Are Glitches Always Fun to You?

Something Amyss

Aswyng and Amyss
Dec 3, 2008
24,759
0
0
The reason I'm thinking about this: today my friends and I booted up Tom Clancy's I Forget the Whole Name Wildlands and played the story mode for the first time in a while because there were new rewards for doing a special story mission. The mission was overall pretty easy, but there's this one point where we kept getting glitched. There's a part where you have to fly a helicopter down a specific path and there's a small fight at the end.

First time we went through, I crashed into something as it spawned in my path. I think they said it was a light pole, but I didn't see it so much as ka-CHUNK into it. Mission failed, we all laughed.

The second time, and each subsequent time, there was a problem with the helicopters at the end not spawning, spawning but not counting as enemies, or just the missiles without the helicopters. The first time, it was sort of funny, we laughed. By the fourth or fifth time...it wasn't really all that amusing anymore. In fact, we only beat this portion because the game...decided the helicopters were gone. A glitch saved us for reasons.

It got me thinking about the circumstances in which glitches are funny. It wasn't simply that we failed, for example, because it was funny the first time we got spawn-crushed and the first time that we were fighting non-helicopters. Glitches usually amuse us, and we've gone out of our way to recreate ones in the past if we have any idea what happened.

The factors that tipped the scales for me are mostly repetition and obstruction. This glitch was a constant impediment to our progress, specifically on a mission with a time-limited reward, which probably didn't help either.

Dying to a random spawn or having some physics glitch blast you off like Team Rocket is usually funny to me. There's an argument that these are issues of game breakage, but I think most of us have grown used t the occasional weird act, especially in open-world games.

On the other side of the coin, I've known people who just seem to like the chaos and could probably be shot down by invisible helos a hundred times and still be entertained. I get there are people who exist on both sides of it, but I'm curious.

As I said, I guess my cutoff point is when something become a routine obstacle, specifically a seemingly unpassable one. For me, bugs that don't stp the game are fun, and even bugs that do it like, once are more entertaining than the system crashing or whatever, but by the time it becomes routine, it might as well be hard-locking my console/desktop.

How frequent it is and how much it affects things are also factors. Wildlands sometimes bugs out and won't let you use standard equipment like your drones, binoculars, or guns, and those are all problems. Failing a mission and restarting at a checkpoint is almost trivial compared to closing out the game and rejoining a lobby to use your gun in a shooter. And I guess being ridiculous helps...invisible helicopters are at least entertaining, while not being able to use binoculars doesn't have the same fun factor for me.

TL;DR what's your threshold for bugs and glitches?
 

Neurotic Void Melody

Bound to escape
Legacy
Jul 15, 2013
4,953
6
13
It does seem to be the progress halting glitches that kill any potential fun mainly. Or any that threaten to undo any particularly substantial chunk of time already invested into the game or get you stuck in a perpetual loop. Though with good friends it probably does help a lot with those games for sursies. Weird, unique glitches are usually the fun ones.

Throughout my time in Red Dead 2 there were a couple that occurred so insignificant that they were mildly amusing, just unexpected brief curiosities mostly. Apart from the odd moments where my horse felt it had to run away from me everytime I tried to get close. I didn't even treat Lieutenant Horseylicks bad! Goddamn drama queen.

However, some games that feel high stress can make glitches all the worse, like lately been going through Shadow of War (no lootboxes means it fair game now)... it's regularly infuriating with its' untrustworthy fiddly movement mechanics that regularly get me stuck on a completely innocent ledge as my stoic self-insert fanfic character stares paralysed at the orc captain winding up for his killer blow, threatening to undo all that time put into removing the other fort captains in preparation for a fort seige as they all get replaced by newer, higher level bumblecunts to worry about instead.
There's also the maps that are designed with Rocky corners where the rocks are below the protag's knees, but even though he can climb every other structure in the world with ease, like fuck can he barely entertain the notion of effortlessly hopping over those tiny bastards! Rather, instead, he prefers to get stuck on the invisible wall they weakly represent. While I'm being chased by angry orcs of course! Grrr.

[small]"Annnd breathe"[/small]

So yeah, issues like that are far less enjoyable and one of many reasons that The Surge will probably never be owned by me. "SoulsBorne but with glitches" sounds like the worst thing for a person who values their diminishing time on this cursed planet of delicious humans.
 
Mar 30, 2010
3,785
0
0
If they have no real consequence I can usually see the funny side, but if they actually screw up a part of the game I can't stand 'em. I shall provide an example from RDR2:

1)You get off your horse in town only to have the horse glitch out, teleport 100ft up into the air and fall to earth squashing a random passer-by which alerts the sheriff who promptly starts shooting at your dead horse. Hilarious, could watch shit like this all day.

2)You get off your horse in town only to have the horse glitch out, teleport 100ft up into the air and fall to earth squashing a random passer-by which alerts the sheriff and fails your current mission forcing you to restart. Annoying as hell, can't be doing with that crap.
 

CaitSeith

Formely Gone Gonzo
Legacy
Jun 30, 2014
5,343
358
88
It's difficult to pinpoint; but mostly, when the glitch gets in the way of the game's selling point, it crosses the line. Game-breaking glitches and glitches that trap you are the most obvious (both FFXV and Dark Souls 3 have one of the latter).
 

the December King

Member
Legacy
Mar 3, 2010
1,580
1
3
I still enjoy playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R games, so I have a pretty high threshold for glitches, I reckon.

I once shot the G Man in Half Life 2 from across the bay, about halfway through Highway 17. I didn't think anything would really come of it, I was just frustrated. There was this stationary binocular thinggy, and I just lined up the shot with the .357...

When I got over to the lighthouse, he was dead, his body on the floor, and the game had spawned two inert models of the rebel commander over top of each other, cycling through their idle poses, and I couldn't continue the mission because he/they wouldn't initiate his/their dialogue.

I was thrilled! It was amazing to know I had offed the G man... smug prick.
 

Pyrian

Hat Man
Legacy
Jul 8, 2011
1,399
8
13
San Diego, CA
Country
US
Gender
Male
I do not ever like the glitches.
They do not put me in stitches.

I want no glitches in my game.
I find they're always a big pain.

No more bugs, is that too far?
Well get your QA up to par.
 

Something Amyss

Aswyng and Amyss
Dec 3, 2008
24,759
0
0
MrCalavera said:
They stop being funny once developers accept them as part of their "charm"[footnote]or "brand"[/footnote].
Yeeeeeeah. Not big when they actually start to market bugginess. Our game is broken...buy it!

Pyrian said:
I do not ever like the glitches.
They do not put me in stitches.

I want no glitches in my game.
I find they're always a big pain.

No more bugs, is that too far?
Well get your QA up to par.
Give us six days, and we'll make your heart grow three sizes!

Grouchy Imp said:
2)You get off your horse in town only to have the horse glitch out, teleport 100ft up into the air and fall to earth squashing a random passer-by which alerts the sheriff and fails your current mission forcing you to restart. Annoying as hell, can't be doing with that crap.
That one would also piss me off, but mostly because it's a Rockstar game and probably means 30+ minutes of riding back from the last checkpoint (if there even is one).
 

Squilookle

New member
Nov 6, 2008
3,584
0
0
When a glitch is:

a) infrequent
b) ludicrous
c) repeatable by performing a certain out-of-the-way action

Then it's usually great. When a glitch:

d) traps the player's movement
e) renders progress impossible no matter what the player does to avoid it
f) is exploitable in multiplayer

Then it usually sucks.

Also I think it's great when a company adopts a glitch into a series if it's established the player base already likes it. For example, the 'skiing' glitch utterly transformed Tribes, and was implemented as a core feature in Tribes 2 and onward, and everyone rejoiced. More recently, a glitch prevented any bullet whatsoever from penetrating the frying pan in the otherwise fairly realistic PUBG, and the playerbase liked it so much that to this day you can still wield it as a makeshift shield or wear it as butt-armour.

And everyone rejoiced.
 

Zeraki

WHAT AM I FIGHTING FOOOOOOOOR!?
Legacy
Feb 9, 2009
1,615
45
53
New Jersey
Country
United States
Gender
Male
MrCalavera said:
They stop being funny once developers accept them as part of their "charm"[footnote]or "brand"[/footnote].
But enough about Bethesda.

In all seriousness I don't mind glitches as much as long as they're not the game breaking kind. They can be really fun to mess around with, like the plethora of glitches in Ocarina of Time for instance. The developers of the 3DS remake liked some of the glitches so much they actually fought to have them kept in and only fixed the game breaking ones.
 

skywolfblue

New member
Jul 17, 2011
1,514
0
0
I have a low tolerance for glitches.

I have played glitchy games like Skyrim, but the glitches were a definite detractor. Skyrim never makes it into my favorites because of all the flaws. Horizon Zero Dawn on the other hand has virtually no glitches, proof that open-world games can be made right. Bethesda has no excuse.

MrCalavera said:
They stop being funny once developers accept them as part of their "charm"[footnote]or "brand"[/footnote].
That.
 

Chewster

It's yer man Chewy here!
Apr 24, 2008
1,050
0
0
Depends. If they cause random, amusing chaos and are an infrequent occurrence, sure.

If they corrupt your save or uninstall the game from your computer, not so much.
 

Trunkage

Nascent Orca
Legacy
Jun 21, 2012
8,684
2,879
118
Brisbane
Gender
Cyborg
Crashing to desktop is a no. Looking at you Witcher 3. It definitely exacerbates any flaws the game has.

A floating bear, literally the one of two bugs I had for 100 hrs of Fallout 4 was funny
 

JCAll

New member
Oct 12, 2011
434
0
0
Glitches are never funny for me. They can be useful sometimes, if you can exploit them for an advantage, exp/items/damage/etc, but they're never really fun.

I fall through the ground in games regularly anymore, destroying my immersion in the game world. I had to stop Borderlands 2 because the next part of a quest just didn't spawn and the game was over, begin over from the start I guess. Going all the way back to the NES, sprite flickering was important part of getting the games running but made them basically unplayable. Glitches just suck.