TOP 9 games that cannot be completed due to a bug: the cult RPG about vampires, a masterpiece from Kojima, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and much more

Aspyr studio released a port of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2. Unfortunately, it turned out that it was impossible to complete the legendary RPG — it was all because of a crash at an important plot point. This is not the first time that technical problems have disrupted the passage of an excellent game. In this collection, we have collected nine projects that made gamers suffer due to a critical bug!

Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines is called one of the best RPGs of all time for a reason. The creation of Troika Games offered unprecedented variety of playthroughs. The gamer could act in stealth, charm his interlocutors in dialogues, break faces with his fists, incinerate enemies with magic, shoot everyone with cannons, or even turn into a bloodthirsty monster. Playing as the Malkavian clan was absolutely mind-blowing: these guys were so crazy that they willingly communicated with TVs and road signs.

Unfortunately, it was not easy to enjoy the RPG at release. Bloodlines is one of the first games on the Source engine, and the publisher persistently rushed the developers, not allowing them to bring the technical state to fruition. As a result, the vampire's adventures were continually interrupted by bugs, glitches and freezes. One of the problems completely broke the passage: once during a story mission, the hero ran away from an explosion and got into a boat — after which the game crashed to the desktop.

After a while, Troika Games released a patch that solved a critical bug, and fans themselves dealt with other problems. As a result, over time, the game still gained cult status. What a pity that the second part ended up in production hell.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker — one of the best Russian games of recent years. Charismatic partners, a decent plot, sophisticated combat, many interesting mechanics like kingdom management — it's not surprising that gamers have been stuck in Owlcat Games' creation for hundreds of hours.

Unfortunately, the release version was more like a bug simulator than an RPG. The enemies were shockingly unbalanced — small creatures easily dodged attacks and quickly slaughtered a high-level squad. Crashing to the desktop at the end of a fierce battle was common. NPCs refused to accept completed quests.

The biggest problem was broken scripts. In my case, at the 60th hour of playthrough, the story NPC simply refused to talk to the hero. It was impossible to move forward without dialogue—neither reboots nor other manipulations helped. Over time, Owlcat Games fixed the problems, but it took many months.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky — one of the the most buggy games of all time. Playing through the game in the first months was a hopeless endeavor: terrible optimization, regular crashes and annoying bugs made it difficult to enjoy Clear Sky.

For example, once the hero wandered through the Red Forest and met a group of stalkers there. The poor fellows found themselves in an anomaly-loop: only a mysterious artifact could save them, which seemed to be lying somewhere nearby, but no one could find it.

As a result, gamers gathered on forums and discussed the location of the quest item. Perhaps there is a secret cache hidden somewhere? Or will there be an NPC in one of the locations who will give a hint? Alas, the answer was never found. And then the developers simply released a patch: after installing it, the player could head into the mine, kill the renegades and pick up the artifact.

This is not the only bug that prevented the completion of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky. To enjoy the game to the fullest, gamers had to wait for a dozen patches.

Before the release suitable Marvel's Spider-Man it was Ultimate Spider-Man that was considered the best action game about Spider-Man. Alas, gamers from Russia were not really able to check it out — already on the first mission the game crashed to the desktop.

Having started the passage, gamers immediately began to get high. Spider-Man coolly flew on his web, crawled across buildings and punched villains in the face. It would seem that this is the ideal game that will captivate superhero fans for a long time. Alas, half an hour later the boss fight with Venom began — but a crash prevented the fight with the symbiote.

It turned out that it was all due to incorrect localization, which did not allow Ultimate Spider-Man to work properly. The problem was fixed by installing the English version, but in 2005 the Internet was not so developed, and few people managed to find a solution.

Neverwinter Nights 2 — a great RPG, the development of which was responsible for cult studio Obsidian. The team managed to greatly improve the squad management, combat system and plot — as a result, the sequel received high marks from gamers and awards from the press. However, the game was mercilessly criticized for its technical condition: some bugs did not allow it to reach the final.

The main problem awaited at the end of the third act: then the evil spirits attacked the fortified fortress, and the heroes had to fight back the creatures. At some point, the squad was attacked by the mighty King of Shadows, but there was no way to kill him. No matter how hard the forces of good tried, the boss's health bar remained full. At the same time, at some point the scoundrel completely froze in place, refusing to fight.

At the same time, there were plenty of other bugs in the game. The King of Shadows might not get out of the portal, NPCs would refuse to notice the quest item in the hero's hands, or the «Save» button would stop working. All problems were solved by fixes, but they still had to wait.

In Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots Kojima (Hideo Kojima) showed all his genius. In terms of plot and presentation, the game was ahead of its time — the outstanding cutscenes and intensity of passions are impressive even 14 years later. But technically the game did not work well: there were too many crashes, and some of them did not allow us to reach the final.

Each gamer had his own bug that broke the passage. However, most players encountered endless crashes in the fourth act, when Kojima deliberately lowered the graphics level. In order for the reference to the first Metal Gear Solid to work as expected, the console launched an emulator of the first PlayStation — but this often led to a crash. As a result, many fans never knew how the story of Big Boss and Solid Snake ended.

Painkiller has become a new word in the first-person shooter genre. Few other games have had such impressive crowds of monsters and such gigantic bosses running around locations. However, there were crashes again — one of them definitely drove gamers to despair.

In the City on the Water mission, different types of enemies fought each other. The problem is that as soon as one Skull killed a Hell Biker, the game immediately froze. As a result, gamers had to quickly rush around the building, destroy some enemies and take care of others — it was incredibly difficult, but only in this case were they able to complete the level.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is a decent action game based on the films of Peter Jackson. Gamers could play as Gandalf, Aragorn, Sam, Frodo and other characters — and the process was accompanied by the spectacular extermination of orcs, ghosts and spiders. Unfortunately, towards the end the fun stopped.

The main part of the game worked fine, but the last missions refused to launch. The textures loaded, but then The Return of the King crashed to the desktop. To deal with the problem, you had to download a patch, but in 2003 many people did not have the Internet at all. As a result, the game versions of Gandalf, Frodo and company never made it to the final credits.

Sacred is one of the most intelligent Diablo clones. Running around the cute world and tearing monsters to pieces was fantastic fun. It's just that Blizzard's creation went through without any problems, but Sacred regularly made me nervous.

One day the hero met a wounded poor fellow in the desert who asked for water. After running around the area a little, he quickly found an oasis, but he couldn't get liquid from there — the object was inactive. To resolve the issue, gamers had to add water to their inventory via the command line, but even this did not always work.

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Have you had any cases when bugs and crashes broke the passage? Tell us in the comments!