It’s something that many take for granted these days, but there was a time not too long ago when consoles couldn’t connect to the internet. The idea of having no online gaming and no DLC may sound terrible to some, but there was actually one big benefit of consoles being offline. Developers actually had to finish their games before releasing them.
The ‘release now, patch later’ mentality began to creep in shortly after online gaming on consoles became popular and has only gotten worse over the years. Long gone are the days of proper play-testing with consumers now expecting to effectively do so themselves. Cyberpunk 2077 may be the latest big release to be riddled with bugs, but it is by no means the only one nor is it likely to be the last.
10 Cyberpunk 2077
It’s amazing how many publications gave Cyberpunk 2077 a perfect score on PC even in spite of its many bugs. Few reviewers could excuse the dumpster fire that is the console port though. On next-gen consoles the game doesn’t run too badly, but on the base PS4 it’s one of the buggiest games on the system. It’s not quite Big Rigs bad, but it’s not far from it.
The game’s performance led to countless refund requests which CDPR redirected to Sony. Renowned for their tough stance on refunds, even they could see that the game should never have been sold in its current state and took the unprecedented step of pulling it from the PlayStation Store completely. It will no doubt return once CDPR gets its act together, but it’s a strong message nonetheless and one that will hopefully discourage other developers from releasing their games before they are finished.
9 Fallout 4
Bethesda games are notorious for their bugs and glitches and Fallout 4 had more than its fair share. The game would randomly crash at fairly regular intervals and some of the visual glitches were really quite disturbing. For some players though, this was only the tip of the iceberg.
Due to an issue relating to save files, certain players could not visit a certain part of the map without the game crashing — and it wasn’t an optional, out-of-the-way area, either. These crashes prevented affected players from completing one of the game’s penultimate quests, leaving them unable to complete the game. Bethesda did eventually release a patch that fixed the issue, but it took nearly a month to arrive.
8 Shenmue 1 & 2
The first two Shenmue games were released in an era where patching a game post-release just wasn’t an option. As such, they both ran perfectly. Sadly, however, the same cannot be said of the HD remasters that were released a few years ago. To say that it was a little messy would be putting it nicely.
A lot of the games’ music sounded terrible when compared to the original tracks, with some of the tracks in Shenmue 2 being particularly bad. The most frustrating issue, however, affected the games’ cut-scenes. While not all were affected, the camera would regularly glitch out or display nothing but a black screen as they played out which completely ruined the immersion and the overall experience.
7 No Man’s Sky
To No Man Sky‘s credit, it was a lot more stable than some of the other glitchy games released on the PlayStation 4 with very few instances of crashes reported. The problem, however, aside from many of the features that had been promised not being included, was that the game was incredibly buggy.
It would be easy to look at some of these bugs now and say they were actually quite humorous, but those who had just shelled out $60 for an incomplete game didn’t see the funny side. The result was thousands of players requested refunds in the window immediately after the game’s release and sales grinding to a halt. Thankfully, not only have these bugs now been fixed, but all of the missing features have been added too.
6 Titan Quest
Missing rewards, incomplete text files, and broken geometry were just some of the many bugs that afflicted Titan Quest at the time of its release. It’s certainly gotten a lot better since then, but it still has its fair share of issues even now, more than two years and countless patches later.
Considering the age of the original game it’s perhaps not too surprising that things didn’t go entirely to plan, but that made it no less frustrating for players. The experience has gradually improved though, and in its current state, it’s able to provide quite an enjoyable experience — even in spite of the occasional bug or glitch.
5 Skyrim
One would expect that five years would be more than enough time for a developer to fix the bugs in their game. Sadly, however, this is Bethesda that we’re talking about here. Skyrim is arguably the developer’s most bug-ridden game and remains so to this day. While the bugs in the original release came as little surprise to most players though, that some of them were still present in the PS4 release that came five years later was pretty shocking.
Four years on and there are still plenty of bugs and exploits in the game including item duplication, floating animals and NPCs, and sporadic crashes. Luckily for Bethesda, most players are willing to overlook these issues due to it being one of the greatest games ever made. It also helps that many of them can actually be used to the player’s advantage.
4 The Evil Within 2
Strangely, several of the bugs that affected The Evil Within 2 only cropped up on the PS4 version of the game, suggesting that the team at Tango Gameworks did most of their play-testing on the Xbox One version. As with Cyberpunk 2077, the game did run a lot smoother on the PS4 Pro than it did on the base PS4, but even then, it was far from the perfect experience.
There were a few little problems here and there, but the game’s biggest issue was random crashes, which seemed to occur mainly at certain points throughout the main story. Saving regularly helped to mitigate the damage that they caused, but still resulted in players having to repeat sections of the game multiple times. Later patches improved stability, but they were unable to erase players’ frustrations.
3 Battlefield 4
Although the single-player campaign of Battlefield 4 was fairly solid at launch, its multiplayer mode was a real mess. Considering that, as with the Call of Duty games, this is a series that many people play strictly for its fantastic multiplayer experience, this was quite a big problem.
Among other things, players found ways to get under the map, become invisible, and even clip through certain walls. DICE has since patched out some of the more game-breaking issues but plenty of problems still remain, and given that the game is now seven years old, they’ll likely never be fixed.
2 WWE 2K20
WWE games have always had problems with glitches, but WWE 2K20 was one of the most visually jarring titles not just in the history of the series, but the very history of gaming. With Yuke’s no longer at the wheel, Visual Concepts struggled to whip the game into a passable state and released it with some of the funniest and most frustrating glitches ever seen.
Interestingly, reviewers didn’t give the developer the benefit of the doubt as they might have done with a larger studio — as evidenced by the game’s average rating sitting at just 43% on Metacritic. It’s hard to argue too much with that assessment really, especially as the game doesn’t have too many notable redeeming qualities.
1 Assassin’s Creed Unity
The Assassin’s Creed series is no stranger to the world of bugs and glitches either, but Assassin’s Creed Unity took the franchise to a new low. One of the more noticeable issues was that the character models would regularly glitch out during cut-scenes, which led to some truly terrifying imagery. There was more to come, though.
The game would occasionally place random NPCs in the foreground of cut-scenes who would continue with their scripted dialogue. Perhaps due to their proximity to the camera, they were significantly louder than the game’s main characters and so completely drowned them out making it nearly impossible to follow the story. Ubisoft did get on top of some of the issues after a few months, but for many players, the patches came far too late.
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