Most Useful Game-Breaking Bugs

[PainInTheAssInternet]

What methods/items have you encountered in your games that have actually improved the experience because they break the game's balance?

My most notable one is in Socom Combined Assault on PS2.

The AI isn't all that great to begin with (your team is effectively useless and the enemies just wander around even if they're being shot at), but they can also be completely shut down with something programmed into the game; smoke grenades. Forget every other piece of equipment and just get these babies that come in two flavours; grey and red. My advice is go with red because the cloud they produce is very translucent if not transparent, so the red is easier to see. Yet this near-invisible cloud completely eliminates the enemies' willingness to use their guns on you, even if you stand right in front of them and kick them in the shins. The clouds also cover a considerable area, penetrate entire buildings and last for 30 seconds each. Since most missions involve close quarter combat, you can imagine how useful these are.

You can arrange it so each member of your 4-man team carries 4, so 4 x 4 = 16. They last for half a minute so 16 x .5 = 8 solid minutes of game-breaking smoke for each mission.

Just to top it all off, in this game that really punishes you for carrying too much equipment, they weigh nothing. I'm not exaggerating, I've checked. I wonder if it was meant to be like that, if it's a glitch or they just forgot to program it.

What are your favourite game-breakers?

Capcha: point-blank. How does it get such appropriate phrases?

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

There're several easy ways to cheese a Demon's Souls boss.

1) Flamelurker. Run up the stairs behind the debris to the left. Flamelurker will get stuck behind a rock in the middle of the arena and keep running against it. All you have to do now is long-range him to death. He will never stop running against that boulder.

2) Maneater. You can snipe the first Maneater from just outside the mist gate leading to the boss room. Stand to the right and use manual target. Use any bow but the Lava Bow or it will push it beyond your reach. Bring a few hundreds of arrows. Once it's down it'll make the fight against the 2nd Maneater considerably easier.

3) Lady Astraea. Not really a bug but it might as well be: go to the cliff to the right and snipe her from above. You don't even have to fight Garl to get to her, he can't get to the cliff. Once you kill her Garl will stop attacking (unless you provoke him), but you can get his gear by exiting and returning to the place, or simply loading your game. His gear will be on the ground, by his spawn point.

 

[Elfgore]

Fallout: New Vegas' money glitch. In the Primm casino there is a glitch that gave you unlimited money. They've patched it out, but you could always uninstall the patch data. So in the casino you have the opportunity to cash in your chips, luckily for you the chips don't leave your inventory and you can repeat the process over and over for unlimited caps. You can then buy all the weapons, ammo, and implants you need.

 

[Roxas1359]

Fallout: New Vegas' money glitch.

I remember that glitch. Only did it once myself, but after getting the Jury Rigging perk, money was never an obstacle for me again. >

Another one from New Vegas though that hasn't been patched is the fact that some enemies are afraid of rocks. You stand on top of certain rocks, sometimes ones that the enemy can still get you, and they suddenly run away in fear. Makes dealing with the Deathclaws in the Quarry easy, as the mound of boulders in the middle is something not even an enraged Mother Deathclaw would dare to get near. As a result, we have a scenario where our lone Courier, barely level 4 and just barely having freed Primm, managed to take out a Mother Deathclaw, and Alpha Male Deathclaw, and an army of regular Deathclaws by just standing on some rocks and arching shots with the Incinerator.
Twas a legend passed down through the Mojave Wastes for decades to come!

 

[Sub_par]

fallout 2 had a glitch where you could find uranium ore in a mine in the mutant/ghoul/human town, then sell it to the power plant for $2000, and you can repeat the dialog as many times as you want and keep getting the money, unless you accidentally choose the wrong option, then you cant do it anymore.

 

[Rebel_Raven]

Fallout: New Vegas' money glitch. In the Primm casino there is a glitch that gave you unlimited money. They've patched it out, but you could always uninstall the patch data. So in the casino you have the opportunity to cash in your chips, luckily for you the chips don't leave your inventory and you can repeat the process over and over for unlimited caps. You can then buy all the weapons, ammo, and implants you need.

I think I miss New Vegas' infinite XP glitch more, which also got patched out. I liked sort of having a semi new game+ through getting points, and stats back so I didn't have to re-grind everything, and work on a build as close to maxed out as possible.

 

[drh1975]

My two favorites were in Skyrim. The infinite XP from multiple readings of the Oghma Infinium was helpful, especially when I needed to build up my Sneak and Magic skills. The other one was the Speech to 100 from talking to the bartender in the Black-Briar Meadery. Unfortunately, both glitches were patched, but it was fun while it lasted.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

There're several easy ways to cheese a Demon's Souls boss.

1) Flamelurker. Run up the stairs behind the debris to the left. Flamelurker will get stuck behind a rock in the middle of the arena and keep running against it. All you have to do now is long-range him to death. He will never stop running against that boulder.

2) Maneater. You can snipe the first Maneater from just outside the mist gate leading to the boss room. Stand to the right and use manual target. Use any bow but the Lava Bow or it will push it beyond your reach. Bring a few hundreds of arrows. Once it's down it'll make the fight against the 2nd Maneater considerably easier.

3) Lady Astraea. Not really a bug but it might as well be: go to the cliff to the right and snipe her from above. You don't even have to fight Garl to get to her, he can't get to the cliff. Once you kill her Garl will stop attacking (unless you provoke him), but you can get his gear by exiting and returning to the place, or simply loading your game. His gear will be on the ground, by his spawn point.

Dark Souls has some stuff like that as well.

1. You can kill the Capra Demon boss without ever entering his fog gate. His room doesn't have a ceiling on it so you can just toss firebombs over the wall and through the ceiling. It takes about 15 firebombs to kill him if I remember correctly.

2. There's a spot in the bed of chaos boss room where you can stand and no attacks can reach you. From there you can shoot the boss's weak points with a bow and never have to worry about getting hit into the cracks in the floor. You still have to make the jump to kill the bug though.

3. With a high enough damage weapon, and high poise, you can beat the 4 kings boss and only actually fight 2 kings. The kings appear on a timer, so if you can get their shared health bar down fast enough only 2 kings will appear.

4. The hallway where you fight Gwyndolin isn't actually as long as it seems. If you don't feel like chasing Gwyndolin down and getting one or 2 hits in and letting him teleport you can just sprint down the hallway and completely ignore him, and he'll constantly keep teleporting back in front of you into your path. After 5 minutes of sprinting you'll reach the end of the hallway and Gwyndolin will no longer be able to move. From Software didn't program Gwyndolin to actually be able to walk, he can only teleport and once he has no more room to teleport he's stuck allowing you to just go to town on him. Not exactly game breaking, just funny.

 

[Ulquiorra4sama]

There're several easy ways to cheese a Demon's Souls boss.

1) Flamelurker. Run up the stairs behind the debris to the left. Flamelurker will get stuck behind a rock in the middle of the arena and keep running against it. All you have to do now is long-range him to death. He will never stop running against that boulder.

2) Maneater. You can snipe the first Maneater from just outside the mist gate leading to the boss room. Stand to the right and use manual target. Use any bow but the Lava Bow or it will push it beyond your reach. Bring a few hundreds of arrows. Once it's down it'll make the fight against the 2nd Maneater considerably easier.

3) Lady Astraea. Not really a bug but it might as well be: go to the cliff to the right and snipe her from above. You don't even have to fight Garl to get to her, he can't get to the cliff. Once you kill her Garl will stop attacking (unless you provoke him), but you can get his gear by exiting and returning to the place, or simply loading your game. His gear will be on the ground, by his spawn point.

You know, i was gonna mention Demon's Souls, but more for the fact you can duplicate the stuff in your inventory, meaning you can duplicate the stored souls and keep leveling up as much as you want right at the start of the game.

 

[Pheo1386]

Back to dark souls, the bottomless box glitch was a favourite way of getting high level equipment on a new game. Again, it got patched, but it made getting the plat a lot easier for those who used it.

 

[Vegosiux]

Always loved the alchemy abuse in Morrowind. It would even crash the game if you made a potion of speed too powerful. But, pots that would regen 100 per second, for 6 hours? Yep, quite good.

 

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

My favourite was the Morrowind permanent buff glitch. By combining 'fortify' spells with 'soul trap' spells in a particular way the fortification spells would last indefinitely, thus allowing all sorts of 'God-mode' buffs.

For example, create a custom spell such as the following:
Effect 1) Fortify health 100 pts for 1 sec on self.
Effect 2) Soul Trap for 1 sec on target.
Then cast the spell aiming at your character's feet, so that the Soul Trap effect hits you, and the fortification becomes permanent (well, until it is worn away by damage). Cue characters with stats of 500 and hp and magicka in the thousands.

The alternate (less broken, but still bloody broken) version of this was to learn the 'drain skill' spell and create a spell of:
Effect 1) Drain *skill* 100 pts for 2 secs on self.
Stand in front of *skill* trainer and cast spell. Quickly select trainer and purchase training. As *skill* is currently at 0 training costs only 1 drake, but after the spell wears off the game still acknowledges the training and the skill stands at old value +1, allowing players to train their characters to the next level for the princely sum of 10 gold.

 

[BoredRolePlayer]

Regen armor in batman arkham city

 

[Skrimmy]

I liked the Dawnstar box glitch in Skyrim. It made getting gold and ebony ore much easier.

 

[EyeReaper]

I feel like you shouldn't mention bugs, glitches, and similar without mentioning the classic bug-fest: Pokemon.
My personal favorite back in the day was turning off the game midsave at the computer, cloning your pokemon and their held items (which, if you're doing this, is almost certainly going to be masterballs, or combo-ing Toxic and Leech Seed and getting massive healing.
But of course, probably the most famous is the Cinnabar glitch pokemon, the fan favorite bird-type pokemon... Weighing in at 3500 pounds, it's everyone's favorite save corrupting tetris block...

Spoiler: Missingno.!

Although if you were cool (like me) you didn't go for that ol' L block. Everybody knows the skeleton and ghost forms are where it's at! Lest we forget that Mr.No here also was capable of giving out more rare candies than Marik Ishtar on Halloween, and maybe some masterballs as well. This guy pretty much handed the rest of the game to you on a silver platter, if you were willing to risk it all for that son of a glitch

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Abusing the awful siege pathfinding in Medieval 2 Total War allowed you to butcher entire enemy armies. If an army had an artillery piece, they would refuse to launch their towers, ladders or rams unless the artillery was disabled. So you could target the artillery and wipe them out, which would trigger the enemy siege equipment to move. Once they get into range of your towers, you attack the siege equipment, forcing the units to drop them, and suddenly, nobody is moving, and your towers slaughter everyone because the AI is too stupid to pick stuff back up.

 

[Zeras]

Regen armor in batman arkham city

How did/does that work?

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I feel like you shouldn't mention bugs, glitches, and similar without mentioning the classic bug-fest: Pokemon.
My personal favorite back in the day was turning off the game midsave at the computer, cloning your pokemon and their held items (which, if you're doing this, is almost certainly going to be masterballs, or combo-ing Toxic and Leech Seed and getting massive healing.
But of course, probably the most famous is the Cinnabar glitch pokemon, the fan favorite bird-type pokemon... Weighing in at 3500 pounds, it's everyone's favorite save corrupting tetris block...

Spoiler: Missingno.!

Although if you were cool (like me) you didn't go for that ol' L block. Everybody knows the skeleton and ghost forms are where it's at! Lest we forget that Mr.No here also was capable of giving out more rare candies than Marik Ishtar on Halloween, and maybe some masterballs as well. This guy pretty much handed the rest of the game to you on a silver platter, if you were willing to risk it all for that son of a glitch

There's also the glitch in Gold/Silver that lets you clone Pokemon (and any item the Pokemon's holding). I forget how it was done. Something about changing a Pokemon from one box to another on Bill's PC, then turning off the game when the words SAVING DON'T TURN OFF THE GAME pop up. Though you should look it up kids, I'm not so sure how this was done.

 

[sandangel]

Final Fantasy VII's Magic Pot Item Glitch. Still my favorite.

 

[Isalan]

Lot of Bethesda floating around this thread XD

My favourite is probably a little number from Evil Genius. One of the story missions requires you to capture a maid (for reasons that remain, to this day, unclear). Up until that point, government's of the world will never send anyone out to find your agents on the world map so you can flood the map with workers and set them all too steal making you vast quantities of cashy money. Alt-tab for an hour and watch a youtube vid or play another game, come back and you now have enough money to pretty much complete the rest of the game.