPC doing this and no one would get mad, this made it super easy to get harder to source gear like ranger sequoias or La Longue Carabine, I was sad to find it was patched when I got GOTY and an internet connection.
 
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Many moons ago I played a game called Mindjack. Not only was it fucking buggy as shit, but the writing and story was fuck awful.
Oh my god, yes!
I forgot that this fucking thing exists.
I got this for free in a 3 for 2 deal and I returned it on the same day.
 
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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.
 
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I had a very similar experience playing unpatched New Vegas on an Xbox with no internet, sunk many hours into it but some of the bugs were pretty bad. Frequent quest markers that would make you route through buildings in the middle of fucking nowhere that have nothing to do with the objective, NPCs that don't spawn, don't have dialogue, or bugged pathing that would make them stand in place forever or wander off into the wasteland to get killed for no reason, hideous load times and frequent crashes on entering and exiting buildings, casinos not giving you back your weapons, followers that would set themselves to wait at random fucking spots. There were ones I found that were kinda cool, one of my favorites that I discovered was VATS checking with an anti-material rifle with incendiary rounds would apply fire DOT when you backed out, you could kill any NPC doing this and no one would get mad, this made it super easy to get harder to source gear like ranger sequoias or La Longue Carabine, I was sad to find it was patched when I got GOTY and an internet connection.
I didn't get to see much of the unpatched New Vegas but even patched that game would fuck around sometimes. I remember I decided to do a playthrough where I just skipped all the intro shit and snuck past the deathclaws and went the back way to New Vegas. I ended up killing some bandit or mercenary or something you're supposed to kill for a quest and getting enough xp to be allowed inside New Vegas and it broke a lot of the quests and stuff you were supposed to do before you got to New Vegas.

I fucked myself up in Skyrim a few times going into quest places early or going into places backwards. I remember there was some tower with some wizard lady or something at the top you're supposed to fight and I somehow got to the boss room before doing the rest of the tower and it broke everything. I couldn't finish the quest. No matter what I did I couldn't get any of the events to trigger any more. I think it was a main story quest too. I ended up just abandoning that character and starting a new game because I was dumb and only using one save file and I'd saved after fucking everything up. This was on an updated but unmodded version of the game.
 
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