Most unstable games

[Cowabungaa]

That'd be my PS3 copy of Fallout New Vegas, as I'll explain below, but that's not exactly an original answer.

I'll give my runner-up instead; Dark Messiah Of Might And Magic. What made this gem unplayable was insistent memory leakage leading to a slow degeneration of the framerate right up into single digits after about 5-10 minutes of play. A damn shame too as I really liked what the game was all about, and the combat felt pretty sweet.

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.

And that's the PC version, imagine the launch version on the PS3. It was pretty much unplayable, making me hate the game furiously until I bought it cheaply for the DLC during a Steam Sale on PC.

I suppose it was the perfect storm combination of having the Gamebryo engine, Obsidian working on it and most importantly Obsidian being rushed by the publisher. It was doomed to end up with this kind of stuff:


Yet, somehow, that kind of stuff adds to the charm of it.

Unlike the constant crashing and save file corruption I had on the PS3, that is. Also the weird glitched textures that obscured the entire screen made shoot-outs...a challenge, you could say.

 

[FPLOON]

Sonic 06 for the PS3... You would think that month delay from the 360 release would have been "slightly" better, right?

Other than that, the Red Baron Pizza PC game... Who even play-tested that piece of shit, especially when it crashes once the first plane texture pops up on screen?

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

Any online PC game.

 

[gigastar]

Warframe on consoles.

Dont own either one, but i see people complaining about all sorts of crashes and performance issues on the official forums.

And the PC version can be that way as well, especially after a major update.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

In terms of games I actually played, Ultima IX had some 100+ game breaking bugs in the game at launch, some of which would irrevocably break the plot and then not be discovered for tens of hours. The game eventually got a patch fixing most of them, but it introduced another 60+ new ones.

For games I haven't played, it's hard (if not impossible) to top the remake of the old gold box classic Pool of Radiance. If you installed it in any other directory than the recommended one, and then attempted to later uninstall it, it would literally format your hard drive.

 

[Silence]

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.

Do you have FNV4GB ? I have the texture pack, this, and NVAC (anti-crash mod) and I literally had no crashes after I installed the mods.

But yes, vanilla it would probably be this game.


... Oh, and Kotor 2, until I fixed it.

 

[sneakypenguin]

Stalker granted I only ever played the CoP with the big fix mod idr what its called but damn that game was buggy. So awesome though. Everything wrong and right with pc gaming all at the same time.

 

[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.

Do you have FNV4GB ? I have the texture pack, this, and NVAC (anti-crash mod) and I literally had no crashes after I installed the mods.

But yes, vanilla it would probably be this game.


... Oh, and Kotor 2, until I fixed it.

I sure do. What load order do you have them in? I use Mod Organizer, the two-part medium version of the Texture Pack, and the Archive Invalidation .bsa from the New Vegas Nexus. I also use LOOT to set the load order before running the game (NVSE) from Mod Organizer.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

as of this past week, diablo II, I can't remember the specifics but newer graphics cards don't have the same *something* that older ones did, so the game literally won't run unless you download this patcher online that forces the game to simply use what you downloaded instead (runs perfect after that, but no matter WHAT you do before that, it won't do a damn thing.) of the boss ass stuff you have on your graphics card.

unless you knew to google-fu this problem I could see someone getting very frustrated with this problem.

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.

i'm almost positive that this is a fact with alot of laptops for minecraft, (I can't remember, does minecraft run on java? for some reason that's popping into my head) as pretty much everyone I know who used to play minecraft during lectures (myself included) it ran like ass for the most part and would cook your laptop pretty good.

 

[Silence]

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.

Do you have FNV4GB ? I have the texture pack, this, and NVAC (anti-crash mod) and I literally had no crashes after I installed the mods.

But yes, vanilla it would probably be this game.


... Oh, and Kotor 2, until I fixed it.

I sure do. What load order do you have them in? I use Mod Organizer, the two-part medium version of the Texture Pack, and the Archive Invalidation .bsa from the New Vegas Nexus. I also use LOOT to set the load order before running the game (NVSE) from Mod Organizer.

I start the game from the fnv4gb.exe. Otherwise I use the Nexus Mod Manager, and it did somehow not crash with no particular load order. Hmm.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

If you installed it in any other directory than the recommended one, and then attempted to later uninstall it, it would literally format your hard drive.

whutttt.

how the hell can a game get permission to do that? considering most game directories point you to the C drive, how can it format windows without your computer going batshit insane for the attempt to do that?


it's a damn good thing that game wasn't released in the past 15 years, I'm sure they would've been sued into oblivion for literally breaking people's computers that way.

 

[Aesir23]

Anything made by Bethesda Game Studios but Skyrim really takes the cake. I managed to change things around so that it's not so bad but I remember when it was crashing on me once per hour. Not a fun time and, if I'm going to be honest, it makes me want to stay about as far from Bethesda developed games as possible.

 

[Erttheking]

As the "proud" owner of a mac, I own several games that I never managed to get fucking working. Poker Night at the Inventory and Mercenary Kings comes to mind.

 

[lacktheknack]

For games I haven't played, it's hard (if not impossible) to top the remake of the old gold box classic Pool of Radiance. If you installed it in any other directory than the recommended one, and then attempted to later uninstall it, it would literally format your hard drive.

Well, if the viruses start taking out things like gdisk and Windows Repair, disallowing for a format, we'll have our secret atomic bomb.

 

[teqrevisited]

Maybe it's gotten better now but I remember Garry's Mod v10. If you did even the slightest thing that the engine didn't like you'd be presented with "hl2.exe has stopped working".

Chivalry, which was coded by monkeys, crashes for absolutely no reason. A morning star smashing someone's head can cause around half of the clients connected to the server to crash to desktop. Joining servers sometimes results in joining a fog-filled void, populated by a single grey cube. Newer maps drop more frames than a glazier with greasy hands. Servers' latency can also suddenly double and then continue to increase until the server resets or the map changes. The list goes on.

 

[MeatMachine]

PAYDAY 2. When it works, its a lot of fun, but there are a stupid amount of problems with it. Try playing a stealth mission in a pub and count on your fingers how many seconds you last before someone's desync gets them caught.

Hero Academy. Almost all of the time, after submitting a turn, the game freezes, then says it cannot connect to the server. For some reason, it almost always goes through seconds later, but the error message stays up.

Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Game crashes during cutscenes that cause my whole desktop to turn inside out. For some reason, this has ONLY happened since the release of the new patch earlier this week.

Fallout: New Vegas. Though it's actually run totally fine on my laptop and desktop for the past few years, when it first came out... even people who'd otherwise never heard of the game had heard of its legendary bugs and glitches.

Skyrim.

 

[Zetatrain]

Wolfenstein: The New Order (PC)
-While I have yet to experience a crash the game's fps is wildly inconsistent thanks to the stupid V-ram problem. Then there is the slow motion bug which happens when you alt-tab. Then there are times when it just seems to happen at random though it might be tied to the in game cut-scenes.

The Witcher 2 (PC)
-There is a bug that causes the game to crash when you try to save, load, or even delete files. Every time you save, load, or delete a file you are greatly increasing the game's chance of crashing the next time you take one of those actions. Also the more save files you have the longer it takes the game to save, load, or delete. This part would not be much of a problem if the game actually allowed me to override previous save files. And if you accumulate too many save files the game will crash as soon as you try to boot it up.

Then there are smaller things like audio cutting out and lines of dialogue being skipped. I'm guessing I'm in a small minority experiencing all of these bugs, because there is no way the game would have gotten so much praise during its release if a significant chunk of the users were getting them.

Honorable Mentions

Fallout: New Vegas (XB360)
-Yeah it may be a surprise that this is only an honorable mention, but my experience was never nearly as bad as what most people say and even compared to the two games I listed above it wasn't as bad. Sure there were plenty of glitches in the game but these were usually ones that I could ignore. Once in awhile I would have to reload cause a mission didn't play out the way it was suppose to or the AI just went completely bonkers, but those were rare for me. And of course it did freeze here and there, but once again it didn't happen a lot. Still, it was buggier than the average game I played so I'm giving it an honorable mention.

Skyrim (XB360)
-Pretty much the same story as New Vegas except with less frequency and usually with more hilarious results.

 

[Kingjackl]

I've been having a lot of trouble with Wolfenstein: The New Order. The PC port clearly has issues, but when I play for more than 2 hours, it tends to hang quite bad, even on low settings.

 

[Mechamorph]

I am going to be disingenuous and state "any game you care to name that you attempt to run on Windows ME". I challenge anyone that has extensively used that horrible OS to prove me wrong.

 

[Mike Richards]

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.

To be fair, I've put some serious time into Alien: Isolation and I haven't had a single thing go wrong with it. Picked it up only like a month or so after launch too. Maybe they're just really bad at working with other people's engines? I have no idea what Total War runs on, so... *shrugs*

That being said I seem to have pretty good luck with things. Hell even AC: Unity behaves for me. The most unstable thing I can think of off the top of my head that I've personally played is probably Oblivion modded to hell and back on a pretty crappy machine. Now running on my current vastly superior box and modded a bit more sensibly I can't say I've really had any issues, same with the rest of Bethesda's line.

There's a terrible lack of Big Rigs on this thread though. I'm not saying it should take the crown necessarily, but we have to at least acknowledge its incredible achievements.