History ObviousBeta / VideoGames

Here's an example to the polish of the game: in a few levels there's [[HailfirePeaks lava in ice caverns]], and in levels where erosion is a hazard, the ground can slowly become lava if not taken care of, and there are a handful of levels [[BreadEggsBreadedEggs combining both aspects]]. A problem in this arises in that while the two other types of caverns, rock and lava, have graphics for the terrain deteriorating and slowly becoming lava, ice caverns don't have such graphics and instead reuse the base graphic, meaning you have no indication of what state the ground is at before it just suddenly turns into lava, rendering it [[RunningGag/{{Phelous}} completely useless]].

* When the ''Leviathan'' DLC for ''VideoGame/EuropaUniversalisIV'' was released, the game became littered with ridiculous bugs, such as the ability to [[https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/n1181t/you_can_cancel_monument_construction_in_other/ cancel constructions in other countries]] or your monarch getting [[https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/n0339g/i_see_your_666_ruler_and_raise_you_a_buggy_update/ blatantly implausible stats]].
* ''Infestation: Survivor Stories'' (originally called ''The War Z'' until a trademark dispute with a [[Literature/WorldWarZ similarly-named work]]) managed the remarkable feat of being a [[ShoddyKnockoffProduct shoddy knockoff]] of [[VideoGame/DayZ a game]] that was a ''real'' beta at the time. ''Infestation'' touted itself as an [[MassivelyMultiplayerOnlineRolePlayingGame MMORPG]] pitting the players against each other (and the zombies) in a huge, detailed, WideOpenSandbox. The game at launch didn't contain most of the touted features and was riddled with bugs and questionable mechanics (including the ability to [[BribingYourWayToVictory pay your way to a ridiculous advantage]]). Some parts even came with overlays stating "Not for Public Release" -- that's as obvious a beta as you're going to get. The backlash was so great that not only was the game pulled from Platform/{{Steam}}, players also got refunds -- which almost never happened back then. It's speculated that this game was a direct reason for the Steam Early Access program, Steam's "public beta" setup (and possibly also a factor in Valve changing its "all sales final" policy). The game's lead developer, Sergey Titov, insisted that he had created a masterpiece, blamed customers for misinterpreting the game's description, and [[http://kotaku.com/5969784/the-war-z-mess-every-crazy-detail-we-know-so-far banned critics from the game's forums]] -- perhaps it's no surprise that he was also the lead developer on ''Big Rigs''.
* ''VideoGame/TestDrive Unlimited 2'' suffered from a swarm of bugs and server issues when it was released on the PC. Since it had online activation and needed a connection to the game's master servers to play, the game would flat out ''refuse'' to let players start up the game, and it would often kick them out of the game without warning due to massive server overload. The day-one DLC was broken and would eat players' in-game money, and the game had several GameBreaker promotional cars like the Bugatti Veyron SS.
* The PC ports of ''VideoGame/{{Oddworld}}: Munch's Oddysee'' and ''Stranger's Wrath'' as part of the Oddboxx were more like obvious alphas. Despite being ports of games that had come out five to nine years prior on the original Platform/{{Xbox}}, released halfway through [[MediaNotes/TheSeventhGenerationOfConsoleVideoGames the next generation]] with no graphical upgrades, they performed terribly even on high-end computers. Graphical options were opaque and lacking (''Stranger's Wrath'' infamously ''only'' had options for changing the resolution), you can't move with a gamepad in ''Munch's Oddysee'', and there's an unchangeable Y-axis flip in ''Stranger's Wrath''. On the upside, the developers promised - and actually delivered - patches to clean this all up, including one that fixed all performance issues, and for ''Stranger's Wrath'' a free update into what would have otherwise been a Platform/PlayStation3-exclusive [[UpdatedRerelease HD rerelease]].
* The delayed demo of indie 2-D fighting game ''Beast's Fury'' turned out to be an Obvious Beta, which was pretty upsetting to eagerly-waiting fans. There were control problems, graphical issues, and bugs galore, including [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjNVzON_res one humorous glitch]] that an official tester stumbled across. The developer, Evil Dog Productions, [[SkewedPriorities placed little importance on updating the demo]], and they would later pay for that choice when, in 2016, they would find themselves cancelling ''Beast's Fury''. The rest of the game's TroubledProduction -- which is a story of its own -- didn't make things any better.
* ''VideoGame/EmpireTotalWar'' started out this way, but it was fixed (somewhat) with a lot of patching. If you want to see what it was like on release, fire up the Road to Independence scenario, which for some reason seems largely unaffected by the bug fixes. Marvel as your AI willfully ignores an order you've give dozens of times, and when it does listen, interprets your order to move 12 feet forward to mean go play grab-ass in a forest 5,000 miles away.
* ''VideoGame/MuelsfellRiseOfTheGolems'': Since coming out of "beta", there are just as many, if not more, bugs than there were in beta. The features and monsters added later are particularly bad.
* ''VideoGame/AnarchyOnline'' version 1.0 was an Obvious Beta, to the point where the original version ''would effectively force you to reinstall Windows''.
%% * ''Flanker 2.0'' was so unplayable that the cleaned, definitive version was... ''Flanker 2.5''. ''Falcon 4.0'' was the same as well.
* ''Streets of VideoGame/SimCity'' is a [=3D=] WideOpenSandbox DrivingGame spinoff of [=SimCity=] in which you can drive around cities imported from Videogame/SimCity 2000. Unfortunately, it's riddled with tons of bugs. Likewise with ''[=SimCopter=]'', except with a helicopter. Both are good games with a good-sized fanbase, they just happen to have a ''lot'' of bugs. You can play it just fine; it'll just crash every half hour or so.
* ''VideoGame/SimCity2013'' was released in a miserable state, many of which stemmed from two really big issues, the traffic and the [[UsefulNotes/DigitalRightsManagement always-online requirements]]. The backlash was so bad, that when the community began touting its competitor ''VideoGame/CitiesSkylines'' as "the Simcity 5 that never was", EA had to sack everyone and ax the entire Maxis studio to prevent their shares from plummeting further.
** Traffic was very poorly programmed. Drivers would always take the shortest route rather than the faster one, resulting in all the cars ignoring the highway to take a single-lane dirt road. Cars would sometimes go in endless loops. Public services tended to follow each other, meaning buses would make the traffic worse rather than better. Fire trucks couldn't handle more than one fire at a time. People can't cross a street to go shopping, leaving the stores empty (and residents mad because [[FailedASpotCheck they can't find the stores]]). Any city would grind to a complete halt.
** Compounding that was that the game would withhold or outright misstate key information you needed to fix the problem. It would even show you a much higher population than your city really had, meaning that you wouldn't suspect anything was wrong until it ground to a halt from lack of manpower. The maximum city size was diminutive, and artificial -- it was easy to build outside the borders by using an exploit, with no negative effects.
** It was also possible to log in to your account and edit and control some features in someone else's city in the region. It was trivially easy this way to force other players to go broke and lose.
** The servers just couldn't handle all the players. Wait times could exceed an ''hour'', money would disappear when gifted to another city, and the game would just crash at points. EA had to remove some features (most notably "Cheetah Speed") just to prevent the servers from imploding. Although they never fixed the traffic bugs, they ''did'' fix this (or at least enough people stopped playing that the servers could handle it again). Early players even got access to a "[[http://simcity2013wiki.com/wiki/SimCity_Launch_Park Launch Park]]" for their trouble.
* The PC version of ''VideoGame/RedFaction II'' had a multiplayer mode that didn't allow multiple players, and showed pickups as 2D sprites in spite of the working 3D models in the single-player campaign. The campaign itself was a veritable glitch-fest, and the best ending was essentially impossible to get legitimately due to a bug where some civilians whom you were supposed to save would ''chase the player's vehicle down so they could die on contact'', which was completely unavoidable.

* Creator/{{Sierra}}
** Most of the later VGA adventure games suffer from a profound lack of testing and can crash randomly based upon any number of bugs. The worst example is probably ''VideoGame/QuestForGloryIV''.
** ''VideoGame/PoliceQuest4OpenSeason'' has countless bugs that randomly crash the game, corrupt saved games, or make the game {{unwinnable}}.
* ''VideoGame/UltimaIX''. The ending chapter of the Trilogy of Trilogies. The greatest RPG ever. And it was released as a mash of crap, unplayable on most hardware that was available at the time, and was a war crime against canon.
-->'''[[Website/OldManMurray Erik Wolpaw]]:''' [''Ultima IX'' is] a game in which programming errors battle each other gladiator-style for the privilege of crashing my computer[.]
** The original, unpatched version of ''VideoGame/UltimaVIII: Pagan'' is [[UnintentionallyUnwinnable completely broken]]. What was released is an unfinished alpha version. Remember: ''Ultima VIII'' is the one where Creator/ElectronicArts wanted to turn it into an action RPG. Imagine a ''Mario'' game where it's impossible to estimate how far you need to jump and every gap has an instant-death pit. Unpatched ''Ultima VIII'' is like playing ''VideoGame/IWannaBeTheGuy'' blindfolded. With a mouse.
* Though it had no real GameBreakingBug[=s=], ''VideoGame/TheWitcher'' was such a bad case that the developers took pains to make up for it by producing the ''Enhanced Edition'' (available separately or as a free update), which in addition to being "the game as it ''should'' have been released," also came with a host of bonus in-game content and ''eight'' complete language packages (audio and text). This all happened because the game was considered to be a niche product for a fantasy novel only really known in Poland at that time, so the international interest was a surprise and the localization rushed, resulting in sloppy English.

* The expansion packs to ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXI'' are JustForFun/{{egregious}} in this regard. If you buy them on their release date, you're not so much buying an expansion so much as access to a couple new areas without a whole lot to do in them and the promise that over the next eighteen months, they'll gradually let you access all the stuff they promised on the box.
* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV'' was released lacking so many features, and with so many known serious game design problems (they infamously asked critics to not review the game for a month after release so they had time to try and fix things), that it was more of an obvious alpha; it was straight-up called "unfixable". Undaunted, Creator/SquareEnix apologized and promised to fix it, replacing the lead developer, ''remaking it'' from scratch, providing story updates in the interim, and waiving subscription fees until then. The result was ''FFXIV: A Realm Reborn'', essentially a new game set in the same world five years later that was received much better and lasted far longer than it could have in its original state.

* ''VideoGame/HellgateLondon'' was released in a woefully buggy and unbalanced state, after a too-short beta period. It rapidly improved, but by that time, most people had already written it off.
* The first two ''VideoGame/{{STALKER}}'' games, ''Shadow of Chernobyl'' and ''Clear Sky'', shipped with a great many glitches and bugs. It took almost a decade of [[GameMod modders]] fiddling with the games to fix them into being stable and playable.
** ''Clear Sky'' was especially bad, where the state of the game could change ''between quick saves''.[[labelnote:example]]The ''WebAnimation/ZeroPunctuation'' review noted a case where Yahtzee quicksaved behind cover in a gunfight, promptly died to [[GrenadeSpam a couple grenades]], quickloaded, and discovered the grenade-throwers had completely forgotten they were supposed to be hostile [[RefugeInAudacity until a couple minutes after one of them agreed to lead him somewhere else]]. Then the game crashed.[[/labelnote]] Its original unpatched version was also notorious for numerous [[GameBreakingBug Game Breaking Bugs]] that made the game UnintentionallyUnwinnable, one of the most notorious occurring during the ''final story mission''.
** ''Shadow of Chernobyl'' was also rushed in many other ways: translation errors in the English version meant a lot of confusion[[labelnote:*]]"shotgun" was translated as "rifle" and "attic" as "basement", for example[[/labelnote]]; [=NPCs=] (including vital quest givers) can die in random locations[[labelnote:*]]even in otherwise-safe encampments, because they tended to spawn inside the campfires; mods like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Complete 2009 had no choice but to make [=NPCs=] ''completely immune to fire damage'' to get around this[[/labelnote]]; it's possible to sequence-break to the point that the game takes ten minutes to finish; and there was ''enormous'' amounts of [[DummiedOut obviously cut content]] - fishing around in the game files showed entire missing levels, fully programmed weapons that never actually appeared, and camera settings for drivable cars and helicopters. Notable was the infamous [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc5rB-0ZBcI "Singularity Car"]] glitch.
** Both ''Shadow of Chernobyl'' and ''Clear Sky'' are near-legendary for crashing to desktop constantly (''even patched versions''), to the point where the infamous "X-Ray Engine has stopped working" Windows CTD message has become MemeticMutation among the series' fans.
* ''K.Hawk Survival Instinct'' is a 2002 stealth game where guards will sometimes just see you through walls, one of the levels mistakenly makes you invincible to normal enemy gunfire and the gameplay is incredibly unbalanced. (It's near impossible to escape from enemies as they blatantly always know where you are and only stop after a long period of time, you can kill an enemy with gunfire, hide several rooms away and an enemy will cross half the map to your exact hiding spot.)
* ''Epic'', a space flight sim on the Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS, shipped in a hideously unfinished state. The waypoint system would only point you to a single target even if you'd already destroyed it, the manual was confusingly written and incomplete (including a statement that an ion "is a particle of FILL IN LATER"), a cheat was printed on the control summary card, and early versions of the game crashed so often that many retailers returned their copies and refused to buy fixed ones. To make matters worse for buyers, the game received rave reviews in several magazines based on alpha code upwards of seven months before it was actually released.

* ''Franchise/TheElderScrolls''
** An unfortunately common occurrence throughout the series, in large part due to the sheer scale of the games. Each game has its fair share of [[GameBreakingBug Game-Breaking Bugs]] and exploitative GoodBadBugs when released, but Bethesda is generally quick to get them patched fairly quickly. For the PC versions of the games, modders will usually put out {{Game Mod}}s as unofficial patches until Bethesda is able to release official ones.
** The original release of ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIDaggerfall Daggerfall]]'' had a vicious game-breaking bug which renders the main quest impossible to complete. Not ''sometimes'' unwinnable -- it was impossible to ''ever'' complete the main quest in the original retail release, fullstop. And this in an era (1996) when fewer people had internet connections, so it couldn't be easily patched. Regardless, a patch was made available, which includes an official tool entitled FIXSAVE.EXE, which [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin as its name implies]], repairs errors in saved game files because they were too common to tell all affected players to restart the game. Bethesda also ended up publicizing some cheats, such as a dungeon teleportation spell, because the glitchy collision system in the engine tended to let people slip between the world geometry and into "The Void", where they'd fall forever otherwise, and because of the game's use of [[RandomlyGeneratedLevels Randomly Generated Dungeons]] could often result in dungeons ''without exits''.
** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIIMorrowind Morrowind]]'' itself was released relatively stable for a Bethesda title. Bugs and glitches were certainly present, but, in a major step up from ''Daggerfall'', you could at least complete all of the major questlines without significant issue. However, the two major {{Expansion Pack}}s, ''Tribunal'' and ''Bloodmoon'', badly conflicted with one another. Installing ''Bloodmoon'' after ''Tribunal'' (as most people did since ''Tribunal'' came out first) caused an "endless loop" dialogue bug with a major ''Tribunal'' character, cutting off the final 80% of the expansion's main quest line. A fan patch was released which largely took care of this until Bethesda released their own, which just created loads of ''new'' problems. The GameOfTheYearEdition finally, thankfully, resolved the majority of these issues.
** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIVOblivion Oblivion]]'' was plagued by many, many, ''many'' major bugs, glitches, and serious technical problems. Bethesda released a number of official patches for these issues, but they typically only covered the most severe issues. Fan-made unofficial patches in mod form on the PC covered a large portion of the rest, but in a few instances, Bethesda's official patches conflicted with these unofficial ones, forcing you to choose between the issues you wanted to have fixed. Perhaps the most infamous is the "nVidia black screen bug" which renders the game completely unplayable by those with certain video cards. Once gain, the Game of the Year Edition largely stabilizes the worst of the issues (but not all).
** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim Skyrim]]'': The [=PS3=] version was especially prone to these issues, and its biggest issue has never been resolved. As your save file gets larger (which naturally occurs as you explore, find new locations, complete quests, etc.), the game would bog down more and more. Eventually, once the majority of the game world had been "discovered", the game would slow to the point of being completely unplayable. Bethesda stated that they were aware of the issue, but to date, no fix has been released.
* The English version of ''VideoGame/PrincessMaker 2'' was never finished before it was scrapped and subsequently leaked. Several endings lack text, and there's a hidden "Beta Shop" that lets the player fiddle with stats and trigger any ending they want (or an instant GameOver).
* ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'' suffered from this for quite some time, though it has (mostly) stopped doing so. It helps that content patches are regularly available for testing on the "Public Test Realm" for anyone interested.
** In the early days of ''Burning Crusade'', the final bosses in the two main dungeons were not only horribly unbalanced to the point of being effectively undefeatable, but the first time that any guild managed to kill Lady Vashj, she ''instantly respawned'' and killed the entire raid.[[note]]This was made more infamous by the controversy of two guilds competing for the "world first". Since both kills were bugged, they were dubbed the "world's first second" and the "world's second first".[[/note]] Blizzard also badly underestimated the number of people on the servers, all of whom crowded the same quests for the first few days, which is rather inexplicable as they were ready for this sort of thing before.
** Before any of the expansions came out, most final raid bosses were rendered unkillable or unreachable by {{Game Breaking Bug}}s. Some of it was [[UnwinnableByDesign on purpose]]; they didn't want players getting too far, running out of content, and complaining about it on the Internet. But others were just not properly done. Ragnaros would never come out of submerge and just keep throwing Sons until you ran out of mana and died. C'thun would {{Eye Beam|s}} you while you were in the stomach. And nobody really knows about Naxxramas, because you can probably count how many guilds ''entered'' Naxxramas on just your hands. The most amusing one was Chromaggus, who was [[HopelessBossFight overscaled on purpose]] to prevent players from reaching Nefarian ''because the Nefarian encounter wasn't fully coded''.
** Silithus in general was an Obvious Beta zone. It was this little corner in Kalimdor that, for some reason, wasn't covered in the guide, but there were actually a few quest chains in there. When you entered, you found this wall that you couldn't get past; fully ''half the map'' of Silithus was unfinished. It also became an Obvious Beta (along with Eastern Plaguelands) for an attempt at creating world [[PlayerVersusPlayer PvP]]. It was later finished in patch 1.8. It's still plagued with mob-density problems, but that has been improved in other patches. Even after the Cataclysm which brought about a complete revisit to all the original zones, Silithus remained somewhat of a dead end, where little of the vanilla quests were changed and mobs had a chance to drop items that no longer had any functionality, until they just did away with quests in the zone entirely for ''Battle for Azeroth''.
** The high-level neutral zone Azshara, while not quite as bad as very early Silithus, was generally something of a dead end zone until ''Cataclysm''. There weren't many questlines in the zone, and most of those that did had NoEnding and would just cut off at seemingly random points. This huge zone had many areas the player never needs to go to for any reason. There were no checkpoints or friendly/neutral settlements beyond the western edge of the zone. A big reason was likely a PVP battleground that this zone was supposed to host being DummiedOut, meaning the zone was practically empty until it was revamped into a low-level Horde zone in ''Cataclysm''.
** Expansions typically have growing pains and players expect it, but ''Cataclysm'' was notoriously buggy at launch, largely due to the sheer amount of content Blizzard crammed into it with a relatively short beta testing period. Numerous quests were glitchy or outright broken (Vashj'ir being the biggest culprit), mob spawning was out of control, phasing caused any number of headaches, achievements were busted, you name it and it was screwed up. Loads of hotfixes were a daily occurrence for weeks, and even after the first major patch (4.1), there were still lingering issues.
** The introduction of certain trinkets in Siege of Orgrimmar with effects that Blizzard was planning to implement as regular stats in the next expansion, such as Multistrike (a new form of CriticalHit) and Readiness (lowering the cooldown of certain abilities), had numerous problems. The fact that these effects are now nowhere to be seen says a lot.
** ''Warlords of Draenor'' shipped with so many bugs that the game was unplayable; insanely long server queues, broken starter quests, and glitched phasing rendered countless players stuck on flight paths or in the middle of thin air. Garrison missions were easily exploited, and several of the newer stats added to the game either were completely useless or utterly overpowered. While mostly fixed with a lot of hotfixes and patching, some of these issues are still there.
** ''Battle for Azeroth'' became infamous for this trope, to the degree that it was given the FanNickname 'Beta for Azeroth'. The pre-patch 8.0 was bashed because of its many glitches that made almost every content that wasn't [=PvP=] or mythic dungeons either unplayable or far more difficult to complete than ever. [[https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/900wiu/blizzard_the_80_patch_is_a_level_of_quality_that/ Here is a full list of the pre-patch bugs.]] The released expansion was just as bad: unbalanced dungeons that were hard or just impossible to do in time on Mythic+ difficulty in some affixes (Teeming and Grievous had to be nerfed because of it, and in at least one case, [[https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/9qr3ta/underrot_with_explosive/ a dungeon was rendered unwinnable]] because they forgot to cap the amount of orbs that spawn from the Explosive affix), [=PvP=] end of season titles rewarded the very second said season started, unfinished class specs and more. All made worse because many of the bugs were reported on beta but some were only fixed weeks after the content was out.
* ''VideoGame/{{Warcraft}} III: Reforged'' was supposed to be a remake of ''Warcraft III'', but it went through a TroubledProduction no thanks to a cripplingly low budget provided by Creator/ActivisionBlizzard, was released unfinished and ended up being a downgrade from the original in several ways.
** The game completely lacks several of the new features that were promised, [[TrailersAlwaysLie including features that were shown in the trailer]], and is even missing features from the original game. Even more infuriatingly, the release of the game forced owners of the original to update to the new version.
** The game also has serious [[GameBreakingBug Game-Breaking Bugs]] that make it nearly unplayable for some users due to constant crashes and other bugs, and in some places the game is visibly unfinished with things like placeholder objects and other bad graphics.
** One of the worst letdowns is that custom campaigns are no longer playable despite being one of the consistent draws of the game over the years. Thankfully fans came up with a mod that lets you do so.

* The initial demo release of ''VideoGame/{{Painkiller}}: Resurrection'' was an absolute disaster. The developers accidentally released a much older version of the demo than they had intended, and it shows. [[LoadsAndLoadsOfLoading Loading up the level takes a good five minutes]], particle textures appear as orange-brown cubes, the finicky draw distance causes distant church towers to hang in the air miles away, and players couldn't even finish half the level because a [[WreakingHavok physics-enabled rope bridge]] kept tossing them over the edge or pushing them ''straight through itself''. The Platform/{{Steam}} release of the game wasn't much better either, thanks to dodgy [[ArtificialStupidity AI programming]], painfully long load times and frequent crashes. And even in the retail version, the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea7qTUvs4Qs multiplayer mode is an absolute mess:]] Players can dart up along walls, the weapon pickup models are completely botched, and firing the electrodriver crashes the game on the spot.
* ''VideoGame/{{Daikatana}}'', after a TroubledProduction noted for excessive delays and slippages, shipped with broken AI, largely unfinished levels, and dozens of bugs and glitches. The game was a mess in co-op as well: {{Cutscene}}s (and their subsequent event flags) were removed entirely, causing the players to spawn stuck behind closed doors that were supposed to open in cutscenes, first rearing its ugly head in the ''second level of the game''. The readme recommends playing the single-player mode first to get an idea of the story. The co-op has a host of bugs on its own, the best being a glitch that causes players to spawn stuck partly in the floor, {{telefrag}}ging each other in an infinite loop.
* ''VideoGame/SupremeCommander'' shipped in an Obvious Beta state, including severe game balance issues (most notably regarding the Aeon faction being a gigantic GameBreaker) that had been identified during Beta testing but weren't fixed prior to launch, pathfinding problems, engine problems, and hardware compatibility issues. Despite being promoted heavily as a [=DX10=] showcase, the [=DX10=] support was never added; in addition, the promised SDK and editors never materialized due to proprietary code used in them. The majority of these issues were fixed by further patching and the ''Forged Alliance'' expansion, and even more have been fixed since by the modding community.
* ''VideoGame/PlanetaryAnnihilation'' exited Early Access with insane amounts of bugs, pathfinding issues, lag spikes, promised content that wasn't included in the game such as the Unit Cannon, always-online DRM, an unfinished Planet Editor, and severe RAM issues that caused it to become nearly unplayable on certain systems. Most of these problems have been fixed with patches since release.

* Creator/{{Valve|Corporation}} in general has a habit of releasing games with {{Game Breaking Bug}}s, although they are generally prompt about patching them. However, they also have a habit of releasing patches that cause brand new bugs in addition to fixing old ones. Special mention goes to:
** The 2010 ''VideoGame/HalfLife2'' update, which ported the entire game and ''Episode One'' over to the newer version of their engine used in ''Episode Two'', but introduced a host of new problems, at least some of which are present on all or at least most users' systems. The patch was released in May 2010, and to date only one bug (which made the AI crash at a critical point) has been patched.
** The OS X and Linux versions of ''VideoGame/HalfLife1 Source'' double as a PortingDisaster. The port was released barely playable, suffering crippling problems, such as spawning with no weapons, HEV suit, or even a HUD. To make matters worse, these errors were even present in the Windows version, which launched ''almost a decade earlier''.
* ''VideoGame/ElementalWarOfMagic'' was released in a buggy state. Given that it's Stardock, this by itself isn't too terribly surprising. What is surprising is that said "buggy state" is horribly, horribly buggy and received more patches (''six'') in four days than ''[[VideoGame/GalacticCivilizations GalCiv2]]'' and ''VideoGame/SinsOfASolarEmpire'' did the entire ''month'' of their respective releases. And it's still missing content, [[ArtificialStupidity like competent AI]]. If [[WordOfGod Brad Wardell]] is to believed, this was deliberate -- as a substitute for CopyProtection. Reviewers did not wait for the six patches to hit before slamming the game for being unfinished.
* ''VideoGame/{{Elite}} 3'', a.k.a. ''Frontier: First Encounters'', is a great game, and the fact it's still played after more than ten years (after being reverse-engineered and spawning [[http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/GLFFE advanced graphics clones]] with the same gameplay) proves this. But [[http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Gametek Gametek]] took ExecutiveMeddling up to eleven, went behind Frontier's back, and released the closest thing to a complete version they had (or so Frontier's official site says). Ugly bugs spoiled the release as a result. For example, when flying into the atmosphere of a gas giant to scoop up hydrogen fuel (a useful and oft-used feature in the previous two games in the series), as soon as the scoop activates, the game crashes spectacularly. Even after the game was patched, it still refused to run in anything that wasn't a pure DOS environment -- which prompted the aforementioned hacking of the game by the fans over the years so that they could at the very least run it in Windows.
* In ''Frontier - Elite 2'' (at least on the Platform/{{Amiga}} version), {{Game Breaking Bug}}s appeared over time (150 hours or so). It, therefore, most irritated players who had put the most into the (otherwise excellent) game. It became impossible to access the bulletin board to take missions and other features became disabled. The fact that Gametek released several improved versions cemented its position as an Obvious Beta for those who played it for the requisite length of time.

* ''Might and Magic: Heroes VI'' has issues despite testing including open beta. A fan-created bug list contains over 120 issues, and quite a bit of them were {{Game Breaker}}s.
* ''VideoGame/DungeonLords'' was released with many missing features, despite them being stated in the game manual and advertised as such. Buttons, sliders and icons were present in the game and didn't do anything. Game patches gradually implemented some of those elements. The developers later released a collector's edition with some (but not all) of the missing features labelled "new stuff". To add insult to injury, the very last patch doesn't upgrade the original release to the "collector's edition" version.
* ''VideoGame/StarTrekLegacy''. The Xbox 360 version wasn't too bad, although it suffered more bugs than a console game really should. The PC version, on the other hand, was a total mess, riddled with bugs and controls that obviously hadn't been tested properly, if at all. When players looked through the game directory, they found huge chunks of legacy code from the ancient ''VideoGame/StarTrekArmada'' engine, just proving how little effort had truly gone into the game's development.
* ''Pool of Radiance: Return to Myth Drannor'' was so buggy that some gamers reported it destroying their OS. Even the install shield had a crippling bugs which prevented players from installing the game to a folder other than the default. It was so bad that the developer needed to release not just an update patch, but a completely new installer, meaning the user has to download this to ''install'' the game rather than going through the autorun setup from the disc. Most users would not be aware of this fact and will install it from the disc anyway, making it pointless.
* After the closure of Black Isle Studios, producers of ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}'', ''VideoGame/IcewindDale'' and ''VideoGame/PlanescapeTorment'', the studio was "resurrected" through SpiritualSuccessor studios made up of much of their old staff, Creator/ObsidianEntertainment and Creator/TroikaGames. Both studios have become renowned (or reviled) for their tendency to release unfinished or incomplete games.
** ''VideoGame/KnightsOfTheOldRepublicIITheSithLords'': Due to Creator/LucasArts pushing for a [[ChristmasRushed Christmas release]], much of the last third of the game is missing, including lots of voice files and code left in that details entirely new planets, a more satisfying ending, and a bit more character exploration and personal sidequests. A fan mod was eventually released to try to implement some of it. Compounding this was some ''massive'' ExecutiveMeddling, as Obsidian was fully willing to release the rest of the game in a free patch; [=LucasArts=] said "no", presumably because the Xbox version wasn't Live-enabled, but still.
** ''VideoGame/NeverwinterNights2'' was fairly buggy upon release and suffered from memory leak issues and a lack of polish. Then both expansions introduced {{Game Breaking Bug}}s that made the previous campaign unplayable: ''Mask of the Betrayer'' made a PlotLock in the original campaign fail to unlock, and ''Storm of Zehir'' deleted all of ''MOTB's'' voiceovers. Though these were later fixed, several minor bugs were left over as [[ScrewedByTheNetwork Hasbro would later sue Atari]] over ''TabletopGame/ForgottenRealms'' license agreement violations, which meant that all official patches stopped.
** ''VideoGame/AlphaProtocol'' also has several bugs, including some that include flags not being thrown correctly in response to some of your actions and leaving you with odd results. Trying to sneak into the US embassy in Moscow will make the game think you butchered your way in, and Shaheed will mysteriously come back from the dead in the epilogue if you arrest him (when he's supposed to die in a missile strike).
** ''VideoGame/ArcanumOfSteamworksAndMagickObscura'' had a lot of bugs and incomplete content. These included such things as as certain spells and items not working as they should have, sound glitches, incomplete animations and missing dialogue.
** ''VideoGame/TempleOfElementalEvil'' was riddled with several bugs and was generally unstable as heck. There are also references to some minor cut content in the second town. The bugs come both in [[GameBreakingBug game-breaking]] (like chests glitching out when doing anything with their content) and [[GoodBadBugs positive]] flavors (like using an enlarging spell to equip two two-handed weapons which count as one-handed due to size, then shrinking back and realizing you didn't drop your weapons and are free to use them or being able to equip both a bow and a sword leading to your character [[HilarityEnsues slashing at the thin air with arrow "shooting" out of the sword]]).
** ''VideoGame/VampireTheMasqueradeBloodlines'' was playable from the outset but had many physics flaws and bugs. A number of Troika programmers stayed on after the company went bankrupt and was able to finish an official patch that fixed many of these errors. Fans latched on to this and went on to produce several years' worth of unofficial patches that have fixed most of the game's errors and restored cut content.
* ''Franchise/DragonAge'':
** ''VideoGame/DragonAgeOrigins'' is rough around the edges in hindsight. The endgame (everything post-Landsmeet) is extremely bugged, failing to recognize who was made ruler of Fereldan and ''even your character's gender''. The Dwarf Noble-only sidequest, "The Prodigal Son", was so bugged that it is {{Unwinnable}} without mods (and still causes issues in the "Completed Quests" folder). Most of the DLC post-Warden's Keep were notoriously full of bugs and glitches upon initial release, most notably "Return to Ostagar" (which had to be delayed for over a month because it was practically unplayable), "[[VideoGame/DragonAgeOriginsAwakening Awakening]]" (which even those who liked it agreed was most likely rushed), and "Witch Hunt". Thankfully, the combination of patches (both Bioware and fanmade) and special mods have removed or mitigated these issues.
** ''VideoGame/DragonAgeII'' had some problems on release, including a way that the game could be made {{Unwinnable}} early on by killing a major NPC who is important to one of the late-game mandatory quests. Save file corruption has also been known to happen. Patches have fixed most of these, though even with 1.04 Sebastian and Isabela's character quests for Act III have to be completed at the beginning of the act or the game will crash when you play them (and with Sebastian's you can't have Anders in the party unless you also have Fenris). The game also has an overuse of CutAndPasteEnvironments and has a small variety of enemies. The developers have confirmed that these problems were the result of a rushed development cycle.
** ''VideoGame/DragonAgeInquisition'' was loaded with both major and minor bugs from the very beginning. Unparallelled among them, however, is the notorious Patch 4. Bad enough that the whole thing was nearly seven gigabytes, but an error in programming it for the Xbox One ports caused it to automatically uninstall and reinstall the entire game.
* Several of ''VideoGame/EVEOnline'''s expansions are considered this. Although CCP got better over time, many earlier ones introduced {{Game Breaking Bug}}s, lag, and desync issues, which then required entire patches dedicated simply to resolving those.
* ''VideoGame/DarkSun: Wake of the Ravager'' was plagued with such issues as disappearing doors that left the player permanently stuck, [=NPCs=] who continued to speak and act after death, inability to complete quests, and best of all, enemies, allies, terrain, and equipment vanishing permanently for no good reason. An official patch fixed only a small amount of game-breaking problems. Completing this game is only possible through extreme abuse of multiple save slots.
* The (presumably leaked prototype of the cancelled) PC release of ''VideoGame/{{Rampage}}: World Tour'' was a ''literal'' Obvious Beta. If you were able to get it to run at all, it had the words "Beta Release" in all four corners of the screen.
* ''VideoGame/LordsOfMagic'' remained in beta for a very long time after release. The developers admitted they [[ChristmasRushed rushed it out to cash in on holiday sales]].
* ''VideoGame/LeagueOfLegends'':
** While the initial game went live without many hitches, Yorick the Gravedigger was an Obvious Beta. When he was released, he was considered worthless because his abilities were, well, practically a beta. His ult was also supposedly changed from development to release and was full of bugs. While the bugs of his kit were eventually ironed out, he still suffered from extremely poor design, and out of all the champions, Yorick had the dubious honor of never being included in the weekly free champion rotation. When Yorick was relaunched in 2016 with a brand new kit and model, the entire fanbase rejoiced.
** Syndra upon release was so badly bugged she managed to have a ''25%'' winrate upon launch.[[note]]Champions are typically considered "balanced" around a 48-52% winrate[[/note]] Her orbs would be unable to be picked up and not hit enemies properly, reducing her kit to her minion throwing mechanic, which was most often used to grief your team's Jungler rather than for any benign purpose. Riot slowly fixed these bugs over the course of several months, eventually bringing her to a balanced state.
** Upon release Viego constantly had bugged interactions with enemy champions, including an interaction with possessing an enemy Taliyah or Anivia that not only crashed the game, but ''completely deleted the game's existence on Riot's servers''.
* On the ''VideoGame/{{Glider}}PRO CD'', the final [[StarShapedCoupon star]] in "Grand Prix" appears in a room whose title promises one more. A half-built, unplayable sequence of rooms lies beyond. The house was supposedly completed, but no patch was ever released.

* Having been shipped hastily just before the company went under, Mac RPG ''VideoGame/TheTombOfTheTaskMaker'' has some noticeable glitches and DummiedOut content. Read the section on underdevelopment at [[http://web.archive.org/web/20040605131022/http://www.btinternet.com/~G.Janacek/Taskmaker.html this site]].
* The first ''VideoGame/SuperSmashFlash'' game was made in four months by a then-inexperienced Creator/McLeodGaming. It shows, with playable characters only having five moves, wonky hit detection causing most of said moves to [[OneHitKill kill instantly]], items barely working, and perhaps most infamously, right-clicking allowing you to skip stages in single player modes.
* The sequel to ''VideoGame/SwordOfTheStars'', ''Lords of Winter'', was released as a beta in November 2011 due to an erroneous upload of a pre-release candidate to the Steam servers instead of the intended release candidate. It was successfully replaced by the release candidate 24 hours later, at which point the delighted audience discovered that the actual release candidate wasn't much of an improvement and was riddled with several bugs. Kerberos Productions declared anyway that they felt the game is at the release stage, and bug fixes kept coming out on a near-weekly basis.

* ''VideoGame/{{Magicka}}'' had numerous game-breaking or crashing bugs on release; multiplayer was especially buggy and laggy, the latter because it used ridiculous amounts of bandwidth (far more than an average FPS game). After many of these bugs were fixed, the developers added a free "Mea Culpa" DLC (Latin for "[[SelfDeprecation my mistake]]"), including a wizard model with a patchwork robe, a broken sword, a staff that lets you summon bugs, and a "Crash To Desktop" spell that kills anything with less than 100,000 health but is completely random with who it targets.
%% * ''VideoGame/CitiesXL'', a ''VideoGame/SimCity'' clone, suffered this. An UpdatedRerelease, ''Cities XL 2011'', fixed most of the huge bugs, but many remain.
* Merit Software's ''Command Adventures: Starship'' can become unplayable about halfway through. When you attempt to send a team to a planet, the default action sound will "bleep" three times and you're kicked back into space. At times, you'll find crew members vanishing, and eventually it gets so bad you can't even get into the shop and other sections of the Starbases. Merit intended ''Starship'' to be the first in a series of ''Command Adventures'' games, but it ended up being a StillbornFranchise instead.
* o3 Games gave too much control over ''The Outforce'' to their publisher, who committed ExecutiveMeddling upon it, pushing it to be released with only the Terran campaign finished. Even worse, the units for the Terran, Crion, and Gobin races have identical capabilities, even some of the unit names are the same across all three. Nonetheless, the AI is killer, it may have been the first RTS to support unlimited group sizes and the graphics are beautiful. Multiplayer also works and there are no game breaking bugs. It just needed more time in the oven to bake in more content and de-clone the three races.
* The PC version of ''[[Toys/RockRaiders LEGO Rock Raiders]]'', thanks to rushed development and multiple revisions of it (the game is 80 MB and around a good 30 of them aren't even used), featured rampant ArtificialStupidity for both your Rock Raiders and the enemies sides (your Rock Raiders, despite Chief claiming that they're "very clever", are not exactly all the brightest when it comes to tactics. Such an example is that they love to clean up rubble and debris, even if it comes from halfway across the map in a area having constant landslides, meaning they'll try to clean it up until you do something about it. As for the enemies, in some levels, the Slimy Slugs just appear out of their hole, and then reenter it) and impossible requirements for HundredPercentCompletion, as the developers at didn't even fully make sure that some of the 100% objectives were completable (like you had to obtain Energy Crystals for 100% completion in ''maps which didn't have any'') before it was fully released, ''twice''.
** Here's an example to the polish of the game: in a few levels there's [[HailfirePeaks lava in ice caverns]], and in levels where erosion is a hazard, the ground can slowly become lava if not taken care of, and there are a handful of levels [[BreadEggsBreadedEggs combining both aspects]]. A problem in this arises in that while the two other types of caverns, rock and lava, have graphics for the terrain deteriorating and slowly becoming lava, ice caverns don't have such graphics and instead reuse the base graphic, meaning you have no indication of what state the ground is at before it just suddenly turns into lava, rendering it [[RunningGag/{{Phelous}} completely useless]].
* ''[[VideoGame/LEGOIsland LEGO Island 2]]'' was beyond rushed in the middle of its development, even more so than Rock Raiders! Almost ''50% of what was intended was cut entirely'' -- for instance, there was going to be a cave area with many more sub-games. And the fifty percent that was done didn't even look half-complete; the physics were basic, the graphics were very texture-filled, [[GuideDangIt the instructions would barely give you a hint on what to do]] (an example being in the jousting minigame; Pepper would likely fly off if you were randomly mashing buttons in vain hope you would win), replayability was non-existent, [[LoadsAndLoadsOfLoading the load times were inexcusably long]] (sometimes going as long as ''two minutes'', all for an JustForFun/{{Egregious}} reason[[labelnote:Explanation]]Not only are the files it loads extremely unorganized, meaning the game will load things which aren't even intended to be used in certain areas, it also ''[[DarthWiki/IdiotProgramming prioritizes the rendering of the loading screen over the actual files]]'' '''''per frame''''', and it can be fixed by changing '''a single instruction''' in the game's EXE file![[/labelnote]]), and it was filled with various glitches, not uncommonly [[GameBreakingBug game-breaking]]. Because the ''Platform/PlayStation'' version was based on this one, it consequently makes it incomplete in the same way ([[PortingDisaster if not worse due to console limitations]]), but the ''Platform/GameBoyColor'' and ''[[Platform/GameBoyAdvance Advance]]'' versions weren't and are [[ReformulatedGame entirely separate games on their own]], meaning they were thankfully free of this trope, although opinions still tend to vary on them.
* The PC version of ''VideoGame/LEGOHarryPotter Years 1-4'' is surprisingly broken for the usually-solid ''LEGO'' series. Not only are crashes shockingly common, the game is plagued by numerous potentially [[UnintentionallyUnwinnable progress-halting bugs]]. For example, quitting a certain level[[note]]Year 2, ''Tom Riddle's Diary''[[/note]] without finishing it will cause the story to move on without unlocking the level for Free Play, and some rooms in Hogwarts can become permanently inaccessible if the player performs certain actions[[note]]Approaching the Gryffindor Common Room painting as a non-Gryffindor character will cause the painting to refuse to open up for anybody, for example[[/note]]. Worst is a hidden bonus room that can potentially trap the player forever because the dragon that's supposed to boot you out is prone to becoming unusable. If one happens to save in this room just before this happens...
* The PC version of ''VideoGame/DeadIsland'', at launch, turned out to be an earlier developer build instead of the final retail build, and the Xbox 360 developer build at that. It even came with a built-in noclip button (which can crash the game if used).
* Freeware {{Metroidvania}} ''Legend Garden'' suffers from this. It's UnintentionallyUnwinnable, over half the bosses are hideously broken, things have a tendency to get stuck in walls, and some items are unobtainable.
* VideoGame/MyTimeAtSandrock is a beautiful mess. There are loads of quests, characters, items, locations... and bugs. While true game-breakers are rare, many things are half-finished and some bugs have a nasty habit of accumulating. After playing for a bit, just walking a few steps from your workshop to the town will have you walk pass your glitchy fence that clips through itself, glitched mission markers permanently stuck to your minimap, random crafted items floating ten feet up in the sky.
* ''VideoGame/TheSims3'' [[http://forums.thesims.com/en_us/discussion/890435/amd-nvidia-cards-how-to-cap-ts3s-fps-to-60 lacked a vsync or frame limiter option]]. A number of players have complained about the game running at over a ''thousand'' frames per second [[http://modthesims.info/t/445629 on loading screens]] and several hundred FPS ingame, resulting in overheating. Forcing a framerate cap through the GPU driver's control panel fixes this issue.
* ''VideoGame/TheSims4'' has had a few releases that were buggy enough to qualify.
** The Dine Out DLC is frustrating to play, at best. A multitude of issues plague the pack, ranging from poorly-designed NPC AI to employees getting deleted by the game's culling. Many players avoid that pack's gameplay as a result.
** The "My Wedding Stories" DLC [[https://simscommunity.info/2022/02/24/the-sims-4-my-wedding-stories-is-severely-broken/ released in a very broken state]]. A number of interactions, like cutting the cake and having flower girls and ring bearers walk down the aisle, flat-out didn't work. And then the weddings suffer from the aforementioned AI issues... Let's just say that when the couple is exchanging vows, the attendees do everything except sit and watch respectfully.
** The "For Rent" DLC released with several bugs, some [[GameBreakingBug game breaking]]. Commonly reported was build mode lag, bizarre apartment rent calculations, deleted households, up to a complete inability to create rental lots (the DLC's main selling point).
* The ''Franchise/{{Metroid}}'' fan game ''[[http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/284725 Metroid; Beginings]]'' [sic], made with UsefulNotes/AdobeFlash in 2005 and [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWTWfz4-YBc discovered]] by WebVideo/{{Retsupurae}} in 2013, qualifies on a spectacular level. The collision detection is so buggy that you can often fall through the floor for no apparent reason, and it's possible early on to get stuck in a door -- the twist being that ''opening the door doesn't fix it''. It also has NoEnding, in that the author simply did not program one into the game. Lest you think we're kidding, the player who recorded WebVideo/{{Retsupurae}}'s source footage confirmed this using a Flash decompiler.
* ''VideoGame/{{Furcadia}}'' is an inversion: It's a complete, working game, with no more [[{{Pun}} Bugges]] than most finished games--but has been in "Alpha" stage for over 20 years.
* The ''Extreme Paintbrawl'' series of video games. Your team had no programmed AI routines, so they would either run straight into a wall at the beginning of a match or randomly flail around like they were having epileptic seizures. You could shoot paint at the sky, and it wouldn't disappear. The "practice mode" was just an empty arena.
* As memorably revealed [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3VaSl5jhPA here]], ''Gettysburg: Armored Warfare'' lacks certain features, like reliably being able to run, not exploding your entire army, spawning the sky dome more than half the time, etc.
* ''VideoGame/StarTrekOnline'' launched as an Obvious Beta. The team at Cryptic bought the rights after Perpetual had dicked around for about [[{{Vaporware}} half a decade not making the game]]. With the license on a tight deadline for release, they got the game out in about a year. It had crappy content, crappy graphics, and was just buggy in general. Cryptic spent the next four years of the game's life burying this content (and in the last two seasons, straight up replacing the story missions from launch with remastered versions) and making actual quality content. The dev team has been on the record that they will eventually get around to replacing ''all'' of the old story missions with properly done versions [[ThatOneLevel (with a few unwanted missions torn out entirely)]].
* ''VideoGame/PlanetSide 2'' launched out of beta with beautiful graphics paired with [[TechDemoGame massive performance issues]] due to a near total lack of optimization, and what little optimization it had only applied to a very specific set of hardware (Intel i5 or i7 CPU, NVIDIA GPU) that caused players on cheap $500 Intel rigs to have twice the framerate of players on monstrous $2,000 AMD setups. It launched with only two continents and a [[RiskStyleMap territory control system]] that made large direct fights very rare; players instead simply captured bases around the defenders and ignored them entirely. After release, the ''Operation Make Faster Game'' ([[FunWithAcronyms OMFG]]) update effectively doubled everyone's framerate and made the game playable on AMD hardware, along with loads of incremental content updates (such as a new map and a [[CoolCar sweet new dune buggy]]).
* ''VideoGame/SecondLife'' became a horribly buggy mess when Linden Labs forced Viewer 2, the successor to Viewer 1, onto its users. Viewer 2 had terrible UI design that couldn't be customized, overall performance took a nosedive, and new users couldn't choose a last name when signing up for a Second Life account. The redesigned viewer was clearly not ready to be launched and it took Linden Labs ''years'' to remedy most of the problems after the user base loudly complained about the changes that were pushed onto them without notice.
* In the PC version of ''VideoGame/TombRaider2013'', the button prompts for [[PressXToNotDie QTEs]] will randomly cease to appear, turning the game into a LuckBasedMission. Not only that, but there's a late game bug when you [[spoiler:return to the ruins of the Endurance]] that makes the game {{Unwinnable}}.
** Likewise, a bad physics collision glitch in the only non-multiplayer, non-cosmetic expansion, ''Tomb of the Lost Adventurer'' will prevent the area's puzzle from being solved. Granted, all you get is extra crafting material, but for content you paid extra for, this is especially frustrating.
* The ''VideoGame/DoomII'' [[GameMod PWAD]] ''[[http://doomwiki.org/wiki/NewDoom_Community_Project_II NewDoom Community Project II]]'' spent three years in development, only to be released in a terribly buggy state. Among other things, you can't finish the second level without cheating (with a code or an [[SequenceBreaking exploit]]) because you otherwise get locked in a required room with no way out. The [=NewDoom=] community died a few months later, leaving an official fixed version in limbo.
* While quest- or combat-related bugs were relatively few, ''VideoGame/WarhammerOnline'' shipped without several major features. Each racial pairing set of zones were supposed to have their own capitol cities, but only the Order/Chaos (human) ones were ready to actually be entered; the other cities were never completed, with all characters eventually starting in the human zones. Two of the classes had been going through constant rewrites and changes and weren't released (finally put out as the Dwarf Slayer and the Ork Choppa) until several patches in. Instanced [=PvP=] matches were quite badly implemented and lead to interminable queuing. The standard "load lag" of large numbers of player characters coming on screen at once ended up being either individual floating body parts or invisible. The developers stated that "due to late-developmental issues, the team was simply unable to compensate for all issues before release," which many fans took to mean "The bigwigs at EA that bought Mythic are [[ExecutiveMeddling sticking their noses in everything]] and forcing us to release early," especially in retrospect for some of their decisions with other games. There was also a severe issue involving server stability above certain (incredibly low) population levels, despite being released with several dozen servers to log into that caused player population to always be distressingly small in any one area outside a major city.
* The PC release of ''VideoGame/DarkSoulsI'' was both this and a PortingDisaster. Creator/FromSoftware slapped the port together and put it on PC simply due to a fan petition (despite their admitted inexperience with PC games), and it shows. Tiny resolution, terrible controls, garbled sound, and bad graphics were only the beginning. It also had plenty of bugs before patches -- it was possible to skip everything after getting the Lordvessel by glitching through doors to get to the final boss, severals spells were so massively overtuned and/or buggy that they made the game trivial, and just hitting Black Knights with certain weapons would [[GameBreakingBug instantly crash the game]]. While the major bugs were fixed very quickly, the resolution and controls were never patched, although the modding community has fixed them since release.
* While not nearly as bad as the original, the PC version of ''VideoGame/DarkSoulsII'' also shipped with technical issues on release, including unresponsive controls and a scaled-back graphics engine completely different than the one used in promotional materials. It also had many GoodBadBugs, such as the famous binocular speed glitch and the ability to glitch out of a roll and fly through the air. These were eventually fixed.
* While there aren't really any blatant gameplay bugs, the port of ''VideoGame/DarkSoulsIII'' is a technical mess filled with frequent slowdowns and crashing. One of the more crippling -- and hilariously ironic -- bugs causes the game to crash when using a bonfire.
* ''Battlecruiser 3000AD'' was launched far [[ExecutiveMeddling too early by its publisher]] after existing in an (apparent) state of nigh-VaporWare for years -- being an "everything" simulator ''a la'' today's ''Videogame/StarCitizen'' but with a tiny fraction of the budget and employees tends to do that. This led to the game being critically panned due to a plethora of bugs and lack of documentation. The creator sued, settled out of court, and released several patches and an UpdatedReRelease to address the bugs.
** Its spiritual sequel, Universal Combat, suffers from many the same thing to the point that the final version was released as a freeware after failure to trust the game to another publisher.

* ''VideoGame/AirControl'' was a game released on Steam that has errors apparent right from the beginning of gameplay. The player character's head moves around while selecting menu options, several debug buttons appear at times, the gameplay chaotically switches from one style and storyline to another, and giant green blocks presumably indicating something is clickable randomly appear. It was eventually pulled from Steam, and there is still some debate as to if this was all [[StylisticSuck an intentional attempt at making a bad game]] to show how gullible people can be if they don't read reviews before buying something, or if the developers really were that inept.

* While ''VideoGame/{{Blood}}'' is a consistently functional game with some GoodBadBugs, the same can't be said for the sequel, ''VideoGame/BloodIITheChosen''. The creators have explicitly admitted the game was ''not'' released in a finished state, with one account claiming that they explained to the publishers that they had a choice between finishing the game and releasing it in what amounted to an early beta, at which the publishers promptly shipped it.
** DamageSpongeBoss battles like the Naga and [[spoiler:Gideon]] end earlier than their last sliver of health being expended. In the latter's second form, he's the diametric opposite of ImmuneToFlinching - '''every''' hit makes him flinch - and when he dies his body is almost guaranteed to clip through the floor and drop to the lower boundaries of the level.
** The SawedOffShotgun can be wielded GunsAkimbo, but the second one doesn't have its viewmodel mirrored, so Caleb ends up with two right hands.
** Fire just doesn't work right, with only the Flare Gun's primary fire actually lighting enemies up -- secondary wastes eight flares to do nothing except look pretty, the Insect-a-Cutioner bug spray's secondary fire likewise does nothing but waste ammo better put to use with the M16's GrenadeLauncher, and the Napalm Launcher fails to set enemies on fire under any circumstances as well.
** Killing a Death Shroud with a weapon that gibs on death will keep its "presence" sound running.
** Characters that are friendly have in-game entities hostile to Caleb. If a cutscene ends too early, which is a bug of its own, they will attack you if you're within their line of sight, and given the power of their weapons, they ''will'' kill you. In turn, you can slaughter them to no ill effects. Gabriella at the end of Chapter One is a notable example, but it's rarely possible for the same to happen with Ishmael at the end of Chapter Two.
** By dropping a weapon you're holding and staying on top of it, when you pick it up it'll come with a full serving of ammo as if you've picked it up for the very first time.
** Some enemies, like the third Soul Drudge in Love Canal, will be permanently stuck attacking the air (often several times faster than normal despite not corresponding to the animation playing) until you shoot them. If you don't, they'll just stay there and can be safely ignored.
** The Behemoth has its AI set so it starts {{Shockwave Stomp}}ing the ground when its health is below a certain level and it takes damage. However, it's not immune to its own shockwaves – each causes a tiny bit of damage to it. If you hide while it's pounding the ground after you hurt it enough for the behaviour to trigger, it'll eventually gib itself, though it takes a very long time.
** There's one that elevates the Drudge Lord from GiantMook to {{Demonic Spider|s}}: if you aggro it and hide, it'll sometimes move forward at walking speed while it launches its set of three fireballs, something it's not supposed to do. If you don't run away far enough to see the fireballs coming, you're bound to catch the third one with your face when it turns the corner.
** Enemies tend to get frozen at the end of an attack/flinch animation if they can't see or get to the player by the end of it, instead of going idle or prowling the level.
** Doors are [[TheDoorSlamsYou particularly deadly]] if you don't show the proper respect for them. A cutscene in Chapter Two, in particular, can end up with you ''dying'' a few seconds into it, because it starts up while you're partway through a door, which will automatically close during the cutscene, and if you're in the wrong spot, it will promptly crush you between the door and its frame.
** The difficulty in general is extremely poorly balanced, with the equivalent of Easy mode, Genocide, making you nearly ImmuneToBullets while your own weapons deal so much damage that you can gib almost everything you kill ''on accident'' - '''including several bosses'''. Moving on to the Normal equivalent, Homicide, expecting a reasonable difficulty curve turns out to be more like a difficulty ''cliff'', as enemies suddenly gain superhuman reflexes and deal upwards of 25 damage per shot, and then drop piddling amounts of life essences to recharge.
** In general, damage values tend to be very wonky. It isn't abnormal for a shooter to have a degree of variation in its damage values, but usually this means something like "sometimes an enemy takes four pistol shots, sometimes they take five." In ''Blood 2'', though, it's completely unpredictable--sometimes, an enemy that died in a single hit from a weapon in a previous encounter can take three shots and keep walking. It's especially noticeable with the heavy-duty weapons, with their slow firing rates and limited ammo, which means they have a habit of sometimes barely tickling EliteMooks when you really don't want them to.
** Certain enemies can pick up health and ammo if they happen to run over it trying to get to you. Particularly noticeable near the end of Ishmael's level from ''The Nightmare Levels'', where several pickups along one wall - the way the game tries to make fighting a Behemoth in close-quarters anything approaching possible for [[SquishyWizard Ishmael]] - ''will'' be taken by a Shikari before you can get down there and kill it.
* ''[[VideoGame/RealmsOfArkania Realms of Arkania HD]]'' was rushed out in pre-alpha stage at best, with many obvious missing features and loads of bugs. It was vastly improved with more than 30 patches released within the year. The rush was a [[ExecutiveMeddling direct order from the publisher's order]], despite the protest from the developers.
* The main reason for ''VideoGame/LordsOfTheFallen'''s average reviews was its utterly staggering amount of bugs at launch, including several game-breaking script failures that could make the game {{Unwinnable}}. It also suffered from severe crashing and stuttering issues (most of which stemmed from the game's Denuvo DRM), enemies getting stuck in scenery, etc. The vast majority of these issues were eventually fixed with a lot of patching.
* ''VideoGame/{{Hatred}}'' was strongly criticized for its buggy state upon release. Its near-lack of optimization and anemic options menu caused massive slowdowns even on powerful machines (in a top-down twin stick shooter no less). The devs later released the free ''Survival'' DLC which fixed nearly all the optimization issues, along with adding many more options and expanding the single player campaign to boot.
* The PC version of ''VideoGame/BatmanArkhamKnight'' was handled by Creator/IronGalaxyStudios and was wrought with lots of glitches and graphical issues on launch ([[http://kotaku.com/sources-warner-bros-knew-that-arkham-knight-pc-was-a-1714915219 known for months prior to release]], apparently). This was so bad that the game was almost immediately rescinded after launching from stores like Steam in order to try to suss them out. This happened in June 2015 and the game was not returned to digital distribution storefronts until the very end of October, where it was ''still'' steeped with problems (such as requiring an absurd ''12 GB'' of RAM to run on Windows 10 without issue). WB Games [[http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/11/warner-issues-refunds-for-broken-batman-arkham-knight-again/ washed their hands of the matter]] by offering refunds (regardless of playtime) until the end of 2015 and admitting there are things they simply ''couldn't'' fix (a similar story was told of the PC version of ''Arkham Origins'', which had several [[UnintentionallyUnwinnable progression-halting issues]] that WB walked away from in order to put their resources into DownloadableContent for the game).
* The launch version of ''VideoGame/XCOM2'' is very unoptimized. At best, players on the Windows version of the game would experience some slowdowns from time to time despite system specs, especially on the Avenger. At worst, the game will run out of RAM/VRAM and crash after playing the game for some time, or the CPU and/or GPU will be extremely stressed to the point they'll overheat and take down the entire system, or in some cases the game just won't load at all (again, despite system specs). And all of this is ''after'' the game was delayed for three months.
* ''VideoGame/GoatSimulator'' is RuleOfFunny in compiled code form. The game was made during a game jam that was designed to help the staffers at Coffee Stain Studios master working with the Unreal Engine 3 and was never meant for a full release. When MemeticMutation took hold and the game was highly desired by those who got to see it in action, the team decided to take the game into a full release but only fix the bugs that would cause the game to completely break operation, leaving all the other bugs and unrefined development work intact so as to retain the feel that gave the game its popularity. The result is the game is ''highly'' unpolished (for instance, going up the elevator to the coaster can cause the goat to phase through the floor and fall out if you ragdoll on the way up). The Steam store page even proclaims "MILLIONS OF BUGS" as a selling point for the game. The game has been ported, faulty code and all, to other platforms and has also received new expansions (such as a zombie-themed or MMO-themed add-on packs). The short development time (roughly a month) and the cheap assets used for the game also allowed Coffee Stain Studios to make back what they spent to make the game in about ten minutes of putting it on sale.
* Creator/ParadoxInteractive is known for releasing ''really big'' Grand Strategy games, and they tend to ship in very buggy and incomplete form. Their business model is to release things in this state, but keep close engagement with their userbase and patch the bugs out. New DLC are likewise expected to come with bugs in whatever new material they introduce.
** ''VideoGame/HeartsOfIron III'', a World War II strategy game, shipped with extremely broken AI. The AI countries would join factions seemingly at random; it wasn't uncommon for Japan to join the Allies or the US to join the Axis. Save games got corrupted all the time. The game ran incredibly slowly, even on computers that far exceeded the system requirements, and crashes were very common. The AI failed to research certain very valuable techs, giving the player a huge advantage. Improbable events, particularly involving naval landings, happened practically every game, such as Brazil invading Germany in 1941.
** ''VideoGame/{{Stellaris}}''' internal politics were a complete and utter mess from the start, with ''slaves'' unable to ever revolt and factions almost never forming. This took several patches and a complete revamp to fix and they're still (as of writing) working on getting it all right.
* ''VisualNovel/MissingStars''' demo is this. After being in DevelopmentHell for several years, the first demo came out in January 2018. Unfortunately it contained some spelling errors and run-on text issues. Two of the love interests are also inexplicably ''not present'' in the demo. WordOfGod is that the demo was rushed.

* ''VideoGame/GrooveCoaster for Steam'' has had a pretty difficult [[{{Pun}} ride]] so far. Backgrounds fail to load correctly for many players, controller support is pretty unreliable, and sound is handled pretty poorly (if you hit a note late or miss, ''the music will mute'' until you hit or the note is counted as a miss).
* ''VideoGame/NoMansSky'' promised an infinite space game consisting of over eighteen quintillion procedurally-generated worlds. When the game was released, it was criticized for featuring barely any gameplay mechanics, no clear purpose to anything you ''can'' do in the game, an enormous number of bugs and glitches and a poor attempt at introducing a multiplayer mode. Since it was greatly hyped as the biggest space exploration game ever prior to its release, the backlash was vicious, and the active player count ended up plummeting to as little as 14 players at once in the entire world with sometimes ''not a single person in the world logged in to the game''. Hello Games's official social media accounts eventually went eerily silent, leading everyone to believe they were toast and on the brink of bankruptcy -- until the ''Atlas Rises'' update rolled out in August 2017, which implemented an actual single-player campaign, and then the ''NEXT'' update rolled out in July 2018, which finally added the much-vaunted multiplayer mode everybody was expecting. As soon as the ''NEXT'' update hit the online stores, the good reviews began trickling in, many video game news outlets ended up reviewing the game again due to the sheer amount of changes, and ''No Man's Sky'' ended up being hailed as one of the most epic redemption stories to ever grace the video game industry.
* ''VideoGame/VectorThrust'', an attempt at a highly moddable ''Videogame/AceCombat''-like flight action game, suffers from this. It was out from Early Access, but still very buggy, missing a lot of features and with unplayable campaign (without workarounds). Suddenly in August 2016, the developer, Timesymmetry, went completely silent to this day, dashing any hopes for updates or remakes. The community also dispersed soon after.
* ''VideoGame/{{Towns}}'' was an early ''Dwarf Fortress''-inspired city-builder that garnered a lot of interest and then became a minor fiasco when it was seen as an Obvious Beta and (possibly) a blatant money-grab. Coincidentally, Steam rolled out its Early Access program -- in which developers can intentionally release games in a beta state to generate additional funding and user feedback -- not long after.
* ''Otaku Masshigura'', the final VisualNovel fully written by ''VisualNovel/CrossChannel'' creator Romeo Tanaka, was released in an unfinished state with an engine so unstable that it's essentially unplayable. Even after the game was fully patched months after release, the heavily rushed nature of the game is obvious. Long stretches of story are skimmed over with little buildup, with one of the routes being almost completely missing, voice acting is limited to only the heroine of the selected route, with one route just having it dissapear entirely, most areas reuse backgrounds, entire scenes have been DummiedOut, and the game script is filled with grammatical and continuity errors which suggest virtually no editing had been done.
* After 6 years in DevelopmentHell, ''VideoGame/YandereSimulator'''s official demo was finally released in the tail end of August 2020... and was widely criticized for being clearly unfinished, with students frequently clipping into walls, suffering pathfinding issues, and numerous shortcuts galore. To make matters worse, it resulted in [=YandereDev=] releasing ''15'' bug-fixing builds within the span of half a month. History repeated itself with the release of 1980s Mode in early October 2021, with players often finding their saves being corrupted and rendering issues, and again [=YandereDev=] had to fix over 80 bugs within just five days.

* ''Car Tycoon'' was obviously rushed out for Christmas 2001, so there was no time to properly balance the game. It is playable, but not for too long. The major problem is that the streets on the maps don't have enough capacity for all the cars produced in the long run, and the overall number of cars increases too quickly because too few cars disappear over time. Eventually, due to too many cars on the map, the streets will be clogged with traffic jams that lead to gridlocks. However, the streets are also used to get new cars from the factories to the dealerships. You'll eventually ''inevitably'' go bankrupt because you can't get your new cars to the dealerships and turn them into money as they're stuck in traffic jams. This was never fixed because it would have required a new set of bigger maps.
* ''VideoGame/FiveNightsAtFreddysSecurityBreach'' has a whole ''heap'' of bugs and glitches that should have been discovered on a playtest. The AI often teleports out of bounds, gets stuck on objects, and loses track of the player completely if they climb on any elevated surface, turning the voice volume down to zero breaks most cutscenes, starting a new game and dying without saving will pull data from a ''different save file'', and jumping while entering Freddy causes the ''entire map'' to unload. On top of this, the game rarely directs players to the place where they're actually supposed to go (see WebVideo/{{Markiplier}} getting stuck in a laundry room for 45 minutes because he couldn't find the exit), and the ending cutscenes take place in a comic book format, a notable downgrade from the rest of the game and its fully animated cutscenes. It's pretty telling that Backstreet Games [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcGfk7m_M0s once tasked himself]] to beat the game ''without'' encountering a glitch, and could only do it if he counted "not seeing a glitch" as not a glitch, and even later versions have areas can just casually walk, climb, or jump to that will just utterly ''break'' the game.
* ''VideoGame/TheLordOfTheRingsGollum'' launched in a highly buggy state, [[UnintentionallyUnwinnable to the point where some reviewers couldn't even finish it]]. The game features clipping issues, frame drops, failed triggers, crashes, and falling out of the map. The optimization is also poor at best, with the game's requirements on PC being far higher than a game with its graphics should warrant.
* The Windows release of ''[[VideoGame/DisneysAnimatedStorybook Disney's Animated Storybook: The Lion King]]'' in 1994 gained infamy for "killing Christmas" for thousands of children that year as a number of Compaq Presario computers that came bundled with the game crashed when trying to load it due to driver incompatibility issues with graphics cards used by the Presarios in question, causing Disney--through developer Media Station--to issue updated versions of the game in an effort to placate families who had been frustrated by the ''Storybook'' ordeal. This was cited as one of the key factors for the development of [=DirectX=] in 1995.
* ''VideoGame/CitiesSkylines II'' released in an utterly barebones and broken state, with awful frame rates and performance, loads of bugs, a superficial facade of complexity, with graphics and visuals that are practically independent of the statistics and gameplay, and barebones content compared to the original game (including lack of mod support at launch, [[ComeForTheGameStayForTheMods widely considered one of the best features of the original game]], which was not added until several months post-release), making it abundantly clear the game was ChristmasRushed and far from completion when it was released. This was made even worse when the first paid DLC released; despite being labelled as "Beach Properties", it doesn't actually add beaches and the handful of buildings it does add are almost identical to one another, making it apparent ''this'' update was Christmas Rushed by Creator/ParadoxInteractive too, who refused to delay the DLC from its original date to allow more time for the base game to be patched (a common practice for the company regarding its game releases).

* While ''VideoGame/LeagueOfLegends'' went live without many hitches, Yorick the Gravedigger was an Obvious Beta. When he was released, he was considered worthless because his abilities were, well, practically a beta. His ult was also supposedly changed from development to release and was full of bugs. While the bugs of his kit were eventually ironed out, he still suffered from extremely poor design, and out of all the champions, Yorick had the dubious honor of never being included in the weekly free champion rotation. When Yorick was relaunched in 2016 with a brand new kit and model, the entire fanbase rejoiced.

* ''VideoGame/TalesOfCrestoria'': The game launched with very poor performance on Android phones, constant game crashes and softlocks during battles, unusable features such as the chat function, daily missions that would inexplicably lock for 12 hours a day, and reward glitches causing clear and arena rewards to not appear in people's inventories. Unfortunately, the game, despite getting most of the glaring issues fixed by its first anniversary, and getting a more positive reception, announced it would close down by February 2022.

* ''VideoGame/MegaManBattleNetwork1'' is laden with stiff and clunky mechanics, and the characters are flat and all suffer one form or another of EarlyInstallmentWeirdness regarding their characterization. It's also extremely short and easily beatable in under ten hours, less than half that of any other game in the series. While it was still good enough to serve as a foundation for the rest of the series, [[VideoGame/MegaManBattleNetwork2 the sequel]] released nine months later [[SurprisinglyImprovedSequel makes the first game's beta status painfully obvious by comparison]].

* ''VideoGame/ETTheExtraTerrestrial'' was made by a single developer who was given only five weeks to make it so that [[ChristmasRushed it would make it in time for Christmas]]. As such, it was an utter mess. It was a confusing, unintuitive, ugly-looking game that bore no resemblance to [[Film/ETTheExtraTerrestrial the movie it was based on]] (though to be fair there's very little if anything in ''E.T.'s'' plot that lends itself well to a video game adaptation.) The backlash from this was so bad that a completely different version of this game planned for the Platform/Atari5200 was aborted. Atari, figuring they had a [[CashCowFranchise license to print money]], made more copies of this game than there were consoles, expecting a [[KillerApp system seller]]. Needless to say, Atari had a very, very large amount of unsold games on their hands that became the bulk of Atari's "buried treasure", namely [[http://kotaku.com/e-t-found-in-new-mexico-landfill-1568100161 a landfill in New Mexico where they dumped all their leftover inventory]] before exiting console and computer markets after the game turned out to be the harbinger of MediaNotes/TheGreatVideoGameCrashOf1983. In recent years the game has started to [[VindicatedByHistory gain a more positive reputation]] - it will never be a highlight of the 2600 library but it's pretty damn impressive for something done by one guy in five weeks, especially compared to some of the other entries on this page.

* ''VideoGame/ETTheExtraTerrestrial'' was made by a single developer who was given only five weeks to make it so that [[ChristmasRushed it would make it in time for Christmas]]. As such, it was an utter mess. It was a confusing, unintuitive, ugly-looking game that bore no resemblance to [[Film/ETTheExtraTerrestrial the movie it was based on]]. The backlash from this was so bad that a completely different version of this game planned for the Platform/Atari5200 was aborted. Atari, figuring they had a [[CashCowFranchise license to print money]], made more copies of this game than there were consoles, expecting a [[KillerApp system seller]]. Needless to say, Atari had a very, very large amount of unsold games on their hands that became the bulk of Atari's "buried treasure", namely [[http://kotaku.com/e-t-found-in-new-mexico-landfill-1568100161 a landfill in New Mexico where they dumped all their leftover inventory]] before exiting console and computer markets after the game turned out to be the harbinger of MediaNotes/TheGreatVideoGameCrashOf1983.
* The Atari 2600 port of ''VideoGame/PacMan'' is sometimes accused of being one, to the point where there's a myth that the game was released as soon as Atari got their hands on the programmer's alpha version (the reality is rather more nuanced). The game is infamously unable to draw all the ghosts on screen at once.[[note]]This relates to the Atari 2600's limited capabilities for drawing moving objects; other games on the system with many moving objects ran into this problem, though none suffered as badly as Pac-Man. CRT screens also had phosphor decay that allowed the ghosts to stay on screen for longer and partially mitigated the flickering.[[/note]] It also looked ugly, at least partly because Atari didn't want games to have black backgrounds unless they were set in space.

* The rushed PAL release of ''Metropolis Street Racer'' for the Dreamcast was riddled with game-breaking, save-corrupting bugs. Sega quickly recalled it, but the second version was still somewhat buggy. The third PAL release, as well as the NTSC release, were more solid.

* When the ''Leviathan'' DLC for ''VideoGame/EuropaUniversalisIV'' was released, the game became littered with ridiculous bugs, such as the ability to [[https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/n1181t/you_can_cancel_monument_construction_in_other/ cancel constructions in other countries]] or your monarch getting [[https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/n0339g/i_see_your_666_ruler_and_raise_you_a_buggy_update/ blatantly unplausible stats]].

** ''VideoGame/PokemonGoldAndSilver'' were ''somewhat'' less of an obvious beta, but it was fairly clear that there was a decent amount of copy-and-paste between the two generations -- not entirely unheard of in those old days, especially when getting a giant game to run on a potato like the original Game Boy/Game Boy Color took all the hacks and prayers one could shove into the cartridge. ''Crystal'', like ''Yellow'' before it, fixed quite a few, but the way that some of the earlier-fixed bugs actually translated from ''[=RGB=]'' '''directly''' to ''GS'' made it clear that the transfer and development had begun before ''Yellow'''s release. Even then, some playtesting errors crept in, like a Pokémon's sex being tied specifically to their attack IV -- which means that if you want a female Totodile, for example, enjoy its 1 ATK value.

* ''VideoGame/TheKingOfFighters XII'': The playable character roster had been cut nearly in half between ''XI'' and ''XII'' (a few players browsed through the index files of the Platform/Xbox360 version and discovered files for several unused characters in the game such as Yuri and Takuma Sakazaki, fan-favorite Mai Shiranui, and long-unused ''VideoGame/FatalFury'' SubBoss Hwa Jai), the main arcade mode is little more than a glorified time trial with only five stages and no proper end boss (though given [[SNKBoss SNK's reputation for making extremely punishing bosses]], this change could be seen as a good thing), and until a version 1.02 patch fixed it, the netcode for online play was extremely unreliable, leaving some players stuck on the loading screen for minutes before even being able to select a character. The fact that all of the characters that were datamined from leftover files in ''XII'' showed up in ''XIII'' proves that ''XII'' was an obvious beta.

* ''VideoGame/PokemonScarletAndViolet'' are the buggiest games in the series since ''VideoGame/PokemonRedAndBlue'', featuring an eye-watering framerate caused by memory leak issues, clipping errors galore, animation bugs, atrocious texture quality anf filtering and semi-frequent game crashes. The title shows clear signs of being [[ChristmasRushed Christmas Rushed]] for Holiday 2022.

** ''VideoGame/PokemonGoldAndSilver'' were ''somewhat'' less of an obvious beta, but it was fairly clear that there was a decent amount of copy-and-paste between the two generations -- not entirely unheard of in those old days, especially when getting a giant game to run on a potato like the original Game Boy/Game Boy Color took all the hacks and prayers one could shove into the cartridge. ''Crystal'', like ''Yellow'' before it, fixed quite a few, but the way that some of the earlier-fixed bugs actually translated from ''[=RGB=]'' '''directly''' to ''GS'' made it clear that the transfer and development had begun before ''Yellow'''s release. Even then, some playtesting errors crept in, like a Pokemon's sex being tied specifically to their attack IV -- which means that if you want a female Totodile, for example, enjoy its 1 ATK value.

* ''VideoGame/PostalIII''. While the ''VideoGame/{{Postal}}'' series isn't known for its high production values, the game's initial release suffers from frequent crashing on some systems, the AI failing, broken Steam achievements, and sound issues, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRJIXCPYY6c among other things]]. Additionally, the style was quite a departure from what RWS had in mind before Akella took over production, making it much more cartoonish. Free-roam mode was cut and later put out in a patch, and there is no multiplayer, despite its development being credited, as it was canned at some point. The game was quite underpromoted and wasn't out on Steam until two months after its official release date, instead having to be purchased directly from RWS' website or other minor retailers, because Akella, in the last of their many weird decisions brought about by an economic downturn that caused they to lay off their primary dev team early in development, was too cheap to send it in to get an ESRB rating. Reception (fan and critical) is mixed to negative, with one of RWS' developers saying "the whole thing was rather tragic" and RWS since declaring it CanonDiscontinuity.