The Game-Ending Bug Thread

Tiemler

Just a place to catalog all the man-hours lost to bugged save systems, glitches that strand you unable to complete the game, or games that just didn't play nice with your memory card.

My earliest experience with this particular circle of hell was in Wasteland. Fishing around in the sewers earned me the wrong part, so I couldn't repair my robot or go take out the military base. Game over, fuck you for playing. Of course, we're talking about Wasteland. I started over, level-grinding a new bunch of losers into elite commandos who can eat Terminators and shit the little robots from Batteries Not Included. And finally beat the game. But I'm still bitter about it.

More recently, I've lost hours of progress in Gun for the PS2 because I saved in a section where, if you manage to get killed, the game leaves you with no way to retrieve your weapons and continue. You have to kill a specific enemy to get them back, and when you reload or retry, the guy is already dead and his body removed. Yet another reason to despise any design team that uses the tired old "captured and disarmed" level in a shooter to force the player into using otherwise boring and lame weapons.

Sure, I could've avoided some of these problems by duplicating my saves constantly to another memory card. Unfortunately, this is a fair amount of trouble in many games, and most do not have such glaring quality-control issues. So I get complacent, and occasionally suffer for it.

What are some games that have burned you?

Gim

There was a point in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time where if you die after hitting a certain switch to lower something from overhead to continue the quest with, the switch would no longer work. The 71% glitch. It's the reason why you're supposed to have more than 1 save file and alternate between them. I had not been doing that and had to start back at around 30%. I was not pleased.

RidleySaria

Fortunately I haven't had such an experience. My brother in law told me about an RPG's poor design choice that got him stuck at the end of the game. It might have been a Phantasy Star game, or maybe Y's. The problem was that the last save point before the final boss was past a "point of no return". You can't go back, there's no enemies and no other way to level up. So if at that point you're not powerful enough to defeat the final boss, you're hosed. He wasn't too happy about that.

Gilder

I also haven't experienced any horrors like this but I do remember reading about one in Metroid Prime 2 I made sure to avoid. After you get a certain scope you have to hit these 4(?) switches in one room. I think the glitch was if you left the room without hitting all of them, when you came back one would never register as being pressed so the door would never open. And you had to open the door to proceed in the game.

TelMarine

Didnt happen to me, but in twilight princess if you saved at a particular part, quit, then reloaded, it was impossible to get out of the room and you were basically fucked out of what usually was over 20 hours.

FyreWulff

There was a glitch in Donkey Kong 64 near the very end (through the run through K Rool's hideout with the countdown) where if you decided to save some time and not grab a banana medal, it'd be transparent and uncollectable if you waited until after the countdown stopped to go back and collect it.

Considering that no other banana medal was programmed like that in the game, I fucking hate you Rare.

Blake T

Playing KotOR on the PC I restarted because I thought the game had a bug where I couldn't get off the Jedi Planet (I forget what it was called).

I could see all the planets in my navigation computer but no matter how many times I clicked on it I couldn't go to them, I figured it was a bug so I restarted. Again using the mouse I couldn't select dick.

Turns out you needed to use the arrow keys to select the planet you wanted to go to.

I was not impressed.

Woodroez

I stopped playing Oblivion about 40+ hours into it...not necessarily game-enders, but a combination that resulted in much frustration on my part. First, there's this puzzle in a Mage guild quest where you have to cast four different kinds of spells at a pillar to make it lift, revealing your path to completing the quest.

Well, I had been in the Mage's Guild by way of being an alchemist, rather that an actual mage, so I occasionally had to rely on scrolls. I had the scrolls and a couple of actual spells, but every time I did it, I alledgedly didn't do it "right". Whatever. I end up burning through all the scrolls unsuccessfully and fuck myself over by relying on auto-save and leaving the area.

Then, for some reason, if I fight bandits and there's a Imperial Gaurd nearby, guild will kick me out for stealing from guild members. WTF? I have absolutely no stolen property on my person even.

Fugitive

Blaket wrote: »

Playing KotOR on the PC I restarted because I thought the game had a bug where I couldn't get off the Jedi Planet (I forget what it was called).

I could see all the planets in my navigation computer but no matter how many times I clicked on it I couldn't go to them, I figured it was a bug so I restarted. Again using the mouse I couldn't select dick.

Turns out you needed to use the arrow keys to select the planet you wanted to go to.

I was not impressed.

It wasn't exactly "game-ending" as it was "console-resetting", but KotOR there was a part if you were Darkside where

if you tried to get Zaalbar to kill Mission using a mind trick, the game would restart

Not sure if it was a glitch or intentional since it was probably the most assholish thing you could do in the game.

Rhaka

Warrior Within. Loathed every minute of it, played it for story connections. 18 hours in, the savepoint before becoming human again, very close to the final boss, had to run to the store to get some medicine. Came back, what the hell, lost sand wraith form, can't return to the main hall. 18 hours wasted. As a result I've never played The Two Thrones

Meiz

Faxanadu and writing your mantra down.

Htown

X-Men Legends 2, there's a room late in the game where you have to destroy four statues in a certain order to proceed. If you leave the room before finishing the puzzle, all four statues become invincible forever and you cannot proceed further.

Dee Kae

Meiz wrote: »

Faxanadu and writing your mantra down.

Comon, it takes balls to write that down, every time.

DarkPrimus

Rhaka wrote: »

As a result I've never played The Two Thrones

Two Thrones tells you the canonical ending of WW right at the start anyway.

And of the three games it's the most polished, IMO. I never encountered any bugs.

Janson

Blaket wrote: »

Playing KotOR on the PC I restarted because I thought the game had a bug where I couldn't get off the Jedi Planet (I forget what it was called).

I could see all the planets in my navigation computer but no matter how many times I clicked on it I couldn't go to them, I figured it was a bug so I restarted. Again using the mouse I couldn't select dick.

Turns out you needed to use the arrow keys to select the planet you wanted to go to.

I was not impressed.

Strange. I've played KotOR for PC numerous times and have never had to use the arrow keys...

Kazhiim

In Oblivion, doors inside Ayleid ruins wouldn't open for me (the ones activated by switches) after I installed a certain mod (I don't remember what it was- either New Sky Textures, or Clearer Water). Problem was, they still wouldn't open for me after I uninstalled the mod, unless I made a new save. I'd already completed the main quest, but it killed dungeon diving.

Blitz Rawket

RidleySaria wrote: »

Fortunately I haven't had such an experience. My brother in law told me about an RPG's poor design choice that got him stuck at the end of the game. It might have been a Phantasy Star game, or maybe Y's. The problem was that the last save point before the final boss was past a "point of no return". You can't go back, there's no enemies and no other way to level up. So if at that point you're not powerful enough to defeat the final boss, you're hosed. He wasn't too happy about that.

This happened to my friend with Final Fantasy IX. I've also had other friends whose save files often corrupted for that same game.

Rhesus Positive

Less a bug and more harshly unforgiving gameplay, but in King's Quest VI there were several places where you could die if you hadn't picked up a random item three hours previously. Considering several areas would lock you in until you finished, it was a bitch if you'd forgotten to keep a save from before going into the Labyrinth or the Underworld.

I traded Red Steel for Mercury Meltdown Revolution after a level started and I had no guns, nor any method of acquiring guns. That game relys totally on autosaving, so I would have had to have played six or seven missions all over again in order to continue.

I also never completed Morrowind properly due top doing things in the wrong order - the first playthrough I killed somebody too early, then lost the item I needed from them. The second time I completed two main quest missions at once, mucking up the "Now you have to do X" conversation with the quest giver person.

korodullin

I've had to restart the original Fallout due to mass save game corruptions more times than I can count.

I simply don't play FO1 anymore due to it.

Zephyr

RidleySaria wrote: »

Fortunately I haven't had such an experience. My brother in law told me about an RPG's poor design choice that got him stuck at the end of the game. It might have been a Phantasy Star game, or maybe Y's. The problem was that the last save point before the final boss was past a "point of no return". You can't go back, there's no enemies and no other way to level up. So if at that point you're not powerful enough to defeat the final boss, you're hosed. He wasn't too happy about that.

this happened to me too except in FF X-2, except it was like the 3-4th boss.

god that was horrible.

Meiz

DoNotPursueLuBu wrote: »

Meiz wrote: »

Faxanadu and writing your mantra down.

Comon, it takes balls to write that down, every time.

Yeah considering if you get it wrong, you have to start over.

SpikedFreak

I have encountered one right now in The Darkness. I have to go to a certain area to meet two characters. Well when I get to the loading screen for that area the game freezes. Starbreeze says they are working on a patch, (it affects both the 360 and PS3) but they refuse to give a date. For now they recomend a restart and avoiding certain side quests. Lame.

Athenor

This isn't exactly a bug, but it was game-ending.

There was this really popular game a couple years back by the name of Doom 3. Perhaps you've heard of it?

Well, I have an ATI video card. Doom 3 doesn't like them. In fact, I swear it actively makes the game suck just to punish ATI users.

One fateful day, I had fought my way through the infuriating comm tower level, where you send off the message to ask for reinforcements or not. I was in sight of the final door, and I decide to save it rather than walk through. Once I got out of the game, I decide to look around to see if there were any patches to fix the ATI shit. Well, lo and behold, there was one! So I go to download it, and frantically look around for a readme. No such luck, no site had posted what the readme for the save was. Upon downloading the patch, no readme was present with it. So I decide to go ahead and install it.

After it was patched, it gave me the readme.

At the very bottom of the readme was a little note: "Due to incompatabilities, this patch will reset your save files to the beginning of the current level you are on."

My jaw hit the floor. Because I decided to install this blasted thing before I walked through that damned door, my few hours of work went up in a puff of smoke. So did my interest in the game. Because lo and behold, the patch didn't fix any of the ATI problems.

Serule

Rhesus Positive wrote: »

Less a bug and more harshly unforgiving gameplay, but in King's Quest VI there were several places where you could die if you hadn't picked up a random item three hours previously. Considering several areas would lock you in until you finished, it was a bitch if you'd forgotten to keep a save from before going into the Labyrinth or the Underworld.

My brother and I were both playing one of the King's Quest games - and both got horribly stuck. My dad played the same game and breezed through. When we caved in and compared notes we figured out that there's a spot in the game where you get hungry, and have two food items - a turkey and a pie. My brother and I both ate the pie, and it turned out you couldn't complete the game without it.

Quintile

Gim wrote: »

There was a point in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time where if you die after hitting a certain switch to lower something from overhead to continue the quest with, the switch would no longer work. The 71% glitch. It's the reason why you're supposed to have more than 1 save file and alternate between them. I had not been doing that and had to start back at around 30%. I was not pleased.

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within had something like that, but instead of it being the 71% glitch, it was the every number glitch, and instead of there being a certain switch to lower something, it was every switch ever.


I'm pretty sure if you find a list of bugs and glitches in that game, there are pages and pages, many of them game breaking.

Saving in certain rooms will mean you can't get further.
Saving in certain rooms will load your game and you won't even be the prince.
Loading your game will make traps not hurt you...

It wasn't very fun to play.

Sinister Cheshire

This isnt so much of a bug, more of a technical problem. When I first bought Final Fantasy IX for my playstation I kept losing my save file whenever I would get beyond the first town, out into that grassy area where you have to eventually go through the cave. Wow its been a while since I played that.

Anyway, everytime I would play it I would go out into the world map area and walk around a bit, eventually saving my game as per usual. When coming back to the game It would freak out and tell me I had no save file, and yes I had saved it before while in the town and the save file appeared perfectly, it was just something about that area.

So after doing the beginning of the game like....7 times I was too aggrevated and left it laying on the floor till I finally went out and bought a new memory card. Worked fine after that. I blame the lightning storm that hit a few weeks before. strange that it would just take out the FF save though.

Basticle

in the original pressings of Gran Turismo 2 if you used the car wash a certain number of times it erases your memory card

The Wolfman

Wiegraf says hello.

dachish

Blitz Rawket wrote: »

RidleySaria wrote: »

Fortunately I haven't had such an experience. My brother in law told me about an RPG's poor design choice that got him stuck at the end of the game. It might have been a Phantasy Star game, or maybe Y's. The problem was that the last save point before the final boss was past a "point of no return". You can't go back, there's no enemies and no other way to level up. So if at that point you're not powerful enough to defeat the final boss, you're hosed. He wasn't too happy about that.

This happened to my friend with Final Fantasy IX. I've also had other friends whose save files often corrupted for that same game.

Was it that part where you all get captured in the desert and you end up having to fight a few battles solo? I know that sting very well. I got stuck there myself.

Magic Pink

Harvest Moon DS.

Save corruption bug? All the time? Not so much fun.

Magus`

Blitz Rawket wrote: »

RidleySaria wrote: »

Fortunately I haven't had such an experience. My brother in law told me about an RPG's poor design choice that got him stuck at the end of the game. It might have been a Phantasy Star game, or maybe Y's. The problem was that the last save point before the final boss was past a "point of no return". You can't go back, there's no enemies and no other way to level up. So if at that point you're not powerful enough to defeat the final boss, you're hosed. He wasn't too happy about that.

This happened to my friend with Final Fantasy IX. I've also had other friends whose save files often corrupted for that same game.

I don't recall any 'points of no return' in FFIX.

muninn

Bioware/Black Isle hates me....
Baldur's Gate: I have completed all quests... gotten all the items... game crashed whenever I tried to battle the final boss.
Icewind Dale: One of the main story characters never spawned, so I could not progress, halfway through the game....

Reigner

The Wolfman wrote: »

Wiegraf says hello.

Wiegraf can eat a dick.

Fucker.

whuppins

Huh. I thought for sure that I'd come in here and seem mention of two of the most notorious "you can't win" bugs ever: Impossible Mission for the Atari 7800 and Gran Turismo 2.

Edit: Not the bug that erases cars and wipes memory cards, the fact that you could only ever get 98.2% completed since they removed drag racing.

expendable

Half-Life 2 Episode 1. I'd bought the game, but it sat next to my computer for months before I played it.

When I did, I fought my way all the way to the hospital, saving at the point before you drop into the hole in the floor. Tried to load the next morning and couldn't. The HUD would load halfway and then nothing would ever happen. Tried to load all my earlier saves, same deal.

Start over. Save in near the same spot. Same bug.

Start over. Save in a different spot somewhat near the area. Same bug.

Start over. Save 20 or so minutes before the spot. Same bug.

Leave game for a couple weeks. Finish tests and projects and finals in school. Start over. Blow through area, save after. Same bug.

Read the internet. Find rumblings about Steam. Apparently I'm not the only one who's saves are getting corrupted. There are theories that it's steam updates that are guilty.

Fine. Disable Steam, play offline. Save in original spot. No bug. Finish game.

I hate Steam.

RoundBoy

Police quest 3 -- unless you magically knew to patrol the random highway in the game on day '2'... you would be stuck on in game day '4'

dopplex

Back in the very early days of City of Heroes (before ANY balance patches) I had a (grossly overpowered) Fire Tanker character that I'd leveled into the low 30s at the time - the cap was 40 at the time. (This was ahead of the leveling curve - though I was admittedly abusing a rather amazingly overpowered character type that the masses still hadn't caught on to just yet)

I also had a laptop that had a graphics card that, while powerful enough to run CoH, had some unresolved issues that totally corrupted the screen.

I started trying to troubleshoot the issue - unofficial drivers, etc. - and discovered something VERY IMPORTANT while navigating out of yet another graphically corrupted character selection screen.

City of Heroes has no "type in character name" validation for character deletion.

Well, crap.

(It's not strictly speaking a game breaking bug - more an interplay of a graphics bug and some incredibly poor UI design that combined to break my game)

(CoH now requires name typing to confirm character deletion, by the way.)

jclast

It didn't happen to me, but I'd be pretty pissed if this was all my copy of Prince of Persia Classic would do.

RedMageDarion

Not really bugs per se, but:

I remember using one of those crazy x16 PS1 memory cards that my parents bought me, and it got corrupted. I was like 60+ hours into Xenogears when that happened.

In La Pucelle, I got to a point where everything was too strong for me, so I couldn't continue the story, and I couldn't level up. (I think it's like the 4th or 5th chapter, when you go to that new map.)

In Wind Waker, I got to the boss of the second dungeon, and the game froze halfway through the battle. I would have had to redo the entire dungeon if I wanted to play it again, so I just never bothered.

That's all I can think of.

LockeCole

I've had planescape:torment ate ALL of my saves several times. (Game would crash, and all save files would become unloadable) Damn that game for being so awesome that I keep playing it anyway.

joshtothemaxx

I still don't really know what happened, but when I was back in middle school and FF7, FF8, etc were all t he rage, I had 2 memory cards. One was my "active" one, one was my "archive" one. Yes I'm a dork. Anyways, on the "archive" one, I had all my epic saves, like perfect FF7 files and the like--aka, a TON of gameplay. Somehow, my stepbrother sits down, puts his own memory card in slot 1 of the PS1, and my archive card is in slot 2, he starts up Crash effing Bandicoot, plays for an hour or so, turns off the PS1, and it erased my card completely. I blew an effing gasket--but at least it probably made me less nerdy.

CoH had a bitchy bug at launch. I was pretty much addicted to CoH at launch, so I was cruising through the game as an Assault Rifle blaster similar to the guy above with the fire tanker. Sniper Rifle and Build Up was just way, way, way too powerful. I was able to kill stuff before it got near me, and with my friend as a radiation defender, nothing would hold up within 2 levels of me or so.

Anyways, we do that mission to kill Dr. Vasa... Vaza.... err, sounds like Vah-suh-lock. At some point in there, you get poisoned with this annoying permanent disease that makes you weaker and drains HP slowly. At some other point, you get a serum from an NPC and it makes that thing go away. Well, I start off in a group with some friends, we're going along. I complete the mission that rewards the cure or whatever, running back to the NPC I lose connection. When I come back, the NPC won't talk to me or acknowledge me at all. So not only can I not complete the Dr V story arc, I am stuck with the damn disease until the GM's FINALLY notice the highest level blaster on the server has a damn fly buzzing around him and sucks total ass for like 3-4 days. That was so annoying.