A lot of games launched in 2014 that I’d be nice to describe as not quite working as promised. And in talking about these issues, the staff here at We the Nerdy got to thinking about our worst launch experiences ever!
Bryan Boshart
5. World of Warcraft
Today, World of Warcraft is the preeminent MMO on the market, and nothing comes even close. Blizzard didn’t expect the high volume of traffic that WoW had at the start and the servers were quickly overwhelmed. Queues stretched seemingly forever and I remember waiting hours upon hours to get in the game. Even when you managed to access the servers, the game suffered from tons of glitches and frequent slowdowns. The terrible launch caused me to stop playing for a few months until they were eventually remedied. It’s rather impressive that World of Warcraft managed to survive it’s early issues.
4. The War Z
The War Z was a cheap knock-off of the immensely popular Day Z mod (and eventually standalone). The game was released on Steam and if you were one of the sad few who purchased it, you ran into a ton of problems. First off, The War Z used microtransactions to unlock items and guns. On top of that, the game even charged you money to respawn, that is unless you felt like waiting a few hours before playing again. Keep in mind that you had to pay for the game in the first place, it was not free to play. The massive public outcry from the shady practices led to this game getting pulled from Steam.
3. Diablo III
Diablo III was one of the most hyped games ever, first for being a sequel to one of the most popular games on the PC and second for controversially using an always on-DRM system. Again, Blizzard underestimated the amount of players it had and servers were quickly full. Because Diablo III was an online only game though, you couldn’t even play the game while waiting to connect. Error 37 was every gamers nightmare. As is a common theme for all the games on this list, once the game was accessible it was buggy. It wasn’t uncommon to completely lose a character or their best loot to the game’s glitchiness. Diablo III has mostly fixed it’s problems especially after the Reaper of Souls expansion.
2. SimCity
SimCity is another launch that was an outright joke. Like Diablo III, SimCity has an always on-DRM requirement, which was odd considering the game was a mostly single player entity. Like many of these online only games, servers were always full and nearly impossible to connect to. Despite any perceived convenience in sharing resources with other players and using cloud saves, the DRM offered almost no benefit for what was essentially a single player game.
When you could actually manage to connect to servers, the game was flawed. Citizens would go to the nearest house instead of their own home. The same situation applied to workers and even the power crew making setting up a city a frustrating mess. AI would drive in the shortest distance possible even if it took them past empty side routes. At launch, SimCity was a simply unplayable mess and while it is definitely a better product now, the sour taste it left in the collective mouths of gamers still lingers.
1. Final Fantasy XIV
The original launch of Final Fantasy XIV needed a Phoenix Down. First off it suffered from significant lag during gameplay making any of the harder battles downright impossible. The PC version’s interface was unwieldy and was attempting to serve as a test for the PS3 version (that never happened). Final Fantasy XIV also had an insufferable marketplace system, and the game’s controls were just as awful. Final Fantasy XIV was just plain unplayable. The much touted PS3 release of the game was eventually scrapped, refunds were offered, and the game was eventually just pulled from store shelves.
Years passed and Final Fantasy XIV was eventually re-released with the subtitle A Realm Reborn. Realm Reborn did a lot to fix the issues that plagued the game, but still featured that eternal staple of MMO’s, terrible servers. Despite having over a million people in the beta, they were unable to get working servers in time for launch. Eventually the servers were fixed, and a free week of game-time was offered, but that does little to make up for what was the worst launch I’ve ever seen.
John Newby
5. DriveClub
Much like Battlefield 4, DriveClub has also been a raging hot mess since release. DriveClub released with servers that were completely broken from the beginning, and Sony’s promised PlayStation Plus version still hasn’t been released. The worst part of this broken launch was the fact that DriveClub was supposed to be a big playground for teams. Sony and Evolution Studios wanted players to create in-game clubs for their friends that would help with unlocking specific vehicles and maps. Unfortunately, this club option wasn’t available for quite some time. Actually, most of the game modes were unavailable besides quick race and world tour. You couldn’t even paint your cars a different color because of the online issues.
Yes, DriveClub wasn’t a very good game, but people who bought it were extremely angry at the lack of available features and the delay in connectivity. These players wanted to play with their friends, and it was impossible.
4. Diablo III
I love Diablo III. This game has provided constant entertainment for the past six months, but it had a rough launch in 2012. Diablo III was one of the first games to experience the dreaded server issues that spawn in online-focused games, and these issues came in the form of two error codes. The first error code was known as “Error 37”, and it simply gave a busy server message. This error 37 gave hundreds, if not thousands, of pre-order customers fits while keeping them from playing the anticipated game. Of course, Error 37 wasn’t the worst issue with Diablo III.
No, the worst part of Diablo III’s launch was the infamous 3006 error. This error occurred when the Demon Hunter equipped a Templar NPC with a shield early in the game. For some reason, giving this Templar the shield would automatically make Diablo III crash. Even better, you would be unable to log back into the game until Blizzard fixed the problem.
These issues were a perfect example of the problems that can occur in this online-focused era of video games. Thankfully, Diablo III was fixed and has been stable ever since because that game is straight awesome.
3. Halo: the Master Chief Collection
Fans of Halo have to be pissed. This fan base showed pure excitement when Halo: The Master Chief Collection was announced, but they were sucker punched by a partially broken game. Sure, all four campaigns in the Master Chief collection functioned as promised, but the fans didn’t care about the campaigns. Halo fans wanted to play the multiplayer modes, and The Master Chief Collection promised unique modes and settings for each game in the collection. Unfortunately, these modes were unavailable.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection suffered from devastating matchmaking issues that made the game unplayable for most people. Some fans could connect to matches, but they couldn’t play with their friends. More importantly, most players couldn’t even play for more than a few minutes because the matches would crash. Since the November release, 343 has released a large number of patches that have made The Master Chief Collection slightly better and occasionally playable.
As of January 7, 343 has at least three new patches planned for release in an attempt to keep fixin the game. 343 has also promised Halo fans a free copy of Halo 3: ODST for the crap that they dealt with.
2. SimCity
SimCity was supposed to be the best city building game ever released. Hell, SimCity was supposed to take the best parts of SimCity 2000 and bring them into the modern world, complete with connected multiplayer. I couldn’t wait for SimCity to be released so I could have a connected world with cities owned by my wife, my brothers, and my friends. However, this promised world wasn’t to be.
When SimCity was released, the mass amount of players attempting to download and log onto the game completely broke the online servers. Most players were unable to unlock their digital versions of SimCity while others experienced a multitude of game crashes. Even worse, every crash would delete the save data of random players, causing them to restart cities from scratch. In the opening month alone, Maxis released eight different patches in an attempt to fix the online issues. At one point, Amazon even pulled SimCity from their store because it was so broken.
The weirdest part of the broken launch came when Maxis stated that it was impossible to make SimCity playable offline, only to figure out the problem a short time later.
SimCity has been stable during the past year, but this disastrous launch was one of the most infamous video game moments of the past half-decade.
1. Battlefield 4
Battlefield 4 was a pure hot mess. This game, released in October 2013, was completely broken on every platform. In fact, Battlefield 4 was so broken that EA halted work on all expansion packs and future updates. EA even created an official issue tracker in the Battlelog forums for the “top 22” issues, which is ridiculous. There shouldn’t have been 22 issues with Battlefield 4, let alone a whole lot more.
The main reason why Battlefield 4 was such a broken mess was the time involved. As I mentioned earlier, Battlefield was released in October 2013. On January 3, 2014, Ben Kuchera of Polygon released a story detailing how Battlefield 4 was still broken. That’s quite a bit of time to deal with a broken game, especially one that constantly crashed during multiplayer matches or simply refused to connect. The best part? EA refused to discuss the problems with any outlets while choosing to ignore the dumpster fire that was Battlefield 4.
If you were curious, my favorite bug was the single player data corruption issue. There is no feeling better than saving your game on the penultimate campaign mission, turning off your console, and returning to Battlefield 4 later only to find that the game had deleted the save file because of “corrupt data.”
Holy crap.
Sam Reeder
5. Assassin’s Creed: Unity
Frame rate, bugs, and an overall sense that this game launched incomplete. There are very few games that I have started to play and then given up on minutes later. Assassin’s Creed: Unity is one of them. I endured about five minutes of a framerate that fluctuated between 30fps and what felt like 5fps before deciding to just wait for whatever patch would inevitably come. Ubisoft recently apologized for the launch issues by releasing the Dead Kings content update for free to all users and offered a free game to those who had pre-purchased the season pass. The open admission of the games flaws and the free stuff was a great gesture, but Assassin’s Creed: Unity goes on this list all the same.
4. Halo: The Master Chief Collection
So much promise, so much hype. This was 343’s tribute to the fans, it was Halo as we remember it in the “good ol’ days.” Halo 2 ranking, flag bouncing, warthog jumps and all of that. But alas, it only delivered on 75% of what it promised. Campaigns were phenomenal, cut scenes were fantastic, the multiplayer brilliant, but the match-making was a hot bloody mess. And that one missing piece basically sank the entire product. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game go from system seller to giant disappointment so quickly. Fortunately, it is mostly fixed at this point, and 343i is promising more updates and patches, but the damage has been done. Here’s hoping that Halo 5’s launch goes smoothly, or I worry for the future of my favorite video game franchise.
3. SimCity
When a game launches, it is reasonable to assume that you will be able to play it. Unfortunately for SimCity fans this was not the case with Maxis’ 2013 entry into the much beloved city-building franchise. SimCity’s launch was a total disaster. Not only were people unable to connect with their friends, but some couldn’t even download the damn game. When players did log on, some would spend hours building their cities only to have the game disconnect from the servers and wipe all their save data. SimCity’s launch was so disastrous that Amazon temporarily removed the downloadable version due to the number of validated customer complaints.
2. Diablo III
Error 37. Holy hell, Error 37. How many times did I read that while on the phone with my friends, desperate to get into a lobby and play this damn game. I can’t recall a game that I was more hyped for than Diablo 3. My friends and I spent hours reading about the new classes, thinking about what characters we would play first and then what characters we would pick for our second and third play-throughs. But, when it came time to actually play the damn game, it was nigh impossible. I wouldn’t have minded as much if it was simply that I wasn’t able to connect to my friends. But the fact that I was unable to even launch the game (in single player) killed all my enthusiasm. It’s fixed now, and better than ever promised, but I wonder if Diablo III will ever lose the black mark of its launch.
1. Battlefield 4
Battlefield 4 was meant to be a herald for the new generation of consoles, a prime example of what the new hardware could accomplish. Instead, it became the first in a long line of busted launches. Die-hard fans of Battlefield waited months and months for a working product, they had to deal with massive server issues, problematic bugs, and corrupted save data. As seen above there have been troubled launches on PC numerous times in the past, but to my memory, this was the first major launch failure in the console space. The game was so broken that EA and DICE had to call for all work on future games to be halted until BF4 was fully functional. I wanted so badly to love this game, unfortunately I had a similar experience as fellow writer John Newby. Battlefield 4 has left a black mark on the series’ and developer DICE’s reputations, obviously it’s not irreparable but Battlefield: Hardline will need to launch with near zero technical issues (a.k.a. little more than minor clipping allowed) to bring the series back to the high status it used to hold.
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