10 Games So Glitchy They Were Unplayable on Launch Day
Since the dawn of the console, players have had to work around, and with, broken video games.
Published 4 years ago in Facepalm
We could go on and on, listing games new and old that have corrupted our files, and wasted our time.
So for the sake of brevity, here's a short list of games that were so glitchy, they were unplayable on launch day.
1
Assassin’s Creed: Unity remains one of the more infamous glitched games that really left a lot of people uncertain if yearly Assassin’s Creed games were such a good idea. Among the game’s numerous glitches included being able to walk on the air, fall through the map, NPCs loading in weird locations, and textures just not loading at all. The infamous image of NPCs with their teeth and eyes suspended under false hair follicles is the source of either nightmare fuel or laughs, depending on your mindset.
2
Street Fighter x Tekken was not a successful entry in either franchise, made all the worse by some pretty terrible glitches that befell unsuspecting players. If you played Rolento and used your knife, the moment the knife touched anything the game would crash. Another glitch sent Mega Man flying into the air – only to disappear forever. Sure, patches would fix these, but it didn’t do the game any favors in the early days of its life.
3
Aliens: Colonial Marines isn’t just infuriating because it was bad. It’s infuriating because players were promised so much more and received so very little. The glitches included the usual stuff, but worst of all was the AI. Namely...it didn’t work. The game upon release was so broken that players could beat the whole thing without ever firing a bullet. For an FPS game featuring some of the most terrifying creatures ever conceived, that’s...pretty bad.
4
SimCity is a classic gaming franchise that, in 2013, saw a relaunch that...failed to work on release. The game was required to remain always online for...reasons. This was already inconvenient and frustrating, made only worse when the servers upon launch didn’t actually work. This meant that many players for the first several days of release couldn’t access the game. This was made all the more frustrating when it became increasingly apparent that SimCity’s always-online function was entirely unnecessary. The game itself was good, but what good’s a great game if you can’t play it?
5
Sonic the Hedgehog – also known as Sonic ‘06 – is infamous. The game was rushed for a holiday release, emerging essentially unfinished and borderline unplayable. On top of the sloppy controls and bad physics, characters would regularly slide through stages and be caught in endless loops where they’d get hit, automatically absorb a ring, get damaged again, only to repeat. The game was so poorly created that it forever altered the trajectory of the Sonic franchise. It would’ve been known as the worst game in the franchise…
6
...until Sonic Boom came out, showing that Sonic ‘06 wasn’t a one-off mistake. Sonic Boom proved to make the same core mistake the producers for Sonic ‘06 made – rushing the game despite developers trying to make something new using new, unfamiliar systems. The result is a nightmare. Levels load at random. A glitch made it possible for Knuckles to jump over entire overworld maps. Textures didn’t load. The physics didn’t work. By all accounts, Sonic Boom was the worst game in the entire series. By a mile.
7
Hidden & Dangerous is an often forgotten WWII shooter from the 90s. While the game is fondly remembered, many players forget the game-breaking glitches from its early release. Among them, players could, while driving in vehicles, increase in size so dramatically they couldn’t fit through tunnels, making it impossible to progress. Additionally, if you ran out of ammo, you might happen to slip through the floor and disappear into the ether below. The game was patched, but on release, it was broken.
8
Battlefield 4, like many high-profile video games, had issues on launch. However, few of these launches had the catastrophic glitches that Battlefield 4 had. Among the numerous issues with the game, the campaign for this game would sometimes just delete your saved file. All progress made? Gone. The issue was entirely thanks to DICE, who stepped in to fix the glitch with a patch, but that was one of many quality of life glitches throughout the game. Crashes, texture issues – tons of issues that needed patching pronto.
9
Fallout 76 is one of the biggest catastrophic launch failures in modern video game history – save, perhaps, for the next game. To list the numerous glitches in Fallout 76 would take a list in and of itself. Resources would disappear. Game servers would crash if you fired three nukes at once. There were glitches that had been patched out of prior Fallout games present in this one because they used the original programming without applying the necessary patches. The game was just a colossal mess that somehow never recovered, even as patches fixed some glitches.
10
Cyberpunk 2077 is a modern video game tragedy. It is a monument to CD Projekt Red’s hubris and crunch to get a game out before it was ready. The game was almost entirely unplayable on anything but high-end PCs. The game lacked textures, would spawn you outside the map, ran into game-crashing bugs, and in some cases, deleted your saved files if you accumulated save files over a certain size. The early patches have attempted to salvage the game, though it remains to be seen if CD Projekt Red can even fix the game-breaking glitches littered throughout this release, or if it’s just too late.
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