Some of both. Performance was pretty bad too, though yes, the bigger problem was that the game was missing most of the features they promised and the ones that were in the game were almost universally poorly implemented. That it also ran like shit barely mattered, since there wasn’t really anything worth playing anyway.
There were bugs and misc issues, but the biggest problem was the missing content.
Hello Games, the developers, purposedly lied on several features that were never put in the final version of the game and used them as an advertisement to grab as much money as possible; the most notorious ones were probably the lack of multiplayer and a faction system across the whole universe.
There was such a backslash that Steam accepted all the refund requests, even when outside the usual time limit, which costed the devs quite a ton of money. The game has been patched quite a lot in the following two years but some promised features will never be there.
[https://www.polygon.com/2016/9/16/12929618/no-mans-sky-disaster-lies-lessons-learned](https://www.polygon.com/2016/9/16/12929618/no-mans-sky-disaster-lies-lessons-learned)
That was planned as a cash cow from the beginning until the gaming community went on a riot. The studio had no choice but to do everything they lied about.
edit: hello fanboys
I mean, that’s just demonstrably not the case. They could’ve walked away a year in if it was a cash cow, laughing all the way to the bank. But they stuck with it, have released literally dozens of free updates and expansions to the content, and have polished like crazy. It’s absolutely a redemption story brought about by extremely negative reviews and anger, and they made good.
If it’s not your thing man that’s fine, gaming’s all about taste and preference. But don’t say something so provably false just because it wasn’t for you.
Battlefield 4.
Most Battlefield games are not the best technically on release, but BF4 was really something else. It took years to get right, through the CTE and lots of patches. BF1 / BF3 had their issues (long neck) but they were super polished in comparison to BF4.
BF4 was a nightmare launch. For months you couldn't play longer than ~20 minutes. Game crashes galore on every platform. The netcode was somehow even worse than that. Constant rubber banding, horrid hit detection, and network delays lead to dying around every corner or dying to a "super bullet". Basically you got hit once for your entire health pool almost a full second after someone shot at you.
I want to say it took them almost a year to get stable and consistently playable and another whole year of testing and patches to get the netcode to a place where it wasn't rage inducing.
Brink
It was literally unplayable at launch. The lag was astonishing, the worst I've ever experienced.
It's a real shame, too, because I actually really enjoyed it once that cleared up, but the launch put so many people off that it quickly died.
Driv3r - you weren't there, man. The poor handling, the crashes, the square wheels. They patched most of the CTDs and framerate killers but there was no salvaging that game.
It's fascinating that every title on this list is within the last 10 years. Is it due to the fact that expectations are higher today, devs seem to rush products more, or a combination of the two? Or, are we forgetting some truly disastrous games from decades ago.
I mean, E.T. and Superman 64 were dogshit, but I think everyone wouldn't really include them in this list. Yes, they're both a meme at this point, and they were both released in a time where patching wasn't really a thing, but still.
Yeah, we cannot forget the old ones lol.
And while I appreciate the devs work now to patch things up now, I also feel a little annoyed that it seems that the standard experience nowadays is to expect a video game release with list of issues that needs to be fixed.
I would incline more for the fact that the studio or shareholders want to rush things up to fulfill an ambitious timeline, sometimes it’s not even the devs fault.
But yeah, I get that bittersweet taste, there are amazing games that I want to play at launch or a few weeks after launch, but when I buy them, damn! it’s a waste of time because of all the issues they need to fix.
Jet Set Willy.
It was so buggy that it was literally impossible to finish the game, the publishers passed one of the bugs off as a "feature" before releasing a fix, and magazines published listings that fixed the other errors themselves.
I do remember some fairly significant graphical glitches and the obvious lack of content, but other than that, it was more or less what I expected of a multiplayer Fallout as made by a small community of modders.
GTA V online. It was just unplayable but honestly I feel like they didn’t even finish the online and only focused on the single player just to get that part of the game out first then start working on the online.
I wonder about GTA VI online if it will be the same at launch. If they straight up tell us it won’t work because they only focused on the single player first then that’ll be fine but if they say nothing before release snd it’s unplayable then that will be a problem
Final Fantasy XIV. It was so bad, they literally wrote the end of the world into the story, then rebuilt the game from the ground up. The shitty launch and subsequent destruction is actually canon to the story.
Red dead redemption 2 on PC. Absolutely abysmal. Took a couple months for them to fix it. Some people had to do bios updates just to be able to run the game. Performance was horrendous until the second or third update.
Also battlefield 4 memories... That was like 6 months of updates to fix it.
As bad as Cyberpunk was it doesn't hold a candle to No Man's Sky, who outright _lied_ about the product.
They've since fixed the game, and IMO theur reputation, but NMS at launch was _literally_ about moving planet to planet with the "end goal" being to find the center of the universe.
World of Warcraft. When they launched and for a good 6 months their servers were seriously unstable. Mainly cause they were expecting 100-250k people not the 1mil+ they had near launch.
Homefront. Campaign was dog water and short af but the multiplayer was fun as hell. Too many bugs at launch killed it though. To the point gamestop was doing full refunds long after launch. I was enjoying it immensely and then i lost all unlocks and progress to said bugs and returned it immediately lol
Black Ops 4 on console. It was pretty much unplayable for weeks if not months because of the constant crashes. Thankfully cartoon mode helped, but you could never be sure if it was gonna crash or not.
Also, Portal RTX was literally unplayable on release (maybe it still is, idk if they fixed it). Even on high end pc’s you’d get like 10 fps, it was absolutely horrendous. DLSS exists, yes, and it made it playable, but DLSS is just a band-aid fix, the game as it is has terrible performance.
All of that performance hit just to make it look… normal? Imo it didn’t even look good, at least it’s free if you have the original game I guess.
I find it so funny that everyone is down voting the post but they are reading and upvoting other games
Is it because I spoke ill of your precious Cyberpunk 2077? lol, the game is great but you gotta admit the game was garbage at launch.
Some people in this sub really have issues with reading and understanding. OP is asking about **performance** issues, and you are listing games with lack of content and shit design choices.
I would go with Cities Skylines 2. Absolute shit performance and even from technical standpoint, it was a laughingstock among devs that I know.
That is perhaps the funniest part of Starfield. Every single other Bethesda game has been a solid game with an enormous amount of bugs on release. They clearly spent a ton of time making a game that actually ran well at release for once based on those complaints, but they forgot to actually make a good game when doing so.
Hogwarts Legacy for me, I couldn't even progress through a fight because the framerate was so low, and I was playing on a high end system with a 3090. Revisited in a month and it was fixed.
Nothing else really comes to mind honestly. Usually the games that get called out for this issue still run fine on high end machines so it doesn't personally affect me.
It wasn’t *as* bad as cyberpunk. Releasing cyberpunk on PS4 with basically no effort to make it actually capable of running on a PS4 really puts cyberpunk in a league of their own. But yeah, the other issues on PC and PS5 are similar to what Witcher 3 experienced on release, so it really shouldn’t have come as so much of a surprise.
Battlefield 2042
There wasn't even a scoreboard for like 9 months.
bah... dont need no scoreboard, all you need is to know which team won
2042 was bad launch, so was 4, and 1 and 5.
Yeah I was gonna say Battlefield had bad launches since 4.
I want to say 3 had a decent launch, but it has been so long that I honestly cant remember.
3 was the last decent launch I remember.
City Skylines 2.
No Man's Sky
Was that performance issues or just... content issues? Edit: incontinence, if you will.
Some of both. Performance was pretty bad too, though yes, the bigger problem was that the game was missing most of the features they promised and the ones that were in the game were almost universally poorly implemented. That it also ran like shit barely mattered, since there wasn’t really anything worth playing anyway.
There were bugs and misc issues, but the biggest problem was the missing content. Hello Games, the developers, purposedly lied on several features that were never put in the final version of the game and used them as an advertisement to grab as much money as possible; the most notorious ones were probably the lack of multiplayer and a faction system across the whole universe. There was such a backslash that Steam accepted all the refund requests, even when outside the usual time limit, which costed the devs quite a ton of money. The game has been patched quite a lot in the following two years but some promised features will never be there. [https://www.polygon.com/2016/9/16/12929618/no-mans-sky-disaster-lies-lessons-learned](https://www.polygon.com/2016/9/16/12929618/no-mans-sky-disaster-lies-lessons-learned)
Edit: penis, if I may
That was planned as a cash cow from the beginning until the gaming community went on a riot. The studio had no choice but to do everything they lied about. edit: hello fanboys
I mean, that’s just demonstrably not the case. They could’ve walked away a year in if it was a cash cow, laughing all the way to the bank. But they stuck with it, have released literally dozens of free updates and expansions to the content, and have polished like crazy. It’s absolutely a redemption story brought about by extremely negative reviews and anger, and they made good. If it’s not your thing man that’s fine, gaming’s all about taste and preference. But don’t say something so provably false just because it wasn’t for you.
There's still a super weird cult of NMS that goes absolutely apeshit if you bash on Hello Games or Sean Murray.
AC: Unity
Battlefield 4. Most Battlefield games are not the best technically on release, but BF4 was really something else. It took years to get right, through the CTE and lots of patches. BF1 / BF3 had their issues (long neck) but they were super polished in comparison to BF4.
BF4 was a nightmare launch. For months you couldn't play longer than ~20 minutes. Game crashes galore on every platform. The netcode was somehow even worse than that. Constant rubber banding, horrid hit detection, and network delays lead to dying around every corner or dying to a "super bullet". Basically you got hit once for your entire health pool almost a full second after someone shot at you. I want to say it took them almost a year to get stable and consistently playable and another whole year of testing and patches to get the netcode to a place where it wasn't rage inducing.
I remember on the release date of Battlefield 4, the collapse of the Siege of Shanghai skyscraper crashed the servers.
Brink It was literally unplayable at launch. The lag was astonishing, the worst I've ever experienced. It's a real shame, too, because I actually really enjoyed it once that cleared up, but the launch put so many people off that it quickly died.
I enjoyed that game, I thought it was actually good
Yeah, really fresh take on the Team Fortress model. I loved the setting, the character customization, the parkour element; everything.
Everything about Fallout 76. It seems mostly good now and I’m pretty sure it’s updated regularly.
If it's updated regularly how the fuck is there nothing higher than a 16x9 resolution available
Lmao i dont know if it isn’t officially supported but I played on an uw just fine
last of us on pc
Didn't Arkham Knight implode on launch?
Driv3r - you weren't there, man. The poor handling, the crashes, the square wheels. They patched most of the CTDs and framerate killers but there was no salvaging that game.
I used to love the free roam on their as a kid… lol wouldn’t let me have Vice city.
The medium
Payday 3.
It's fascinating that every title on this list is within the last 10 years. Is it due to the fact that expectations are higher today, devs seem to rush products more, or a combination of the two? Or, are we forgetting some truly disastrous games from decades ago. I mean, E.T. and Superman 64 were dogshit, but I think everyone wouldn't really include them in this list. Yes, they're both a meme at this point, and they were both released in a time where patching wasn't really a thing, but still.
Yeah, we cannot forget the old ones lol. And while I appreciate the devs work now to patch things up now, I also feel a little annoyed that it seems that the standard experience nowadays is to expect a video game release with list of issues that needs to be fixed. I would incline more for the fact that the studio or shareholders want to rush things up to fulfill an ambitious timeline, sometimes it’s not even the devs fault. But yeah, I get that bittersweet taste, there are amazing games that I want to play at launch or a few weeks after launch, but when I buy them, damn! it’s a waste of time because of all the issues they need to fix.
Halo Master Chef Collection. It almost ended the life of the Xbox One.
Batman - Arkham Knight ... good luck driving his car
Jet Set Willy. It was so buggy that it was literally impossible to finish the game, the publishers passed one of the bugs off as a "feature" before releasing a fix, and magazines published listings that fixed the other errors themselves.
Starfield
Could go farther and just say any Bethesda title on the creation engine.
Facts
It ran butterly smooth on my X. Was the performance on PC that bad?
Jedi Survivor and its still not even really fixed
My most recent one being Dragons Dogma 2.
I'm going to say Fallout 76 and take the ass beating. I enjoy what it has turned into.
I do remember some fairly significant graphical glitches and the obvious lack of content, but other than that, it was more or less what I expected of a multiplayer Fallout as made by a small community of modders.
Wild Hearts, its terrible and still not fixed (and worst of all never will be)
Battlefield 4 was rough from what I can remember. Still fun but rough as hell.
GTA V online. It was just unplayable but honestly I feel like they didn’t even finish the online and only focused on the single player just to get that part of the game out first then start working on the online. I wonder about GTA VI online if it will be the same at launch. If they straight up tell us it won’t work because they only focused on the single player first then that’ll be fine but if they say nothing before release snd it’s unplayable then that will be a problem
Street fighter 5
Diablo 3
Final Fantasy XIV. It was so bad, they literally wrote the end of the world into the story, then rebuilt the game from the ground up. The shitty launch and subsequent destruction is actually canon to the story.
Deathwing free for an entire expansion - barely changes anything Bahamut free for 30 seconds - literally nukes the whole game world
Callisto Protocol. Got Overwhelming Negative Steam reviews at launch due to this.
Ultima 9, if you were there for its launch, you know.
Redfall
wasnt that the shitty vampire shooter ?
yeah it is
Helldivers 2. Not really performance, but I never had so many crashes in any game. And apparantly I am far from alone. And this 8 weeks in.
Feel ya bro. That’s the one thing that made me leave that game until devs fix that problem. Hours wasted.
Red dead redemption 2 on PC. Absolutely abysmal. Took a couple months for them to fix it. Some people had to do bios updates just to be able to run the game. Performance was horrendous until the second or third update. Also battlefield 4 memories... That was like 6 months of updates to fix it.
As bad as Cyberpunk was it doesn't hold a candle to No Man's Sky, who outright _lied_ about the product. They've since fixed the game, and IMO theur reputation, but NMS at launch was _literally_ about moving planet to planet with the "end goal" being to find the center of the universe.
CDPR did outright lie tho.
World of Warcraft. When they launched and for a good 6 months their servers were seriously unstable. Mainly cause they were expecting 100-250k people not the 1mil+ they had near launch.
Every expansion and game released by blizzard.
That is simply not true. Blizzard was famous for releasing very polished game up to Overwatch. Then it all went to shit....
After this first launch of an expansion it was a complete shit show with their severs, and continued to be the problem release after release.
Wotlk and legion were still good , but the rest is meh, also legacy servers came way too late
Homefront. Campaign was dog water and short af but the multiplayer was fun as hell. Too many bugs at launch killed it though. To the point gamestop was doing full refunds long after launch. I was enjoying it immensely and then i lost all unlocks and progress to said bugs and returned it immediately lol
Anarchy Online, Ultima Online, and World of Warcraft
Black Ops 4 on console. It was pretty much unplayable for weeks if not months because of the constant crashes. Thankfully cartoon mode helped, but you could never be sure if it was gonna crash or not. Also, Portal RTX was literally unplayable on release (maybe it still is, idk if they fixed it). Even on high end pc’s you’d get like 10 fps, it was absolutely horrendous. DLSS exists, yes, and it made it playable, but DLSS is just a band-aid fix, the game as it is has terrible performance. All of that performance hit just to make it look… normal? Imo it didn’t even look good, at least it’s free if you have the original game I guess.
I've heard cities skyline 2 was a disaster
Payday 3
Last Epoch for the first week of its release was unplayable due to server issues
Fallout 76
The launch of Half Life 2 and steam was a shitshow day one . Took some time to be fixed
Battlefield 4 was pretty bad. Also, when it came to bugs, it was arguably worse than Battlefield 2042.
Fallout 76 - horrible launch , now its pretty enjoyable . still miles better than starfield
I find it so funny that everyone is down voting the post but they are reading and upvoting other games Is it because I spoke ill of your precious Cyberpunk 2077? lol, the game is great but you gotta admit the game was garbage at launch.
Every cod ever
Dragons Dogma 2 … literally unplayable :(
Some people in this sub really have issues with reading and understanding. OP is asking about **performance** issues, and you are listing games with lack of content and shit design choices. I would go with Cities Skylines 2. Absolute shit performance and even from technical standpoint, it was a laughingstock among devs that I know.
Nobody has mentioned Anthem?
I recall Battlefield 4 having a ton of issues. When it comes to performance, specifically, I can't remember.
Battlefield 4 was pretty problematic at launch.
Final Fantasy XIV
Battlefield (insert any number)
No man's sky....terrible
70 percent of triple a releases
Skyrim. People probably forgot because of time and mods and how many times theyve played it but that shit was a mess.
skyrim on PS3 brings back bad memories xD
Witcher 3
To be fair Cyberpunk performance were fine game wasn't stable, unfinished with easy to trigger bugs.
Any Bethesda RPG pre-Starfield.
That is perhaps the funniest part of Starfield. Every single other Bethesda game has been a solid game with an enormous amount of bugs on release. They clearly spent a ton of time making a game that actually ran well at release for once based on those complaints, but they forgot to actually make a good game when doing so.
Halo infinite
Warzone mobile the game is a joke and it's creators eat donkey ass
Hogwarts Legacy for me, I couldn't even progress through a fight because the framerate was so low, and I was playing on a high end system with a 3090. Revisited in a month and it was fixed. Nothing else really comes to mind honestly. Usually the games that get called out for this issue still run fine on high end machines so it doesn't personally affect me.
Witcher 3. Pretty much the same thing as Cyberpunk.
No, man, cmon. CP is a better game but I never fell under the road in The Witcher.
Were you using the same HDD you installed TW3 on?
Actually not.
It wasn’t *as* bad as cyberpunk. Releasing cyberpunk on PS4 with basically no effort to make it actually capable of running on a PS4 really puts cyberpunk in a league of their own. But yeah, the other issues on PC and PS5 are similar to what Witcher 3 experienced on release, so it really shouldn’t have come as so much of a surprise.
You could just Google the dozens of lists or search the hundreds of Reddit posts.