Game Breaking Bug / First-Person Shooter

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• In Battlefield 2142, you can move the Titans around, allowing you to use their weapons in an effort to win the round. Unfortunately, doing so lagged many servers as they moved about, not to mention during firefights on a moving Titan, bodies will glitch through the floor, preventing them from being revived. Dice eventually patched the game so that servers can disable Titan movement, unfortunately removing an otherwise useful tactic of the game mode, as most servers went with the disable movement option.
• Although most of the crash bugs were fixed, Battlefield 4 still has a chance of crashing whenever you destroy the big tower in "Siege of Shanghai" (most servers explicitly have rules against it as such, as even if it doesn't crash the server, many feel blowing up the building makes the map harder to navigate and less fun to play), as well as a new glitch spot in the ported version of "Operation Metro" that allows players to get on top of the map, allowing them to freely shoot and drop explosives on anyone else without fear of reprisal.
• Boiling Point: Road to Hell is essentially a game strung together with fatal bugs, as well as a whole bunch of ones not completely fatal, but amusing nevertheless. Excerpts from the patch notes that fixed these problems are now somewhat of an Internet legend:
  - fixed: jaguar floats across screen at treetop level;
  - fixed: size of the moon;
  - fixed: npc die on contact with grenades, and not from the actual explosion;
• Prior to a patch, the EOS boss fight in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! could break, rendering victory completely impossible. This was due to the way the boss respawns. Whenever it loses 1/4 of its red health, the boss retreats, sends waves of enemies at the player, and then respawns with its red health still gone, but its blue shield completely refilled. During its respawn, it was possible for the game to accidentally spawn EOS off of the field and in the distance, making it nearly impossible to hit. If that wasn't the glitch you dealt with, the other major glitch would be where EOS would respawn with its health completely refilled, negating all of your work. If this happened, then when EOS disappears to refill his shield... he would never come back. You're just stuck in limbo with the boss theme playing endlessly.
• Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth:
  • There is one infamous sequence in which you must fire at several enemies using a deck-mounted cannon. The problem is, while the enemies are still there, you can't see them. Nobody knows what causes this bug, and the only known solution is to use the savegame of somebody fortunate enough to not encounter it.
  • In another part of the game, there is a cart you are supposed to get onto. On some games, the game just plain refuses to let you advance. In a rage, people realized that shooting a specific point on the cart will let you on. Another way of bypassing the bug is to go back to the control panel of the cart and pushing again the button to start the (already) moving cart. Despite Jack saying that it didn't do anything, the invisible wall in the cart is now deleted.
  • Playing the game on a low-end PC can result in movement lag during the escape during the finale, which does not slow down the countdown, rendering the game unwinnable unless you can find a way to speed it up, such as continually looking at the floor to reduce the strain of rendering, or using a cheat program.
• Call of Duty series:
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops has a strange one — in "Rebirth", a level towards the end of the campaign mode, using the shotgun the game hands to you before the shooting really starts to get your way through the level, without warning an error message will appear warning of "more than 160 bones" (or, sometimes, "bodies"). The exact cause of the error is unknown, and after closing the message box, the game will essentially reset itself and return to the main menu. Reloading the campaign will send you back to the start of the level, forcing you to restart it from the beginning. This glitch can also appear in other Call of Duty games made by Treyarch.
  • The same mission has one section where your Regenerating Health is temporarily disabled—you're fighting in a cloud of Deadly Gas, and getting shot during this time damages your Hazmat suit, which can't regenerate for obvious reasons. However, after an update, this broke entirely - you were stuck with limited health for the entire mission. Fortunately this was fixed in another update.
  • On the immediately-following mission, where you discover you were brainwashed, you get punched while running down a corridor. However, this sequence will often break, and after being punched, Mason will be stuck in place and Hudson will appear in his Vietnam gear, complete with sunglasses. The unfunny part is you're stuck, and the level has no checkpoints as there's no combat in it, so you have to start the entire mission again.
  • The Vorkuta level in general is rather broken, from randomly crashing on PC to randomly refusing to react to audio cues on consoles (even if the player goes on with it like this, the game will eventually hang after the tear gas scene, with the player stuck staring at the motorcycle they're supposed to drive for the last part of the level).
  • A similar glitch to the "more than 160 bones" one occurs in Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare on PC. Picking up any throwables in singleplayer will kick the player to the main menu with the message "Could not allocate a reserved scriptable for entity x — limit is x — try increasing the number in the worldspawn entity in radiant." The only solution is to increase your virtual memory in Windows to 4 GB or more, which causes the cutscenes to exhibit audio stuttering.
  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has the infamous "reliable command buffer overflow" bug, apparently caused by staying too close to a friendly tank as it goes down a specific street in the "Goalpost" level.
  • MW3 also has a rare bug in the "Iron Lady" mission. Basically, shoot the wrong tank with the AC-130 just before the final stretch of the mission, and suddenly the other two will be entirely invisible as far as any anti-tank weaponry you can use on the ground is concerned. Even worse, there's a checkpoint right after you shoot one of them with the AC-130, so your only hope is restarting the entire level and aiming at a different tank at that one specific point.
  • The mission "Suffer With Me" in Call of Duty: Black Ops II has a weird glitch where Mason (who is an NPC in this mission) will get stuck at the top of some stairs and start "dancing" (it's the only possible explanation for whatever the hell he's doing). While humorous to watch, it completely halts your progress since there's a door that needs opening. You can occasionally dislodge him from the spot, only for him to go back to it and continue dancing. The only choice is to restart the mission from the beginning. These sorts of movements are apparently a "default" animation from Call of Duty 4, which is only supposed to play when an NPC can't find the animation it's supposed to play, and it can happen at a few other spots (such as the uphill battle in the previous game's "SOG" mission), but this is one of the places where it can happen that actively interferes with progression.
  • World at War has semi-scripted sequences during banzai charges where being attacked by a charging Japanese soldier will cause the game to switch to the HUD-less "cinematic" view as he knocks you down, with a QTE to stab him in the neck and get back to the game. Should a lucky shot from an NPC kill the soldier at the exact moment where the banzai stab animation begins but before the player and soldier become invincible, the player will be stuck on the ground permanently (since there's no soldier to stab to return to the game) and the level needs to be restarted. The same sort of bug appears in one specific part of Black Ops, but even worse - if you're hit by the first attack dog you see in the second part of "WMD", even if you hit the QTE to break its neck, your weapons will suddenly disappear and you won't be able to grab new ones from enemies, making you completely incapable of fighting. Your NPC allies can still shoot enemies, but they're not exactly very good at it.
  • Call of Duty 2 has one issue with its more scripted nature than the original game that can grind the game to a halt in the "Comrade Sniper" mission. One of your objectives is to pick up a scoped Mosin-Nagant, then shoot an enemy sniper with it. However, the game doesn't wait until you pick up the sniper rifle to spawn the enemy sniper. You can shoot the sniper with a different sniper rifle, such as a scoped Kar98k taken from the first level of the campaign, but the mission's progress will grind to a complete halt at this point - you have to pick up that specific sniper rifle before the "kill the sniper" objective will activate, and it doesn't retroactively trigger as completed if you kill the sniper before picking up the rifle. Your only option is restarting the level, thus resetting what you started it with, and making absolutely sure to grab the sniper rifle the game tells you to grab.
• Crysis
  • The final boss can randomly become invincible and untargetable, rendering the fight impossible. The cause of the bug isn’t known and the only way around it is to retry until the bug doesn’t happen.
  • The stage "Relic" has one. When you fight the soldiers in the graveyard, sometimes the helicopter you are supposed to leave in never arrives. You have to replay the whole level again to fix it.
  • Also, the mission where you have to meet Prophet in a cave will sometimes decide to spawn rocks in front of the entrance so you can't reach him. Fortunately, this one is easily remedied by enabling the god mode cheat and passing through the rocks.
  • Crysis has plenty of game-ending flag bugs right from the very beginning: If you're playing a second time, you'll probably want to run straight to the action. Nope, sorry. Using your nano-suit abilities, given almost immediately after reaching the beach, if you get to the point where you meet your first teammate too quickly, he'll just stand up on the cliffs. Nothing you can do except starting over will get him to come down.
  • Crysis and Crysis Warhead both have bugs where triggering the start of the final boss fight will remove part of the map's clipping data. If the player happens to be standing in this part of the map, they will fall through the level and be forced to reload. If the player doesn't have an earlier save or can't get to a safe part of the map fast enough, they have to restart the level.
• Daikatana has a host of these, most of which seem to be in co-op:
  • There's a glitch in the Lair of Medusa level where, when played in co-op, the player can get stuck to the floor when spawning, and get stuck in an infinite loop of respawns and telefrags by the other players. The only way to get out of it is to noclip past that spot.
  • The second level of the first episode has a large door that is opened by a ghost in the cutscene that starts the level. Cutscenes are removed from co-op mode, but obstacles removed during cutscenes are not, resulting in the first episode being unbeatable in co-op without cheating.
  • The various traps in the first part of the final level can be desynced in co-op if a player dies to them, thus making it impossible to get past them without noclip.
  • The AI allies frequently glitch up and begin running into walls, and you'll be unable to snap them out of it. Considering your allies need to be by your side to finish a level, this is game-breaking indeed. This isn't even getting into how your allies frequently kill themselves on every stage hazard they can find, resulting in an instant failed mission.
  • The Nintendo 64 port of the game has a bizarre glitch. If you quit a level and go back to the main menu then try to continue your game, you will spawn with no weapons except the Disruptor Glove (the absolutely useless melee weapon you're given at the start of the game). You have to select "load game" again before continuing the game to circumvent the glitch.
• Deathloop relies on the player finding and killing eight "Visionaries" all on the same day in a Rogue Like structure. In order to pack enough punch to pull it off, you'll need to kill each of the Visionaries beforehand and retrieve the powerful gear they drop. Said gear loves to fall into level geometry, just out of reach. The only option when this happens is to restart the whole level.
• The 1.0 versions of both Descent and Descent 2 infamously have a fatal bug that causes their final bosses to be unbeatable on any difficulty higher than Rookie.
• In the original Deus Ex:
  • It's possible for the player to bring the game to a grinding halt by succeeding when the game needs them to fail. At one point, the plot requires the player character to be arrested and detained at UNATCO headquarters. The main character emerges from a subway station and is confronted by a squad of UNATCO troopers, a cybernetically-augmented agent and a few heavy-duty bipedal combat robots. Normally, the player character can choose either to go quietly or get the tar whipped out of him and wake up in a UNATCO prison cell. However, skilled (or incredibly patient) players can pick off the troops who are meant to take the player down in a hail of bullets, leaving nobody alive but them. Unfortunately this also leaves them with no way to advance to the next chapter, and the player becomes stuck in the decrepit shanty town that surrounds the subway station. A subsequent patch fixed this by marking the augmented agent as invulnerable, meaning no matter how many grunts got mowed down there'll always be one unkillable badass ready to put bullets into the player.
  • In early versions of the game, a bug would cause Big Bad Bob Page to not appear during a critical cutscene at Vandenberg, which would advance the plot and give the player the mission to find and rescue Gary Savage's daughter. As such, it leaves the player completely unable to progress and permanently stuck in Vandenberg. Even worse, there was no way around the glitch, as it would trigger randomly if you started a new game. Luckily, this was eventually patched out in later versions of the game.
• Doom series:
  • In all versions of TNT: Evilution (one half of Final Doom) except for the id Anthology and GOG.com versions, the first secret level, "Pharaoh", is impossible to finish in single-player without cheating or engaging in Sequence Breaking because the level's designer mistakenly flagged a vital key as multiplayer-only. The creators, TeamTNT, soon released a patch to correct the bug and make it winnable, and a version with the level fixed was also included in the id Anthology. It would not be until the GOG.com release in 2015, however, that the fixed version would be sold by id Software in a widely-released form, almost 20 years after Final Doom originally came out. As for the Sequence Breaking part, an oversight by the map author (and a couple of bugs in the Doom engine) means that by straferunning onto the right-hand throne, you can activate the switch hidden on the "backrest" to open the door to the last few areas and skip almost the entire map.
  • The Mac version of Doom II had a bug in one of its MIDI files that caused the game to crash on Level 29. Fortunately, this was quickly patched.
  • Really early versions of Doom's multiplayer code sent packets to every computer on the network, whether they were actually part of the netgame or not — a bug so bad it could bring down the entire network if it had a lot of computers.
  • Doom v1.666's "At Doom's Gate" (E1M1's music) had an extremely corrupt section in its Adlib/Sound Blaster music file that would cause one of two things: your computer would immediately restart, or the program would instantly hang. This was not present in versions before or after 1.666.
  • In both Doom and Doom 2, typing "idmus##" will change the music to whatever number you specified. Typing "idmus00" in Doom 2 will cause the game to crash because 00 is the number for the title theme of the first Doom game, which doesn't exist in Doom 2.
  • The intercepts overflow bug, also known as the all-ghosts effect, is a rare bug in Doom and Doom 2 that turns all players and enemies into "ghosts" — walls lose all collision, attacks can no longer hit anything, and switches can't be activated. This is caused when a hitscan attack encounters at least 147 intercepts (i.e. walls and entities), causing intercept data to overflow out of bounds of its intended array and corrupt the blockmap, which is used for collision checking. While it seems unlikely to activate this bug by accident, another bug can cause this to happen pretty much anywhere. In rare cases, a single hitscan can get stuck processing the same block repeatedly due to a floating point rounding error, causing it to hit the same few intercepts dozens of times and overflow the array.
  • In Map 06 of Doom 2, pressing the "use" key on the red key door's tracks causes the game to either freeze or crash, depending on the version, because the door tracks are programmed to open a door that doesn't exist.
  • Doom³ has a rare bug that causes the game to instantly crash after going through the teleporter to the Hell level. There is no known fix for this bug either.
  • Doom (2016) has a rather notorious bug where the "developer mode" will turn itself on for no particular reason. Normally this wouldn't seem like a bad thing, since it enables you to use the console... but it also prevents you from gaining achievements and even accessing the multiplayer mode at all.
• When Duke Nukem 3D was converted to the Xbox 360, the team carefully scrutinised the level data for game-breaking glitches, and found just one — in E4M8, "Critical Mass", there's a staircase (and a room at the top of it) which collapses and becomes impassable once passed. This isn't a problem in single-player, as the level is reset should the player die (assuming they don't save and load after already passing through it), nor in deathmatch, because in that mode there's a switch to open a teleporter to bypass the collapsed section; but in co-operative mode, it's possible for one or more players to die and thus be stranded at the start of the level. This was fixed for the Xbox version by making the above mentioned switch appear in co-op mode as well as deathmatch. It is not known whether this was ever fixed in the PC version.
• Far Cry 2:
  • This game has the infamous 27% Glitch, so named because it occurs when you have gotten to 27% completion. It only happens sometimes, but when it does, one of the factions' mission-giving Non Player Characters fails to spawn. This prevents you from completing the game, as you have to do all the story missions in the Northern District to go to the Southern District and then finish the game. The only way to avoid it is to restore from a save before 27% completion and hope it doesn't happen again.
  • Another bug is related to the taped messages, which explain the story and set up the motivation of the Jackal, who is the guy you're hunting and your entire reason for being there. If it triggers, every tape you find in the South map plays the same message, which means that the Jackal's character development stops halfway, destroying the storyline. You can still play though, the plot resolution just doesn't make any sense.
  • The game also has multiple glitches related to the "Dogon Sediko Captive" mission (where you have to rescue a buddy from the Dogon Sediko area) that completely grind the story to a halt. Either the door leading to said buddy will glitch out and be marked as locked, or you can get in to your buddy but they won't actually interact with you.
• An update patch for the Xbox 360 version of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon causes the game to crash with a "Disc Unreadable" error during the intro, at least on certain console models.
• First Encounter Assault Recon had a little bit of an oversight that would render the game unbeatable. At one point, you're asked to download data from a laptop. However, there are laptops with downloadable data all around to get the backstory which look exactly like it, and you're told to download the data nearly two minutes after you see this laptop - including a break in all the talking (when you're asked to give a comlink to a nearby NPC) for you to check it without interruption. But once you download data from a machine, you can't do it again, even with that mission critical laptop. The mission objectives also didn't say that it was completed. You basically would have to restart from the last save and wait for the objective to be given, then download the data. One of the game's later patches fixed this, so that in the event that the player uses the laptop before he's told to, Betters will note that he's already got the data and proceed as normal.
• Half-Life:
  • In the original release, it turns out that one of your many foes in the game include the elevators. Almost all the elevators in this version have a rather persistent tendency to lock your movements, make the "foot-scuffling" SFX play a bajillion times, and then just KILL you. This happens when the elevator has reached its destination, higher floor or lower floor. Your only hope is prayer and jumping just before the elevator stops. Though it doesn't seem to happen with the two big lifts.
  • This turns into an absolute nightmare in the final section of Interloper, where every single spinning D-pad elevator is susceptible to this bug. So on top of trying to navigate yourself and avoiding the fireballs of the flying aliens, you have to wildly jump up and down on the elevators to ensure no spontaneous deaths, and in the process, you may very well jump and fall into the Bottomless Pits below the elevator! And did we mention that sometimes, your jumping has to be on the ball, like you have to touch the elevator only just after it stops? Quick Save is your friend.
  • Interestingly, the first time you can encounter this bug (the elevator leading to the surface in the level "We've Got Hostiles"), it behaves slightly differently. Instead of immediately killing you, you just continuously take damage from some unknown entity.
  • This is also a problem with the floating platforms in Xen and the earlier parts of Interloper. Most of them don't have this problem; the buggy ones are located near the bottom in Xen and at least one exists in the first two parts of Interloper. And sometimes for these guys, all you need is to even land on them in the first place to trigger this bug. Did we mention Quick Save is your friend?
  • What's worse is the elevator bug effects NPCs as well, which normally isn't a problem, but in Blue Shift there's a couple scientists on an elevator ride with you near the beginning that will usually die from this bug. This wouldn't be such an issue if the game didn't assume the player killed the scientists and give them a Non-Standard Game Over from it.
  • On older computers, the game can and will randomly crash when loading areas. Fortunately, this bug is somehow avoidable by equipping explosives when going between maps.
  • Half-Life: Opposing Force has a door about 2/3 of the way through the game which, if opened, may crash the game. Unfortunately, opening this door is also the only way to progress. There are a number of tutorials online on how to engage noclip and skip straight to the next working point in the game — it seems that whatever is behind the door is what crashes the game, not the act of opening it, because even looking in that direction while noclipping triggers the crash, hence the need for tutorials instructing how to noclip to the next area.
• Half-Life 2:
  • There's a well-known bug near the end of the game (during the chapter "Our Benefactors") that makes it impossible to proceed past a certain hallway. The Confiscation Field in the Citadel incinerates all your firearms and supercharges the Gravity Gun, but moving around, jumping, or crouching while the field is in effect will make it impossible to jump at all, even after the field has turned off. This usually goes unnoticed until a few rooms later, when a seemingly innocuous waist-high fence becomes an impassable barrier. The only way to 'fix' the bug is to reload from an earlier save point or start the level over entirely.
  • The May 2010 mega-update (which ported the whole game and Episode One over to the latest version of the Source engine) introduced, among many other bugs that have yet to be fixed, one that causes scripted sequences to not run, trapping you in the back room with an inert Alyx. They did patch this a week or so in, but apparently every copy of the game was susceptible.
  • Another issue that Valve apparently hadn't planned for (and that mods sometimes activate without knowing it) is that the nasty but slow poison headcrab zombie shouldn't appear in a level where there are also barnacles around. Most NPCs that blunder into barnacles get pulled up and eaten by the monster, but the game crashes if a poison zombie is grabbed, as the game simply has no idea how to handle this situation.
  • Before all these bugs, it was possible for Alyx or another companion to die right as an autosave kicked in, trapping you in a loop where your companion would die and the game would immediately reload at their death, causing a loop of reloads. If you were quick enough with your escape button, you could load an earlier save, but it's still a major pain.
• While rare, it was possible in Halo: Combat Evolved to checkpoint right at a point of inevitable death (hello, sticky grenade). This would trap your character in a Cycle of Hurting and force you to go back to the start of the level. Future Halo games have a failsafe feature that reverted the game to an earlier checkpoint after a certain number of deaths in such a situation.
• The House of the Dead: OVERKILL:
  • During the Crawler boss fight, the only way to avoid taking damage from Crawler's swipes is to shoot its claw as it prepares to attack. However, when the Crawler is on one side of the train, the mark supposedly showing its weak spot is set too high on its arm/claw, meaning if you actually aim for it you take the hit anyway. You have to shoot it in the spot that's marked when it's on the other side of the train, which is difficult to do without help.
  • The game's "Extra Mutants" mode (which adds enemies to a level) appears to be an afterthought, as enemies spawn in rather inconvenient locations. In one scene in "Ballistic Trauma" where hospital doors blow open and zombies swarm out, one female zombie only present on Extra Mutants can get stuck behind one of the doors. You can't kill her, and the scene won't advance until all enemies are dead. Unintentionally Unwinnable ensues.
  • There seems to be a rare bug, at least in the Wii version, where mutants forget you're in cutscene mode (i.e. unable to shoot any of them) and start attacking you anyway. The "Carny" chapter in that version is also more prone to random freezes than the others, particularly around the boss fight.
  • Conversely, the Extended Cut on PS3 and PC has a bug in the boss fight for the "Ballistic Trauma" chapter. One of the Screamer's attacks involves creating three copies of herself, all of which rush towards you and pause just before actually reaching you. Shoot the real one and you dodge the attack, shoot one of the fake ones and the Screamer attacks you, directly, in one of the creepiest moments in the entire game. However, sometimes the game bugs out and even shooting the correct one still counts as missing, so you take the hit. This issue isn't present in the Typing of the Dead mode of the PC version, so it might depend on the weapon used.
• Killing Floor:
  • A glitch can be triggered by swapping from first to third person camera in observer mode right when the round ends. If you're unfortunate enough to trigger it, you'll spawn with a third person camera. Since the game relies heavily on ironsights, good luck hitting anything. Oh, and you'll get a nice inventory glitch to go along with this glitched camera that erases items from your inventory after you switch. And whether or not you can pick anything up seems to be determined by chance. Getting back into observer mode (by dying) is the only way to fix it.
  • If the Patriarch spawns within eyesight of the players and is able to start attacking before the observer camera around him switches back to their normal first-person views, the game will keep everyone in that camera mode far longer than it's supposed to, essentially allowing him multiple free hits on the players as they're basically forced to choose between aiming in his general direction or actually having any clue where they are for a couple seconds. Thankfully, this is very rare, because specimens in general aren't supposed to spawn in eyesight of a player, and even when the Patriarch does the players can still move during the four or so seconds where he plays his spawn-in animation to get out of his sight.
  • There seems to be a glitch with grenade launchers where, if there's even a tiny amount of lag between the server and a player, that player's grenades have suddenly lost their safe arming distance. Fire an M79 at a Specimen two feet in front of you in these circumstances, and as said Specimen dies from the force of the grenade impact, you'll be injured as though it exploded even though it clearly did not.
• In the PC version of Legendary: The Box, the elevator that leads to the final battle will pass right through the player's body, causing them to fall through the floor and die. If you're affected by the bug, it will happen every time you try and is impossible to bypass without messing around with the game's .ini files. The developer's response? "Buy another computer, because we aren't going to fix it".
• Marathon Eternal is a fan-made game using the open source version of the engine. On the level "Roots and Radicals", there's a medium-sized room which spawns endless amounts of Enemy and Weapons sprites, not to mention unlimited Helpful Drones. Now, there is a wall next to the spawning pad which can not only be switched on to block off the troopers but smash them during their short run outside that area. Letting them spawn instead of blocking off the path can make the game unwinnable because Alephone will block off hit detection due to memory usage exceeding limits.
• Medal of Honor: Allied Assault had a rather nasty bug in the Destroyed Village map. With some careful jumping, a sly player could actually scale the Invisible Wall and go under the map in a feat called Landsharking. The landsharker is completely invulnerable to damage, but can still shoot other players. Plus, since they're under the map, it's impossible to hide from them unless you're on a second story. This would essentially make the team with the landsharker unstoppable. The problem was eventually fixed.
• Medal of Honor (2010) has a lot of these bugs, such as scripted events failing to activate, and parts of levels failing to draw in, causing you to fall to your death in the void. Warfighter continued these bugs. On the monsoon level, it's entirely possible to move faster than the game expects and trigger a checkpoint, just as you encounter a scripted set-piece. This results in the game crashing, which is irritating but manageable. The game-breaking part sets in when you reload and find that all you can do is walk - not run - around with your gun lowered like a duck in a shooting gallery waiting for a setpiece to go off that won't trigger, while the mooks shoot at you and your AI allies are busy missing them. The only solution is restarting the entire level.
• Following the release of the April 27, 2017 patch of Overwatch, D.Va's mere existance caused client crashes, forcing Blizzard to render her unplayable. She returned to playable status three hours later.
• Paladins's Version 2.01 (and possibly some earlier versions) has a rare but horrible glitch when queueing for a Casual game. Sometimes, the game might put you in a Custom Game lobby instead, and ask you to choose your Champion... but not actually display the Champion selection screen. If this happens, there is nothing you can do except wait for the game to time out and boot you back to the main menu... with a Deserter penalty that prevents you from joining any other games for the next 30 minutes.
• PAYDAY: The Heist runs on the not-too-reliable Diesel engine. Due to the quirky physics system and/or desyncing issues (if your connection to the host is shoddy), it's entirely possible to fall through the floor and be under the level in a strange void. Sometimes, you'll suffer fall damage if you phase through the floor and you can bleed out completely so you can respawn later. Other times, you can keep falling forever with no way out other than to leave the game and come back.
• Its sequel PAYDAY 2 has had its fair share over its noticeably longer life:
  • The Cloaker is already a nasty piece of work that can down you instantly with a kick, but in the pre-release beta he was even worse, as he would literally kick you back to the desktop. He was subsequently benched for the remainder of the beta as well as the first six months of the game's release, before being added back in with Update #23.
  • On launch, the game had a bug where unlocking an achievement or completing a heist caused everyone's game to crash; this was fortunately patched within the hour.
  • Patch 11 had the one-two punch of breaking all armor's protection values, so that they all had the same protection as the two-piece suit, and making regular SWAT and gangsters deal triple damage, so even Normal difficulty was horrifically difficult for anyone not running a Dodge build (which may have contributed to why, even years later, more people tend to side with Dodge in the "Dodge vs. Armor" debate). Incidentally, the latter part of the bug was actually mildly popular; the next update fixed both issues, then the one after that added a rarer and more dangerous alternative to the regular street cop who carried a noticeably more powerful Bronco .44 revolver.
  • For a while after the Armored Transport DLC was released, picking up the secret blueprints that would lead to the Train heist would cause the game to crash while attempting to load said heist, which meant that any and all loot stashed in the first part would be lost because you wouldn't get paid until you completed the train heist as well.
    • Even years after the DLC launched, friendly AI still isn't entirely optimized for playing Armored Transport heists. They seem to particularly get stuck in odd areas - getting downed in one of the trucks and being left to bleed out is understandable since they can't get into the trucks, but getting downed in the middle of the street and left to bleed out because they apparently all went for a coffee break in the nearby cafe, rather than immediately hauling ass to get to you like they do in every other heist in the game, is less so. There are also the occasional spots where otherwise-intangible scenery bits along a wall will let you toss a bag into them, then never let you retrieve it, even when one just a few centimeters away from it is still perfectly accessible, unless you have big enough explosives to blast it back into a playable area that's apparently more playable than normal playable areas.
  • "Diamond Store" can be glitched out by throwing too many bags into the escape van at once, causing the "Escape Available" objective to never trigger, even if you stash every bag in the map.
  • The "Hotline Miami" heist, at one point, requires you to set gas cans on the hoods of cars and then shoot them to ignite the cars in question. You're supposed to only torch four cars, but more gas cans and cars than are necessary spawn, so it's possible if you place gas cans before igniting any of them for players to light up five or more. If they do this before the objectives update, the mission logic can glitch out and never progress to the next objective.
  • "Hoxton Breakout" can glitch and end up removing the necessary parking ticket from the game if someone other than the host grabs it. Disconnecting or going into custody is supposed to place the ticket in another active player's inventory. If both happen at the same time, the scripts conflict and just remove that player's ticket without passing it onto another player, forcing a restart of the day.
  • Meth ingredients in heists such as day 1 of Rats had the same issue as above, where being required items they're supposed to transfer to another player if the one holding them leaves or is arrested. Problem is, they don't stack (so one player can't just grab all the ingredients in a level and then focus on cooking while the other three guard him), and if you need to cook a certain amount of meth to complete the heist, this can potentially render the heist unable to be completed. Overkill eventually fixed this by adding a caveat where meth ingredients can be stacked, but only if the extras are acquired by being transferred from a disconnected or arrested player.
  • For some time after the Lion Bipod was added to the light machine guns, there were some oddities about it - namely, it could be deployed in the middle of some animations, without actually properly interrupting them. For deploying while reloading, this was just funny, since the belts and ammo boxes would just continue removing and replacing themselves through no effort on the player's part. If you attempted to deploy while switching weapons, however, the game would crash because it wouldn't know what to do, so a later update prevented deploying the bipod in the midst of reloads (except until the point where the ammo counter actually updates) or while switching weapons.
  • For Linux players, Hoxton's Housewarming Party in October 2016 was a cavalcade of this, as five of the ten days of the event - four of them all in sequence - broke something or other. Day 1 broke the game entirely so it wouldn't even launch. Day 2 broke matchmaking and the new safehouse (the entire point of that day's update). Day 3's update never even launched on Linux. Day 4 broke the new concussion grenades for a few hours, until another patch later in the day fixed them. After five days of no problems, Day 10's update broke the game entirely again until the first post-event update.
  • The following Spring 2017 event, The Search for Kento, was another set of mostly-broken updates, just spread out across every even-numbered day. Day 2's first update added a remade version of the first game's Heat Street heist for all platforms... but Linux players were completely unable to actually access it. The day also broke matchmaking until another update the next day. Day 4 added the "Crime Spree" game mode to let you sequentially make the game harder to accrue bigger and better rewards, but it was completely broken for anyone, regardless of platform, who played the game with a Steam Controller, on top of breaking matchmaking once more on Linux. Day 5 fixed the latter issue, only for Day 6 to break it on Linux a third time. Day 8 launched a beta for improvements to friendly AI... on Windows — Linux didn't get the beta until well after the event. Day 10, which added another remade heist in Green Bridge... well, you can guess what broke on what platform for a fourth time.
  • The Kingpin Injector with the Scarface Character Pack is already pretty good, sacrificing a throwable to let you heal three-fourths of all damage you take while it's active in its base form, and boost your health by up to 80% at its highest level, at the cost that the effect only lasts 6 seconds and has a 30-second cooldown. Then came Update 158, which broke it entirely by accidentally removing the cooldown.
• In Portal, the game transitions through levels by putting you in an elevator, saving your position relative to the elevator, loading the next level, and spawning you in a position relative to the elevator in the last level. This is smooth enough, but if you jump at just the right time and position when the game goes to load the next level, it's possible to get trapped at the top of the elevator doorframe with no way to get out.
• The original release of Quake total conversion Malice has a really bad example of this. In level 8 there is a deep shaft which the player has to parachute down in order to complete the level. But unfortunately the developers forgot to put the parachute in the level! This made it completely impossible to complete the level unless you used the 'fly' cheat from the console. A patch was hastily released by the rather embarrassed developers.
• Late into the second mission of Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, if you send your allies to walk along the right-hand wall of a parking garage, they suddenly become stuck in one specific spot and are unable to move at all. Considering that sending them along said wall is naturally the best way to flank the bad guys, this can become a frequent problem. Fortunately, if you move up anyway, they will eventually fix it themselves by teleporting back to you before you get to the next group of enemies.
• Rainbow Six Siege:
  • The Operation Red Crow expansion added an operator named Hibana, whose unique gadget can, on the PS4 version, crash the game, disconnect players randomly or drop the frame rate to 0 for seemingly no reason (bearing in mind that the Xbox One and PC versions suffered no issues with it at all). Ubisoft quickly issued a patch (about a day after the launch of the DLC) that, in lieu of actually fixing anything, completely prevents PS4 players from picking Hibana at all. This situation worsened when it was discovered that this fix actually prevented players from progressing past the end of season rewards pop-up. Attempting to click through this pop-up would result in the game crashing. With no other choice, Ubisoft restored Hibana into the game, and thus the glitch with it.
  • As if PS4 players hadn't already had it rough, a small bug fix patch, during the Operation Blood Orchid expansion, caused quite possibly one of the worst bugs of the 8th console generation. The bug had the potential to completely brick your hard drive beyond repair (where even a system restore won't help) and, somehow, your entire PSN account. The bug was triggered by simply trying to invite a friend to your game. If you were unfortunate enough to do this, you would be rendered unable to send game invites to people ever again — on any PS4 game. And this is "lucky" in comparison to what many players suffered - where their console may be completely bricked through no fault of their own.
• The first Red Faction has the infamous submarine glitch. At one point, you have to get into an underwater lab, preferably using a submarine. Unfortunately, when being lowered with a crane, the sub will explode 99 times out of 100. While that water passage can be traversed without the submarine, it's suicide on higher difficulties and you can get stuck there with no way to advance. While this bug is frustrating, it is known to be caused by an overly high FPS rate, inevitable on new computers. If you do something to reduce it, such as turning on vertical sync (restricting the framerate to your monitor's refresh rate) or compressing your hard disk in the background, the ride will be yours.
• The Activision PC game ReVOLUTION (2002) had a level that actually could not be beaten without a cheat code. A patch supposedly fixed it, but it would not work on existing saves (requiring that the game be completely started over). Here's a very amusing review at GameSpot.
• At one point in Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, you're supposed to take an elevator down along with your partner. Unfortunately, 90% of the time your partner will inexplicably explode into bloody chunks while riding the elevator with you (presumably the game somehow thinks she has been crushed by the very elevator she's inside.) Oh, and this is an Escort Mission, so it's game over if it happens to you.
  • Random deaths to the environment are a bit of a thing for early games on the LithTech engine Shogo introduced. The in-engine cutscenes of its sister game Blood II: The Chosen can still affect the player character while they're stuck in place due to said cutscene. At times this is as harmless as Caleb not being present to snark at/threaten Gideon because the player entered the cutscene by walking up a down escalator and got pushed back down to the bottom during said cutscene, but one in particular in the second chapter is triggered while the player is walking through a door, which automatically closes just five seconds into said cutscene - if the player happens to be standing in the wrong spot, the door will push them into the door frame and immediately crush them to death. Which the player will not be aware of until after the cutscene ends, except for the screen temporarily flashing red during it.
  • For some reason, the other Chosen in Blood II, despite being allies in-story, are programmed to be hostile to the player in regular gameplay. When the cutscenes work properly, this isn't an issue, since their regular AI routines are overridden by the cutscene logic and animations, so they stand around and just talk like they're supposed to and either leave or have the level end before anything bad happens. The problem is that sometimes the animations and camera work get out of sync with the audio for a cutscene, which will cause it to end early. If you're in view of them when this happens, they can and will open fire, leading to situations such as a tough boss fight ending with Gabriella immediately chewing away the last of your health with her vulcan cannon. Amusingly, the inverse is also true, so if you have enough health and/or are in the right spot to not immediately aggro them when the cutscene ends early, you can kill them in turn and not screw anything up.
• The first release of Si N had a rather nasty bug during the Chambers of Darwin trials. After the second chamber, a guard is supposed to open a tunnel passage for the third one. What actually happened is that the soldier would keep redirecting you to the tube, without opening it: more frustration comes through the fact that you're slowly dying during the tests. A couple of months later, Ritual released a patch to cure this glitch.
• In Sniper: Path of Vengeance, towards the end of the game there is a level where you must board an elevator to get to the next level. The game auto-saves after each level, and on the first attempt at conquering the next level, there are no problems — but if you reload from the auto-save, the elevator doors will never open again, and you get stuck in the elevator. Thankfully, the autosave feature creates a new save for each level, so you only need to replay one level if you forgot to save right after exiting the elevator.
• The first System Shock has received one as time goes on. First, it's designed for old MS-DOS systems and won't run on modern Windows. Fine, there are plenty of good DOS emulators out there that can do the job. Here's the problem: the final battle is a Time-Limit Boss, as you have to destroy SHODAN before she finishes Mind Raping you. The countdown is not based on the clock, but instead on your processor cycles... which on a modern machine, run many hundreds of times faster than they did back when the game was released. This can easily render the final battle unwinnable, as there is no way to damage SHODAN enough before you die. You'll have to limit the processor speed on the emulator if you want to have a chance at this. The Enhanced Edition intermittently fixes this bug (if it doesn't, enabling Vsync in options generally does the trick).
• Team Fortress 2:
  • In the console versions, it's possible to sometimes walk around in the sky above the second cap of the first part of the Dustbowl map. If an Engineer manages to build a sentry up there, then the sentry is effectively indestructible, and getting past it without going into range is almost impossible. This was even worse in the PlayStation 3 version, as it was not developed by Valve themselves — glitches like that continued to run rampant even a year after they had been fixed on the PC and 360.
  • In the PC version, when using the Red Tape Recorder to sap a sentry gun, the building would be downgraded, but would not lose health, and could be re-upgraded to gain an even bigger health pool. If this happened enough, it would result in a ridiculously tough sentry gun.
  • A similar bug can cause a sapper to not disable the sentry gun, but still damage it and be impossible to remove with the wrench. The gun can be maintained by repairing it, but the constant damage will rapidly drain the engineer's metal reserves and need constant attention. Fortunately, this bug can be fixed by simply picking up your sentry gun and putting it back.
  • The Amputator is a weapon that heals nearby allies when taunting with it. However, on release the player taunting could disconnect mid-taunt, leaving the healing aura up for the rest of the round.
  • The Chargin' Targe and the Splendid Screen once had their rate of turning be based on the player's framerate, rendering the weapons borderline useless on slower computers and borderline overpowered on more powerful ones. A side effect of this rendered the Ali Baba's Wee Booties pointless, because the main point of it is to give the player better control over charging; its actual effects wavered between "negligible" and "nothing at all" depending on your rig. In fact, the sheer bizarreness of the bug made it unnoticed until this user showcased a video on how broken the shields actually were.
  • The first release of the Cow Mangler 5000, a particle gun, came with a ridiculously high polycount and particle effects so intense that a lone player spam-shooting it could crash an otherwise reliable server, and even on a super-robust server capable of withstanding it, it could still fry other player's graphics cards because they couldn't handle it. Oh, and for some reason, it was also paintable, making it difficult to tell whose team that laser is coming from. Thankfully, Valve quickly patched it to make its effects and appearance less extreme (in addition to balance changes, since the weapon was also considered the other definition of Game-Breaker).
  • When the PASS Time gamemode was originally released, the Engineer was able to use the Short Circuit weapon to delete the jack from the game. This made scoring goals completely impossible, which either guaranteed a draw or prevented the enemy team from equalising, depending on how many people the Engineer in question wanted to grief.
• Turok:
  • The original PC port of Turok 2 seems to have a major memory leak, causing it to slow down to slideshow levels (even on fast computers) after playing a few minutes, and possibly crash.
  • Early releases of Rage Wars, meanwhile, had a bothersome bug in the Two Player Trial (basically story mode, but not really). The Monkey Tag maps had no win condition whatsoever, predictably making them impossible to complete. Since the entire trial map is playable, you would normally be able to just skip them. The problem is that the very last map before the Final Boss, Tal Set, is a Monkey Tag level. This made Starlight and Tal Set just barely inaccessible, and one of the trophies in the game unobtainable. As a side effect, this also rendered Mantid Mites' final skin, Teddies, unplayable. Minor problems, since the single player version can be completed, but still there.
• Unreal series:
  • In both Unreal and Unreal Tournament, trying to pick up too many weapons crashes the game. That, or your entire inventory will just disappear entirely, leaving you with nothing but what you currently had equipped until you can find another weapon (at which point what you then-currently had equipped will disappear too).
  • The original Unreal engine also tends to have problems running on CPUs faster than 3 GHz or so, at least on the default hardware renderer, causing games on the engine to speed up to levels that make them unplayable. Fortunately, this is relatively easy to fix, either setting the game's affinity to only one CPU core or downloading updated software-rendering drivers that can handle running the game the way it's supposed to on exponentially-faster modern hardware.

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