Most unstable games

[Elfgore]

Some games just seem to be held together by nothing more than duct tape and wire and the slightest glance will cause it to lock-up, crash, or completely bring your system to a halt. Time to talk about the worse of the worst.

Mine is The Sims 3. This game runs like complete ass on my computer, I'm unsure if it does for others, but mine is terrible. I'm lucky to get thirty minutes of game time before the game hard crashes. Mods that are suppose to fix it don't help, EA technical supports answer was to literally bring this game over to Origin[footnote]No, I'm not shitting you. They said that and logging into the Sims network while playing would lower crashes. You can a guess how both of those worked out.[/footnote], and let's not forget that I've sunk probably a hundred dollars into a game that I can barely play. I'm pretty sure even if I just glance at it wrong, the game will go down in flames.

Notable mentions; The Sims: Medieval, which would hard crash my entire computer. Broforce, as if you pause during one of their cutscenes, the game just freaks the fuck out. Stranglehold, which was so epic that it couldn't run it correctly on the PS3.

So let's hear all of your unstable game horror stories.

 

[Foolery]

Vanilla Fallout 3 and New Vegas are still pretty bleh with crashes to desktop years after release. But they can be made relatively stable with mods, so eh. I'm looking forward to Fallout 4, but also thinking of holding off until a GOTY edition is out with all the DLC.

 

[Barbas]

Fallout New Vegas, until I can get it to run without constantly crashing and loading black textures around Primm. I think it has something to do with NMC's Texture Pack, though that's just a shot in the dark.

EDIT: Well I'll be an inebriated aardvark, it appears to be working. In that case, I'd have to say that I just don't know. :,<

 

[Dalek Caan]

Vanilla Minecraft on PC has never worked for me. I can get Fallout, NV and a lot of other games to work but the second I try that game on my Laptop I get stuttering, crashes and sometimes my Laptop completely locks up. It's even worse since I could actually play it on my old non-gaming PC but on my Gaming Laptop it refuses to work.

 

[Morgoth780]

Well once I started modding Skyrim to death it just crashes such an insane amount that I give up and play other games.

Vanilla games though... Battlefield 4/hardline have given me a fair number of crashes, not so much lately though.

 

[Aerosteam]

(Desperately trying to not to say Fallout 3/New Vegas.)

I usually play games which are at least a year old, so it'll have patches to fix it since launch (and it's heavily discounted). Although there was the one bug I encountered earlier this year when I was playing Dead Space. An enemy didn't spawn at all (where you get the plasma cutter, really early in the game) and an invisible wall was blocking my progression.

I still haven't continued the game from that point...

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Amnesia a machine for pigs.
Absolutely love the game, but its a flip of a coin if loading screen doesn't just crash the game.
Also saves simply don't work. I just load from game checkpoints because the saves never actually "save" at all.

 

[Thunderous Cacophony]

For me, the crown is taken by the Total War series. I think it's literally impossible for Creative Assembly to make a game that works at launch, or about 4 months afterwards, or possibly ever. They have a nasty habit of releasing something that's totally broken, patching it until it mostly works, then abandoning it for the next game.

Fallout 3 and NV have problems with late-game saves, but in Total War games you both play campaigns for much longer than a Fallout playthrough (my average Medieval campaign lasted more than 100 hours), and you are expected to play it over and over.

 

[Private Custard]

Nothing can beat Morrowind on XBox. Nothing!

A game so unstable, even having slightly too many save files could tip it over the edge!

 

[Veldel]

KOTOR on Xbox that god damn crash in tatootine has done it's share of anger for me

 

[KarmaTheAlligator]

Fallout 3 (I think we all know the stories by now), New Vegas (had a weird bug where my character's head would explode for no reason after a while, making it literally unplayable) and Skyrim (where the main quest wouldn't continue because some line of dialogue wouldn't load, amongst other things). All these can be made OK with mods, but it's still a disgrace that the were shipped in the state they were in.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Payday 2, it has terrible optimization and is just generally coded very poorly.

I've had the game crash countless times, at one point for a few months my steam overlay stopped working with the game (meaning I couldn't send game invites) I have friends who have constant audio problems with the game (one of my friends can't hear cloakers if he's hosting the game), and on top of all of this I used to get really bad micro-stutter in the game because the game's shadow-map is way too huge and there is no in-game way to change it, so the game was basically unplayable without certain mods.

Despite all this I have over 300 hours clocked in the game.

What can I say, it's a really poorly stitched together piece of crap of a game, but it's an incredibly fun and addicting poorly stitched together piece of crap of a game.

 

[fix-the-spade]

SOLDNER

I remember playing SOLDNER very fondly, it was one of the earlier online, combined arms multiplayer game in the vein that Battlefield would come to dominate. However, that wasn't why you played it, you played it to see who could stay on the longest before falling victim to one of the myriad ways it could break or bug out.

It wasn't uncommon to win a round simply by having the enemy team crash to desktop first, then you would crash to desktop between rounds and the whole hilarious cycle would start again. Or the bots would get into infinite death loops.

Good times, the community project mod fixed almost all the bugs and now it works, but it's just not the same.

 

[PurplePonyArcade]

I'm looking forward to Fallout 4, but also thinking of holding off until a GOTY edition is out with all the DLC.

At last! Another intelligent person!

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Nothing can beat Morrowind on XBox. Nothing!

A game so unstable, even having slightly too many save files could tip it over the edge!

Skyrim on PS3. If you play the game too long after a while you use up all the game's memory and the game becomes unplayable.

http://kotaku.com/5865381/trying-to-explain-skyrims-awful-ps3-lag

 

[Poetic Nova]

Skyrim.

During my now 72+ hours blind playthrough it crashed no less than 6 times, 4 times during loading screens and twice during a long quest at obnoxious moments.

Saints Row 4.

This game managed to crash 4 times in around 30 hours, all randomly during gameplay.

Nothing can beat Morrowind on XBox. Nothing!

A game so unstable, even having slightly too many save files could tip it over the edge!

Skyrim on PS3. If you play the game too long after a while you use up all the game's memory and the game becomes unplayable.

http://kotaku.com/5865381/trying-to-explain-skyrims-awful-ps3-lag

That got fixed over a year ago. Atleast, the copy I have runs mostly fine, minus the described crashes. However, if it is a article written during last year, then I'm puzzled. I cannot view the sites content (most likely due to not using Flash).

 

[silver wolf009]

I don't get all these people pointing to Fallout 3, New Vegas, and Skyrim. I mean, yeah, they're not exactly the best optimized, but I've never known them to be really crash happen. New Vegas was the worst offender, and that was on predictable criteria, more a matter of crashing hard, instead of crashing often.

As for the most unstable game I can think of, I'm going to have to throw my vote in for Battlefield Hardline. I just couldn't get it to work for me, at least on the 360.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

Halo 2 felt like a beta to me. If you played by the rules and went where you were supposed to, the game played well enough. If you decided to try exploring though, you could skip chunks of levels and wind up outside of the game itself. I wouldn't say it was held together by string and prayer but it was definitely a sad, sloppy, partially complete way to sell more Halo multiplayer and make Xbox Live marketable.

Fable 3 is another game that felt like it wasn't meant to be a 360 game...what's the point of an exclusive that isn't optimized to the only console it launches on? The main issue with that game is the near constant frame-rate drops and, screen tearing. Then you do a job mini-game and get to enjoy Fable 3 in glorious 5-frames-within-2-seconds-or-so.

 

[mysecondlife]

KOTOR 2. That game took me forever to run on my computer. It would freeze up after the character creation screen. Oh my goodness...

 

[Xeros]

True Crime: New York City was a bug-infested mess. Phasing through geometry, framerates choking on everything and nothing, cutscene transitions either crashing the game, or skipping the scene entirely, etc. Yet, for all of its faults, that game was so much damn fun I could forgive every single of them.