Glitches and Bugs: The Dark Side of Gaming

[The_Echo]

We've all had this scenario play out.

"Man, look at this game. It's so good. It looks good, it plays good, it sounds good, it's just, so--"

Spoiler: O.. I... oh.

Spoiler: O... OK.

And yes, bugs can be fun [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82yODVL4SeM], they can be abused [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1lwD-jFHOE], they can be just plain weird [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neRn2eBK9dg].

But there are others... the ones that end your quest early, that impede your progress, that completely break your game.
[HEADING=1]This is a thread about those[/HEADING]
Naturally, as the OP, I'll regale to you lovely others a couple tales of my own, spoiler'd for brevity's sake.

Spoiler: The Brotherhood of Staying Still

Long ago in the year 2009, there was a game called Fallout 3, and an expansion called Broken Steel. It's pretty obscure, you probably haven't heard of it.

Early into the Broken Game Steel expansion, the player is led through an area by the NPCs accompanying him. The player's progress is dependent on these NPCs, as they open the doors to certain areas in order to move forward.

So there I am, ready to... well, I don't remember what we were trying to do. But I'm there. And my buddies, NPCs 1, 2 and maybe 3. They're telling me "We've gotta get to Wherever!", and I'm like, "Yes. Let's go. Let's.. letsopenthisdoor."

"... G. Guys. Open. Open the door."
[sub][sub][sub][sub][sub]And nobody ever heard from the Vault Dweller again.[/sub][/sub][/sub][/sub][/sub]

Spoiler: Death's Tomb

This one just happened today, and is the inspiration for this thread.

I finally loaded up the first Darksiders II expansion, Argul's Tomb. I go in, scythes at the ready. Ostegoth awaits me, to tell me the tale of Argul the Mad. I am told that he was laid to rest beyond the Kingdom of the Dead, in a location lost to all but Ostegoth. But before I can find the tomb itself, for which I am to be rewarded, I must find a key.

There's a dungeon nearby. Well, the key must be in there! Proceeding into the dungeon, I am eventually confronted with Voidwalker obstacles. I handle them with ease, until a very sinister beam stops me in my tracks.

I hop through the portal, land on the beam, and... I can't leave. I can move around the beam to my heart's content, but I cannot remove myself from it unless it's to fall to my death. I retry, I reload, I restart. Nothing will make this beam allow me passage.

I guess Argul's Tomb wasn't meant to be found.

So that's all I've got, really. Or all that I can remember, at least.

Discussion Point: (AKA TL;DR)
How about you? What kind of nasty bugs have you come across?

 

[Keoul]

-cough-
I hope this is a nice treat for anyone else that comes.

 

[Voulan]

I hope this is a nice treat for anyone else that comes.

Well, it gave me a hell of a fright, since it started playing automatically as I was reading the OP's post, with my volumne on max. But I see from quoting you that it was the intention.

As for me, I've got this one glitch in Skyrim that annoys me to this day. It's a part of the Companion's quest line, where you can heal yourself of a particular affliction, where in fact I did so, but the game didn't register it properly, so now I'm 'healed' even though I'm not, and I can't continue the last few quests you can do once you've finished that storyline because of this. It's not the worst, granted, but for role-playing reasons it's not an ideal situation.

And then of course there's the growing pile of quest items in my inventory that I can't remove even after completing their associated quests.

As for more amusing ones, there's the growing group of the same person outside Whiterun (with some being stuck in the ground).

 

[Exius Xavarus]

-cough-

I was getting tabs loading so I can read through threads as I go. I had high volume on without realizing it. Scared the hell outta me and took forever to figure out where the hell it was coming from. I dislike you for that. :{

Mass Effect is riddled with bugs.

Camera misaligns with Shepard. When guns are put away Shepard can only move in the direction (s)he's facing and when guns are drawn, camera moves but character model doesn't move with the camera. It's a functional bug when guns are put up, it's an aesthetic bug when guns are drawn.

Mako constantly jumps from point to point after getting stuck for a few seconds. Sometimes I'll get stuck upside down or I'll get stuck in the ground, unable to get out, jump or move. The worst part is if I get stuck in the ground it's an inevitable game over because every single time, Shepard and friends suddenly die for no reason.

During cutscenes, either the sound effects or music will cease working for either part of the scene or the entire scene.

During dialogue sessions, occasionally voice overs will simply not happen for a line or two of dialogue.

Normally these bugs wouldn't bother me if they only happened once in a blue moon. But no. They happen all the goddamn time and they make Mass Effect, an otherwise brilliant game, into quite a chore to actually play.

I was actually going to make a thread about game bugs and glitches, but then I accidentally hit the Backspace key when I wasn't selecting the text field and when I hit forward to go back, my entire wall of text was gone so I said fuckit.

 

[Strelok]

~SNIP~

That is good, I ran into something similar in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky.

 

[EmzOLV]

-cough-
I hope this is a nice treat for anyone else that comes.

That freaked me out.
And this happened to me the other day. I threw some girl in Dishonored and she got stuck and became this strange twitching monstrosity...

Spoiler

[http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/163/photo1ury.jpg/]

I couldn't pick her back up to move her either, so she just stayed there, bobbing away. It was well weird.

Other bugs I hated - I was once stuck on this GTA IV mission like you wouldn't believe. It was the typical shoot 40 people at this mob hide out and then run away from the cops scenario. So after several hundred attempts, I was finally winning. I was driving away from the cops and they were quite far behind and about maybe a few mm away from getting out of the red circle and eventual victory. As I was driving, as you do, there's this person in the road. Screw it I thought, I'll run them over - victory smush as it were. Turns out this one person was made of concrete, totalling the car, throwing me out the windscreen, and re-loading the mission from the start. And typically, GTA IV fashion, as the slow motion death was playing out, I could see the concrete person standing in the background, almost mocking me.

I think I game raged quite hard when that happened.

 

[lapan]

Happened to a friend of mine. He managed to get Vergils HP to zero with normal attacks, which isn't supposed to happen since you have to kill him

Spoiler

with Devil Trigger.

Vergil turned invunerable and he had to restart the bossfight.

 

[Kyrian007]

We've all had this scenario play out.

"Man, look at this game. It's so good. It looks good, it plays good, it sounds good, it's just, so--"

Spoiler: O.. I... oh.

Spoiler: O... OK.

I had the multiple Louis glitch in Skyrim, but I thought they patched that. I had over a dozen of the bastards hanging around outside the stables in Whiterun. Then I spent some time without having to go anywhere near Whiterun and when I finally did come back, he was gone and I've never seen him since.

 

[fix-the-spade]

What kind of nasty bugs have you come across?

You forget, bugs can also make the game better!

Case in point, Team Fortress' spy was born via a bug in the Quake mod that spawned players with the other team's colours. Fast forward to TFC and, Spies, spies everywhere!

The worst bug I've ever encountered is in Far Cry 2, saving at a specific percentage (67 I think) can potentially brick your game. The only fix being to start over, use another save or for the unlucky, re-install the game.

Battlefield 3's occasional invisible soldiers (where the player spawns but not their model) can be somewhat irritating as well, although often short lived.

 

[Ilikemilkshake]

-cough-

Mass Effect is riddled with bugs.

Really? I've played through ME1 about 8 times and the only bug I can remember coming across was a bug where your companions get stuck in the floor during the assault on the citadel but that fixes itself when you move up to the next area.

As for bugs that really annoyed me, I think I'd have to say Pirates of the Caribbean on the original xbox. It was a great RPG but it had a few game breaking bugs, one of which meant you couldn't complete the game I wish somewhere like Good Old Games had it on their store so I could play it again and see if the PC version was less broken but oh well.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

One of the more entertaining bug compilations out there:

But there are others... the ones that end your quest early, that impede your progress, that completely break your game.

Nothing will ever, ever, ever top Ultima IX in this department. I'm not sure there will ever be another game as buggy, or as insidious, save perhaps that Pool of Radiance reboot that deleted your core system files when you tried to uninstall it (no that is not a joke).

If Battlefield 3000 AD is the most notoriously feature-incomplete game of all time, Ultima IX is the most notoriously broken game of all time. Putting aside for a second the monstrous betrayal and ignorance of the previous 20 years of accumulated lore, horrendous voice acting, ghastly nonsensical plot, and various other atrocities, the game just flat out did not work.

Ultima IX is an awful game. It was barely playable on release and even years later, with faster computers and a multitude of unofficial fan patches, it's barely more stable. Two years prior to Ascension's release, id Software's Quake II had dramatically changed the computer game industry with its focus on true 3D hardware-accelerated graphics, kicking off a craze for 3D accelerator cards that could handle these new games. Several different APIs (a rule set for how to draw graphics) were competing, with 3Dfx's Glide API and Voodoo cards at the top of the heap, and the alternative Direct3D and OpenGL formats trailing. Ultima IX only really worked well on 3Dfx's hardware, presumably due to a lack of time to test for the less popular APIs, which backfired spectacularly when 3Dfx's business fortunes dropped out from under them in 1999 in one of the most significant turnarounds in computer game history. Basically, nobody could play this game, because Voodoo graphics cards had dropped significantly in popularity the year Ascension came out.

It's still a devil to even get it working; the article author suffered numerous crashes before even getting to Britannia, and as a result nearly all of the screenshots for this segment of the article are stock shots or shots taken by others and used here with their permission. Contemporary reviews of the game complain about corrupted saves, crashes during saving, crashes to desktop given with no error messages or warning, memory leaks that make the game run slower if it's been open for a while. Ascension has literally hundreds of documented bugs; it's just an inelegant-coded mess of a program.

Most infamous were the plot breaking bugs. Not just because they ruined your progress and forced you to restart the game entirely, but because it was possible to break the plot and not know about it for anywhere from 10-20 hours. Users tracked down something like 130 different plot breaking bugs post release, some of which were later patched, at which point a host of new plot breaking bugs were introduced.

Spoony's hilarious (and occasionally wrenching) retrospective on the game does a good job of detailing how it was arguably the most brutal and complete destruction of a critically and popularly acclaimed fictional property in the history of gaming, but only touches briefly on how busted the game was at release. It's still buggy today, after more than a decade of studious fan patches. Why they bothered I'll never know. Perhaps, like Plan 9 From Outer Space, it is a game so bad it is destined to be a classic, and they wanted people to experience it in its bewildering totality.

 

[Exius Xavarus]

-cough-

Mass Effect is riddled with bugs.

Really? I've played through ME1 about 8 times and the only bug I can remember coming across was a bug where your companions get stuck in the floor during the assault on the citadel but that fixes itself when you move up to the next area.

As for bugs that really annoyed me, I think I'd have to say Pirates of the Caribbean on the original xbox. It was a great RPG but it had a few game breaking bugs, one of which meant you couldn't complete the game I wish somewhere like Good Old Games had it on their store so I could play it again and see if the PC version was less broken but oh well.

That's basically my situation with Assassin's Creed III. People talked about how it was beyond buggy, but I only encountered one bug at the end of the game.

That reminds me of another bug. My squadmates would stop moving and cease responding to the Rally on Shepard command.

But Mass Effect has been a beyond buggy experience for me. It might be that I'm playing on PS3 but I dunno. Don't get me wrong, though. I absolutely love Mass Effect. I had 3 and 3 for PS3 but I was never able to play the first, so my enjoyment really took a blow. Getting the Trilogy has rekindled my love for the Mass Effect series and it really did wonders on my enjoyment for it.

 

[Euryalus]

You know that orange map in the Brotherhood of steel base? The one where the head scribe shows you how to get to vault 87? Well it wasn't there. I couldn't get it to load. I thought fine, alright I'll just go there myself... But when I got back to attack the water purifier, the cutscene to charge wouldn't load because it was still waiting to take me to the map and show me where vault 87 was. I had to start all over.

Reloading my saves didn't work. It was permanently like that no matter what save I used

 

[Ilikemilkshake]

It might be that I'm playing on PS3 but I dunno.

Oh, I just assumed you were talking about the PC version, which was actually an unusually decent port but Yeah that'll be your problem. It seems like getting a good PC or PS3 port is mutually exclusive, we can never have both