Most Useful Game-Breaking Bugs

[Uratoh]

Boost Item Duplicating in Etrian Oddysey Untold: The Millenium Girl. with how RANDOM the grimoire system is as well as annoying some enemy special circumstance drops are, being able to duplicate the items that let you manipulate the grimoire chance, or force circumstance drops just make life endurable, and no, all the combat use items in the game won't let you beat the game's ultimate challenges...you'll just be able to organize your party faster to take them on.

 

[Extra-Ordinary]

There was a glitch I encountered in The Force Unleashed that gave me infinite force ability. I could use any force ability and it would regenerate instantly, no delay. It also gave me invincibility and made the XP go past the end and stretch completely across the screen after enough XP was built up.
It was fun for a while, but it eventually gets boring, there's no challenge to being The Force manifest.

 

[LegendaryVKickr]

Skyrim's leveling glitches and the Dawnstar chest were good and all, but my favorite was abusing the alchemy, to make insane multipliers for armor enchants.

Basically, if you made a potion of fortify regeneration, it would boost your alchemy as well, for some reason...But the effect stacked. So you could make stronger and stronger fortify regen potions, and finally make a fortify enchanting/fortify smithing in order to get a potion with absurd multipliers.

I made a warrior with Daedric armor that basically rendered me invincible, and war axes that did thousands of points of damage per swing, alongside obscene fire damage which in itself often did enough damage to kill people. I would run around as a literal God and murder everyone I came across. Even dragons fell before me with a single swipe of my blades. Good fun.

 

[ShinyCharizard]

The good old W-Item duplication glitch in Final Fantasy VII.

99 Megalixers? Yes please.

Another good one was the gun duplication glitch in the first Borderlands. What you did was join a co-op game, so you were not the host. Drop your best guns on the ground, then turn off your Xbox from the main power switch, the host can then pick up your dropped guns, and when you log back into the game you still have them in your inventory.

 

[OneCatch]

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.

I remember playing a staunchly pacifistic alchemist on one playthrough just to see if I could - if anything it was easier than standard playthroughs. Would make obscene amounts of cash selling poisons and unneeded potions while using potions that boosted personality. Would use cash to bulk buy any necessary ingredients.
Would then create uber-effective defensive potions, then just wander around with no armour or weapons.
I'd end up just ignoring groups of hostiles while wandering around looting, and where I had to kill for mission completion I'd use a single utterly devastating contact spell after boosting offensive stats.
The only thing that gave me trouble was the Lich king (called Revel, Ravell, something like that?) in the Tribunal expansion because of the stupid amount of damage it outputs. Still, killed it after a bit of prep work.

On Topic, siege battles in the older Total War games.
In Rome 1 you could destroy siege towers just when they were full of the enemy's elite assault troops by hitting your own walls with artillery after the towers made contact. Or you could use troops which caused knockback (like beserkers) to do devastating amount of damage on walls. Or you could prevent a massive reinforcing army from relieving a city you were besieging by quickly sending fast forces to capture all the towers and gates, leaving the reinforcing enemy to use the one set of ladders you had placed. Or you could completely break an enemy attack by putting the majority of your troops outside and forcing them to chase you around the outside of the walls while getting peppered. Or just stick two pike phalanxes on top of each other on the approaches to the capturepoint and watch the kills stack up.
Medieval II sieges were just horrifying generally - as a defender you could make it a complete nightmare for any attacking force by skirmishing aggressively and retaking lost areas - it would wrongfoot the AI and cause them to loose coherence. And as an attacker it was rather difficult to unseat the AI on harder difficulties while contending with multiple layers of defence.
Still, while broken as hell, it certainly made sieges a fairly exciting and varied proposition when compared to field battles - which, enjoy Total War as I do, basically amounted entirely to fix and flank back then.

 

[sidewinder fang]

The one that comes to mind for me is the infinite money cheat from the original mass effect, there's a Dr who runs a clinic in the wards, I forget her name, think it was Chloe for some reason, anyway once you complete a certain mission for her she gives you a discount on all the items in her clinic, then you buy as much as you can and then and run to the other end of the wards, sell it to the black market weapons dealer there and run back and a re-buy it from her for less than you sold it for, repeat ad infinitum, I remember being able to buy all the top gear on the citadel pretty much from the word go, I think her mission could be accessed fairly early on.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Definately enjoyed that bug that ran throughout the saint's row series that pretty much stopped you from dying.
Well it was fun for a bit.

 

[drakonz]

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.

same cloning glitch exict in fire red too using the islands auto saving and quiting while its saving after taking pokemon from pc (dont remember exact order of the glitch or how its done anymore, but i used it to get multible copies of groudon)

 

[Ryotknife]

Borderlands 1, third DLC. Once you complete the story, there is a section at the end where you can loot like 100 weapon chests but you have a time limit and you can only do it once. There was a glitch to basically phase through the wall (which doesnt activate the event nor the timer) so that you can do it as many times as you want. Gearbox was going to fix it, but the community flipped out over fixing it, so they left it in.

Borderlands 2, raid on digistruct peak DLC. Another wall glitch that allows you to basically skip half of the level. Although this one was a real bastard to do, requires grenade jumping (ie using the force of a grenade to extend your jump)

Borderlands 2, item duping. There was an easy way to make copies of weapons. They left this bug in because getting legendaries was extremely hard.

 

[Sean Hollyman]

I had a glitch in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed that made me invicnible to all damage. It was awesome.

 

[kilenem]

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.

That one is my favorite. Its bad enough pokemon games don't scale to your level but holly shit was even worse when you could clone your best Pokemon.

 

[kilenem]

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.

That one is my favorite. Its bad enough pokemon games don't scale to your level but holly shit was even worse when you could clone your best Pokemon.

 

[mindfaQ]

Pudge being able to fountain hook and Magnus to fountain skewer in Dota 2. The first one netted Na'vi an unlikely win in a final rounds match of TI3. Although I doubt Na'vi would have picked like they did, if that combo wasn't in the game in the first place (or so to say: people knew about it). Needless to say there was a some rage about this at various places. It was removed a short time afterwards.

video related to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5I-5eo_vDM

 

[MMSouthpawVIII]

The Grenade Glitch in The Gamecube Resident Evil REmake. Definitely game breaking, but so fun.

Crimson what now?

 

[PinkiePyro]

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

the dawnstar box isnt the only one also for those not in the know shopkeeper npcs have their inventory stored in various chests hidden under the map but there are some that with tricks can be reached the easyest being one in dawnstar near the forge its near a winterberry bush...


personally my most favorite is one I call terrain glitch fighting... basically there are spots in various dungeons that with stubborn determation jumping at odd angles that you can wedge into or on top of if you stealth arch. in these spots (on top of rubble, delmer pipes behind columns, etc)you are basicly invincible, enemies with out range wont be able to reach you and it makes leveling stealth that much faster so magic/arrow users will have little chance as well

 

[McElroy]

Takes me back to one of my favourite games: Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader. It had two bugs that made playing the game much easier. Or maybe just one; the random chests and merchants is probably more of an easily exploitable game mechanic that a bug. Anyway, the game made sure you always got items and equipment scaled for your level -> which meant you could quick save before every chest and merchant visit to eventually get the stuff you desired instead of random crap.

The other is a bit of a game-breaker. Having a weapon in a quick slot gives you the ability to re-equip it on the fly, which always resets the weapon's recoil/cooldown. This makes the fire rates of all weapons soar through the roof as the only limiting factor is now the swinging/shooting animation. The bug makes crossbows the most effective weapons in the game, as they become basically semi-automatic with no reload.

 

[BoredRolePlayer]

Regen armor in batman arkham city

How did/does that work?

Did it on the PS3 last week so it should still work.

While I was fighting the Joker in that arena fight and almost out of armor, I hit select and went into the upgrade section and checked out a few things I didn't buy yet. When I went back to fight there it was a full armor bar. So from what I can gather based on how my batman was set up

-playing on the ps3 with hard mode
-had full melee armor upgrade
-didn't run out of the armor yet (had a bit)
-went into the upgrade menu and looked at a few things I didn't buy
-closed and had full armor

 

[Elvis Starburst]

Um, I wouldn't say it was gamebreaking in the sense that it let me go all crazy or get infinite cash, but it was certainly battle breaking! (This is the only glitch on the top of my head)

I was playing Spectrobes Origins, and was fighting a tough boss. I was out of healing items, and he still had a third of his HP. I dunno what I did, but he suddenly glitched out after being smacked a bit and started walking to the edge of the battlefield. Nothing I ever did would make him stop. It was an easy win, and one I was thankful for!

 

[Trude]

Item flying on almost any shooter with a physics engine (Half-Life 2, Painkiller, etc). Giant canyon? Corpse express first class will get you across.

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

The Elder Scrolls' alchemy/stat glitches of course, Pokemon's Missin No., FF7 W-Item duping, This Awesome playlist of different ways to screw around and speedrun in Sonic 3 and Knuckles [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEOsmMOc_BA&list=PL01596721403E0594&index=1], Super Metroid's Mockball; These are a few I can remember abusing.

The ones that I really liked though was Metroid Prime's Scan dash, 6 bomb jump and jumping on the level geometry to sequence break. That added so much replay value to an already top notch game and brought back Super Metroid's open endedness that was missing in Fusion. It really pissed me off to hear Retro locked doors and added obstacles to deny sequence breaking in later versions and were more careful in later games, and that's coming from a guy that owns the original unedited North American version.