Ever come across a game you highly enjoy, but your enjoyment gets ruined by major bugs or reoccurring glitches?

I think my best example of this is probably Blood. No game on the market matches Blood's atmosphere and wit, it's an amazing game. However it gets absolutely ruined by the very awful AI, flying monsters often get stuck in spinning loops, monsters will sometimes stop fighting, hug a wall, and wallrun away from you, the life leech doesn't work correctly, the hand enemies are impossible to get off unless you tune your DOSBox just right, as they are tied to CPU speed, etc etc.

It also has some terrible balance issues (the voodoo doll is garbage in the latest version), and major boss exploits (crouching nerfs every boss).

But I think the bug that takes the cake is this one.

Are you the type of person to play games on easy? Did you try to play Blood on easy, saved, came back and suddenly you got your ass kicked?

Well, blame this save game bug. If you play on the easy difficulty, save, and load it the game loads the monsters' hard difficulty damages. If you play on the hard difficulty, save, and load it the game loads the monsters' easy difficulty damages.

It really is a shame, Blood was fucked from the start. A buggy and messy first game with an amazing idea attached to it, a god awful sequel that even Jace Hall doesn't like to talk about, and no source code availability for a source port that could fix these problems. Life is cruel :c

STALKER Clear Sky. The game is fantastic, but it held my computer hostage a few times (weird crashes, freezes, it disconnected the C drive) and I just can't really play it. Too bad as I was close to the end.

The Conduit 2 wasn't amazing, but I like for a lot of the reasons I like FEAR 3 and its main problem was that it was just poorly made. The final nail in the coffin for me was when it saved a checkpoint right as I fell off the platform and landed into the pit of deadly tiles.

I could mention SaGa 1, which manages to be fun despite major battle system bugs. The one thing that significantly decreases my enjoyment of the game, however, is the Random Number Generator (RNG) that the game uses. It is bad. By bad, I mean that it is predictable and affects casual play (not just challenge runs or speedruns). Boss kills you because you got unlucky? Well, expect to die the *exact* same way on your next attempt, unless you make a minor change in your strategy to throw off the RNG a bit. Esper (Mutant) not gaining any HP? Well, she's *not going to*, unless you re-order your party to put her in a different spot. (RNG-dependent stat growth + terrible RNG = disaster) Esper gains 11 HP the second battle after power on? Well, turn of the game, turn it on (for GBA, you apparently have to wait about 15 seconds for RAM to clear), and she will gain another 11 HP after 2 battles.

I have found a way to at least seed the RNG that affects Esper stat growth: Choose START at the title screen, soft reset in the middle of the intro, and then load my save. I shouldn't have to; that should be the programmer's responsibility, not the player's.

You know the RNG is too easily exploitable when a (non-TAS) speedrunner tries to run from an easy fight, fails multiple times, then wins the battle, so that the player can run from the next dangerous or time consuming fight.

Are those really major bugs? That AI was quite normal back then.
About the rest, I didn't notice anything gamebreaking on normal.. O_o WUT? :O

I'm playing Daggerfall, which was always known for its bugs. But this is the "setup_en" version which is supposed to have all kinds of fixes, both official and unofficial. I gather it is the most bug-free version of the game out there currently.

So far it has worked fine, but when I reached the quest where I am supposed to deliver a letter from the Weyfair (sp?) princess to the King of Worms or somesuch, in that particular dungeon there are stairs with quite high steps. The thing is, when I try to climb those stairs, I always fall through them to an empty space, outside the game area.

The only way I can prevent that from happening is to use the Levitate spell and fly (with PageUp) over the stairs to the exit. If I hadn't had the Levitate spell at that point, I guess it would have been Game Over for me because I couldn't have made it out of the dungeon.

It seems now I constantly have that problem with those bigger stairs, in other dungeons too. There are also smaller stairs where this issue doesn't occur. Oh well, at least I can play the game, I just need to keep casting that Levitate spell.

Otherwise I am actually enjoying the game somewhat now. The only (gameplay mechanism) things that irritate me are:

- The automap is useless in dungeons. It is very hard and complicated to use it for navigation, so usually I just run around blindly in dungeons until I find my objective or the exit, usually by that time I start to learn the dungeon by heart (without a map). This has worked so far, hopefully the dungeons will not get increasingly bigger. Fortunately also monster respawn in this game seems minimal; if the monsters kept respawning as much as in the earlier TES Arena game, I would have probably stopped playing the game already (In Arena, navigation in dungeons was easier because they were pretty much 2D (apart from some underway passages), but then there was that damn respawning...).

- I am unsure why the game needs to have so many different skills. Etiquette? Really? Sometimes less is more, I think the game would be better with less skills, many current skills could be combined together I think. It is silly to have that many (also non-combat) skills as most of the gameplay still seems to rely on combat. It is as if the game has separate skills for using a fork, spoon and a toothbrush, and you need to practice all of them separately. Wheee!

You can try the save game bug yourself, just follow the steps in that link. Only the third difficulty is unaffected. I'd say it's pretty damn major if someone wanted a challenge, only to come back to a save later and the monsters now do barely any damage. Or vice versa.

As for the rest, I don't recall many other FPS around '98 where enemies spin in circles or break their pathfinding and hug a wall as they run away from you. Kingpin had enemies climbing ladders and jumping pits and going through vents to find you, Unreal had enemies dodging and strafing out of the way of your attacks, Duke Nukem and Shadow Warrior's enemies rarely pulled stupid shit and worked as intended. Jumping up on higher ledges and going prone to fire at you, which Cultists at least do correctly in Blood. Just because a game is old is no excuse for stupid AI, because AI was quickly getting better ever since DOOM was released.

The life leech is supposed to give you health when you damage enemies, hence the name "Life Leech". It doesn't. Not being able to get the hands off you as they quickly kill you I'd also consider pretty major. The voodoo doll is their own fault though, they purposely nerfed it for whatever reason, its alt attack becomes useless.

On a funny note, Monolith was awful with AI early on, with Blood's examples, Shogo's enemies usually don't move at all but have the reflexes of a superhero, and Blood 2 is a complete mess (play it for yourself to see), yet would redeem themselves later on with FEAR's AI, which many consider unmatched to this day. Condemned also had pretty good AI.

I agree, have played through Blood several times. Didn't have any problems.

Clear Sky had several times where it completely died, SOC didn't have any problems, and COP only had a couple of problems.

Most releases at the moment seem to be full of killer bugs. I tend to wait a while until they get fixed or modded out.

In Fallout New Vegas you can use faction uniforms to disguise yourself. Problem is, when you do something stupid just for fun like killing a member of the faction you are infiltrating and you load back your previous save, if even there you were wearing the faction outfit the game will save the group hostility towards you, no matter if you still didn't do anything agressive.
I was a NCR champion, and in a second I have become wanted dead or alive and everyone was out for my head, just because I did a rampage to see if I could survive total war alone against all Vegas. That was without saving, of course, but the game apparently tied those actions to my ranger armor, and I had to revert to a much earlier save where I was wearing a suit to avoid the problem.

Ride to Hell: Retribution is such an amazing game, but the bugs/ gliches really ruined the experience. :P

Does the entirety of The Stanley Parable count as a bug?
I mean, it doesn't ruin the game, but I'm just curious.

TombRaider: Angel of Daftness
One bug meant a door didn't open once beating a boss. Which leaves AoD the only PC TR game I've not completed. All other I've completed finding all secrets.

Another silly bit was the use of Depth of Field. One part of the game had a man with a machine gun at the end of the corridor. He'd mow you down if you tried to go down it. The only time it was safe to advance was when he took a drag on his cigarette. Except with DoF on you couldn't see him because he was all blurred out.

Aaah, Daggerfall. I remember jumping right through the roof of a dungeon, and then walking "on the roof", with the dungeon layout twisting like a snake around me. A pecular experience. Happened quite a lot, too. ^^

Never finished this game. Not because of the bugs (I was used to them), but because I misplaced a quest item (some scarab, I think?), and never knew where I put it (I may have sold it to some random merchant? Dunno.)
My brother did quit the game, too, but it was because he accidentally became a werewolf, and the game was suddenly too easy to be fun anymore.

And yeah, those 3D dungeon where hell.

Very good game, but quite frustrating

Siege of Avalon had one where if your inventory was full and you were given an item, that item would just disappear (or never appear).
That included quest items.

Edit: Wait never mind, that wasn't an amazing game.

The constant respawning of enemies on Farcry 2, not a bug really, just bad design, pass a checkpoint to do a mission, head back 10 minutes later and enemies are back again, they should have maybe made it a once a day reinforcements. Also on Farcry 2 there is the whole things with guns degrading with use pretty quickly.