The discussion started with Daggerfall being released as a free download. Naturally there were a lot of comment on just how buggy the game was. So let’s open this up all the way and ask “What is the buggiest game you’ve ever played?”
I suppose I do need to specify for a not insignificant number of us that this is only for games that have been released. Comments on alpha tests or how many errors you got when you compiled.
When it comes to released games there are two that jump to mind for me.
Daggerfall is an obvious selection here. I picked it up on release day and when it wasn’t crashing or sending the player flying out through the geometry of the maps into the void it was doing crazy things like having all the skeletons walk backward. It was so bad that later patched had to implement special keys to teleport the player around dungeons that could not be beaten.
I can’t remember any specific bugs about Frontier: First Encounters (that would be the third game in the Elite series). I do remember it had a tendency to crash a lot. It stands out in my mind because years after playing it I worked with a member of the testing team at a non-game industry job and he apologized to me for it. That’s the only apology I’ve every gotten for shipping a game in an unfinished state.
I’ve probably played buggier ones that have faded into memory but I’ll throw the door open to the rest of you: what’s the buggiest game you’ve played?
Both of the STALKER games are notoriously buggy, probably the most so I’ve ever encountered; despite being truly incredible and groundbreaking in other ways.
The Temple of Elemental Evil was pretty messed up. One thing I recall is that you could hire NPCs to join your party. These NPCs would automatically take a cut of any treasure you found, including items like swords and armor. The problem was, you couldn’t remove these items from their inventory. So any NPC you hired would eventually become so bogged down with broad swords and suits of chain mail that he couldn’t move, and would have to be abandoned wherever he was standing when he passed his encumbrance limit.
The one that is freshest in my mind is the Sims 3, which, when it isn’t crashing and crashing and crashing, is kidnapping babies, wiping inventories, and swallowing whole neighborhoods. I’ve just about given up on it.
The first game I remember being so buggy that it couldn’t be played was Gunship on the C=64, where invisible, invulnerable ninjas would shoot missiles at your helicopter if you landed close to infantry units. The worst part, though, was the anti-piracy scheme in which, as soon as you got close to one of your own bases, a window would pop up demanding word X of paragraph Y from page Z of your manual, or else your own anti-aircraft batteries would shoot you down. Meanwhile, the game was still playing itself while you fumbled for your manual, and if you couldn’t find and type the word in time, you’d crash or be shot down while helpless.
Just about anything made by Bethesda is guaranteed to have game-stopping bugs on release, with at least a half-dozen patches required to fix the worst of the bugs and then fix the bugs created by the patches released to fix the bugs. Oblivion was literally unplayable out of the box. I have something close to 200 mods to fix what’s wrong with Oblivion (with more than 20 of those being just for actual bug-fixes rather than balance and playability issues). When did it become acceptable for game publishers to use their customers as unpaid beta-testers?
Miller beat me to it regarding The Temple of Elemental Evil, but he forgot to mention the Crash To Desktop-bug, ie the game had about a 50% chance to crash every time you zoned.
Knights of the Old Republic. Never has a game forced me into such a ludicrous save-game management strategy. It was practically a minigame in itself, ensuring that the inevitable crashes didn’t annihilate hours of play.
Or sweet jumping jesus the anti piracy page that came with a game, black printed on deep almost purple maroon [supposedly so you couldnt photocopy it, so handwritten lists circulated instead] I think that was Stonekeep?
Eye of the Beholder was little pictures in the corner of the pages of the manual, it would ask for word # line # and pictogram. At least it asked for them between levels instead of in the middle of a fight!
Stonekeep was one of those “big” multimedia games with crappy FMV acting for everything so as far as I’m aware it was only released on CD and CD’s didn’t even use copy protection at that point. You’re probably thinking of another dungeon crawlers, though I can’t place that particular no-photocopy sheet off the top of my head. (Let’s see… The Bard’s Tale series and Legacy of the Ancients used code wheels… Dragon Wars used a paragraph book for in game information… the Gold Box series used manual look up, code wheels, and symbol keys depending on which one you were playing… I’m running out of first person dungeon crawlers here…)
I don’t even know why I wanted to play that game. I think the box looked cool and I hadn’t read the negative reviews at that point. Not only was the game extremely poorly designed, it barely ran at times.
I think it had about 18 official patches, which did not fix all of the problems.
Daggerfall:
'Nuff said. Great game, though.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within:
Buggiest game I’ve played on a console. I played the Gamecube version, and it was weird. Voices would come out of nowhere, with no enemies to be found. Enemies would swing wildly at nothing. It took the first game, which had no bugs, and messed it up. It was clearly rushed to come out 1 year after the first.
Yes, but I can patch my game and install 200 mods to make it good, while you’ll still be fighting bandits in full suits of Daedric armour at level 20 while steering your joystick with your elbows and squinting at 148-point text.
Star Wars Galaxies comes to mind. When it was first released it was so freaking buggy I eventually decided I simply couldn’t play it. You’d spend a week micromanaging something to where you wanted it and then POOF!, GONE. A complete waste of time, I gave up.
It may not have been the buggiest in absolute terms, but Scorched Earth had to have had the largest number of exploitable bugs. Apparently most of the game state was stored directly in the video memory, so if you could make it look like something would happen on the screen, you could make it actually happen. So you could, for instance, drive through a mountain by overwriting the mountain pixels with pixels from your turret, or drive across chasms on a “bridge” made out of the mouse cursor. You could also exploit the hill-climbing mechanism to cause your tank to levitate straight up into the air, or various other tricks (I’ve been known to beat a set of enemies without firing a single shot).
There were also some other less pleasant bugs, too: The game would usually crash after about a dozen rounds in a row, the “save game” feature was completely unusable, and occasionally a projectile would get stuck on a wall and never detonate, forcing you to use the “Mass Kill” feature to end the round. But those are all fairly mundane, compared to the exploitable ones.
