The worst launches in PC gaming history
- Thread starter Gregster
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Caporegime
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I remember when GTA V came out, people were saying it was unstable but it just pushed their systems harder than a lot of other games so they had to dial down overclocks, particularly on the GPU.
Totally agree with both of these. They had just put in the Squad Leader update just before the NGE too.
Another one is SWTOR when that was released the Hero Engine was terrible.
Don't think I've ever had a crash on gta 5 (outside of a bad driver).
My GPU isn't overclocked, just undervolted and my CPU is overclocked to 4GHz from 2.6GHz (i5 750).
Saying that, I also recently played through half of the game again (on dx 12) and didn't have any crashes.
Another vote from me is going back a bit but still bugs me to this day due to the pain I felt at the time. Anarchy Online. Just a real mess at first. Did improve but damn it was a mess to begin. I remember the rage well. Forums were ablaze. Everything went wrong that could possibly have gone wrong really.
Soldato
Worst launch ever? Rise of the Robots, review copies released to the press a few days before release, this was in the day when we used magazine reviews as our source so there was no way it was making the current print cycle and had a whole month of sales before the reviews became known. A confusing mess of a release on PC with a VGA and separate SVGA version but boxes sent out with the wrong disks in them, I was working for Future Zone (They got taken over by Electronics Boutique) at the time and it was a complete nightmare, it was about 10% SVGA returned because they had VGA versions and 25% VGA returned because they had SVGA versions.
On top of that following the massive hype train that came before release, the game was a massive turd produced by broken souls from the lowest levels of hell reserved for the worst of humanity and people from Merthyr Tydfil.
On top of that following the massive hype train that came before release, the game was a massive turd produced by broken souls from the lowest levels of hell reserved for the worst of humanity and people from Merthyr Tydfil.
Soldato
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Much as I loved the game, I'd vote for Freelancer.
Released 3 years later than initially slated, lacking a lot of key features and only after Microsoft had pretty much booted Chris Roberts out, but still needing patches (that took more months) to fix server issues and help prevent cheating....
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I agree APB was a joke, bought it - 2 weeks i believe it folded and vanished, to be bought by a F2P company which let in the hackers and its stayed horrible since, keep going back to check, but it had promise but failed.
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Daikatana
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Still never managed to get it to launch!
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Another old one...
Frontier First Encounters
It was dire, ran about 5 minutes before crashing with hexadecimal code across the top of the screen. Back then, patching was either waiting for something to turn up on PC Gamer or PC Zone cover disc, or after complaining via snail mail a floppy disc from the publisher in the post. No internet in those days! Even when patched the game was bugged to hell and the little bit of gameplay I managed before it got binned wasn't a patch on Frontier 2.
Frontier First Encounters
It was dire, ran about 5 minutes before crashing with hexadecimal code across the top of the screen. Back then, patching was either waiting for something to turn up on PC Gamer or PC Zone cover disc, or after complaining via snail mail a floppy disc from the publisher in the post. No internet in those days! Even when patched the game was bugged to hell and the little bit of gameplay I managed before it got binned wasn't a patch on Frontier 2.
Soldato
About a 6-700mb patch wasn't it. While you might laugh at that now on your 100mb connection, this was 18 years ago in the world of dial up, 56k for most. The cost to download it would have run you a fair amount in the days before bt free or freeserve, over about the best part of a day and a half.
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BF4, somehow they released a game that played worse than the Beta / Demo. Also the server crashing whenever the tower in Siege of Shanghai collapsed, and the subsequent patches breaking the few bits of the game that worked.
I knew Vanguard: Saga of Heroes would be on that list. Shame really because it is my second favourite MMO of all time. It just had a pretty bad launch. For the record my favourite was EverQuest. Looking forward to Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen now to hopefully see it bring back what I love in MMOs.