The 8 Most Broken Games Ever Released

Although developers try to limit them as much as possible, bugs and glitches are simply a part of gaming. It doesn’t matter how much quality control or beta testing a title goes through. There will always be some issues that are missed by programmers. Of course, that’s not to say that players have to accept broken games that are unplayable messes. (Just ask Sony, who was recently fined $2.4 million for refusing to refund faulty games.)

Modern hardware now means that studios can put out patches to update games and fix any problems post-launch. One consequence of this is that more and more games are now releasing with more issues than is acceptable. As developers believe they can fix releases later, they are more likely to make them available in an unfinished state. The pressure of crunch and a desire to release games as quickly to possible means that more broken titles are likely.

But some games are released with so many problems that it truly boggles the mind. Here are the eight most broken games ever released.

Battlefield 4

Over the last decade or so, the Battlefield series has been the only real competition to Call of Duty. While EA’s first-person shooter series had some issues in the past, Battlefield 4 took them to a new level of incompetence. The 2013 game launched in a state that was near unplayable. Online matches would constantly crash, while performance issues meant that the frame rate would drop frequently. Even worse was the fact that error codes and crash screens were commonplace. These problems persisted for months after release, with dozens of patches needed to solve the issues.

Fallout: New Vegas

Bethesda has a reputation for releasing games that contain many bugs. In fact, practically every title they have released has been criticized for the numerous glitches they have. But none of them more so than Fallout: New Vegas. The 2010 Obsidian-developed RPG became infamous for technical issues. These ranged from textures not loading, character models getting stuck, and missions not updating. There was also a huge problem with crashes and load times. Worst of all was the fact that the save files would often become corrupted. The end result was that players had to restart and lose hours of progress.