digg

..........Gears of war PC?

the bioshock thing where you can only play it on like two computers does that count?

Top 5 Botched PC *MMO* Game Launches. Battlecruiser 3000? Duke Nukem?

Dugg for the steam fiasco. Even though it still annoys me that they require me to be online for it...

Anyone who actually played Hellgate: London during the first month of it's release knows that it should be further up the list. The game was literally unplayable, and if you did manage to get anything accomplished, you knew the server would reset and you would lose any progress made.
And now that I think about it, no mention of WoW? Please tell me no one has forgotten about the 3000 person queue's, downed servers, crashing, and general mania that occurred in the first month of the game's release. The WoW of today and the WoW of November 2004 are night and day of each other.

I list any and EVERY game release in Australia. The world treats us like a back water ***** island, and while it may be 90% true, I ask you dickhead publishers one question...
WHY THE ***** MUST I WAIT?!?!? Global launch dates ftw!
And now the legions of arrogant, selfish americans all chanting ***** you ozzy step in and bury me because i propose and idea that might delay their release by a single day. sigh.

I got owned by hellgate.

Battlefield 2 didn't work for me
even now a lotta times it doesn't.

what a poorly optimized game
lag on a card thats 2 years newer than the game itself.... pitiful.

EA sucks

UT3... Tribes 2.... Everquest 2... Quake Wars Enemy Territory

Looking back, the launch of Half-Life 2 wasn't too terribly bad, as far as launches go. Yeah, I remember staying up all night waiting for the damn thing to activate, but after that initial hitch, it's been pretty smooth sailing. Of course, on the other hand, you have to factor in the fact that it was Half-Life 2, and we'd been waiting for it for years, and it had been seriously delayed multiple times, and many of us were already to the point of wanting to go after Valve with a crowbar when this happened... just saying, I think part of the problem was tensions were already so high.

*sigh*. World War Two online had so much potential, too. It's a great game now with all the patches and updates.

Bioshock was probably the worst launch I've ever experienced. Everything from the invasive malware copy protection (yes, it was malware) even on the demo to the broken validation system. I'm never buying another Irrational/2k title again after that debacle.

Two words. Two Worlds.

What a laughable list. No mention of Anarchy Online? Anything to do with Derek Smart? Big Rigs: Over the Road?

Whoever wrote this did so with minimal research.

They forgot Halo 2 Vista. The team disbanded shortly after release and nothing has come of improving the ***** PC game ever released.

Battlecruiser 3k?

can't imagine life without steam now? i can easily imagine it, and it's a nice place

I was so disappointed with Ultima IX: Ascension. I had been playing Ultima Online for quite some time prior to that game's announcement, and anticipated it with much excitement. I managed to get ahold of a beta disc of it when I ordered UO:3D (Another flop, thanks for ruining a great game EA). I played it and was horribly dissatisfied :(. I knew it was EA that screwed over Origin Systems (Creator of UO, et al. They had been purchased prior to this). Origin had been working on UO2 as well, until EA decided to screw up UO (original). Then they canceled UO2, and all of it's hopes of being one of the coolest games to the time. Their reason? They didn't want UO2 to compete with UO. Richard Garriott resigned, from the company he and his family created, in disgust. And I resigned myself from the game series he created and allowed to be mangled by a corporation full of greed. Such a disappointment. Such a loss for the gaming community who desired real open ended content and fun.

Stronghold 2 was bad. I can't forget the horrors I experienced with that game.

Unreal 3 on the PS3 is still buggy as *****, and hasn't seen an update.

Actually, while were on the topic, how about the PS3 as bad launch? $600, crappy networking, half the features of the 360 (Background downloading ftw..) It seems their starting to pick up the pieces and get their horses in order though.

Yeah this list blows. I think it is completely inaccurate. Gears of War PC should be #1! Next in like should have been Gothic 3. I hate to admit gothic 3, yet the game still remains unfinished. Gears of War takes the take because the game is absolutely unplayable, at least on XP with a x1900xt and a dual core opteron. I can vouch at least for Half-life 2 that it is virtually bug free and still ticking. Not to mention that it was playable at launch which is much more to say that Gears of War. The reason Gears takes the cake from Gothic 3 is that you can at least play Gothic 3 even though there are some horrible bugs infesting that game. Gears crashes all the time not matter whether or not you apply all the fixes.

Not to mention that there is no support and you pay $50 bucks to Epic and Microshaft and they release an alpha game. Man I hope someone brings a class action against them.

Did you guys read the first paragraph?

"Installing a new PC game can be something like a blind date. Yeah, sure, it may have sounded great when your friend was saying you'd be perfect for each other, but if things start off on a bad foot -- like, say, she vomits in your car -- you may just not want to bother with the rest of the night. Plenty of atrocious PC game launches litter the past, but what we have here are our five "favorites" -- the ones that still make us shake our heads and cluck our tongues and make other such disapproving gestures with our bodies as we recount their particular horrors. And while it would be easy enough to fill this entire list at least two times over with MMOs alone, we decided not to do that, as it's just too much fish-in-the-barrel shooting even for us. So let's laugh, cry, and get annoyed all over again at five of the all-time worst PC game launches. We promise, reading this list will not automatically reformat your hard drive!"

Meaning, it isn't the TOP 5, since as they said there are too many to choose, it is just 5 they chose? Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how I interpreted it, feel me in.

Im suprised MOH: Airborne didn't make the list. I loved reading the EA MOH forums right after launch, Nearly every post was complaint.

No Daikatana? But John Romeo said he would make me his bitch

I remember the release of Half Life 2, it was horrible. At that time, I didn't have a 24/7 access to internet so I basically couldn't play when I wanted to. Plus, my firewall and Steam weren't the best of friends. I had bought it in store too, and only after hours of installing 5 disks, I found out that I still couldn't play until I updated and validated and yada yada yada.

Steam was actually launched way way way prior to HL2's release. It was initially for the open beta testing of CS 1.6 which I participated in. I think this was back in '02 some time? Also, interestingly enough, it was a FUBAR at the beta 1.6 release and the final 1.6 public release as well as HL2. :)

Absolutely f**king BRILLIANT article for putting "Ultima Ascension" at the top of the list! I still have the collector's edition box, and I've been considering reinstalling it on a separate PC just to see how it now behaves on a system with more horsepower than was even thought of back in 1999. I have been an Ultima fan since the days of the Commodore 64, and this was THE most pathetic way to end the most brilliant RPG series.

I had a top-of-the-line (back then) 800 MHz Athlon PC that was able to run anything that was thrown at it -- *except* Ultima Ascension, because they used software rendering instead of hardware rendering. The bugs and crashes were absolutely ridiculous. A friend of mine, who was bigger into Ultima than I was, couldn't finish the game because of one bug that crashed his system every time he swam back to the water's surface (which was required to reach one of the areas) even with the final patch.

Ultima: Ascension is the quintessential example of a game that was rushed to market. It absolutely required a Christmas 2000 release, but Electronic Arts totally ***** it up in order to release for Christmas 1999. I have never forgiven EA for the destruction that it caused of Origin, Westwood Studios, and Bullfrog -- three of the most original and innovative companies in gaming history, all of which were DESTROYED by Electronic Arts. It's wonderful to see that 1UP has acknowledged it as well.

***** you, Electronic Arts!!

I can't believe Unreal Tournament 3 isn't on this list. Epic made a great game with a competely half-baked interface including the worst menu design I've ever seen. Then they released patches very slowly that only added buggy support for features that should've been in the game before it made it out the door. Then they claimed that PC games were dead. Then they claimed they were just kidding.

The entire time they completely failed to advertise UT3, so nobody bought it. Now less than six months later it's hard to find more than one populated server even during prime time. They had the opportunity to become the new standard of competitive FPS, the new Quake 3, but instead they sat around picking their noses, making pretty levels with unplayable layouts, and recording dumb voiceovers for their dumb single-player storyline (which I don't even have to talk about because Penny Arcade already did a better job): http://www.penny-arcade.com/2007/12/19

Pirates of the Burning Sea should be added to that list.
Completely unready for launch. Problems with 8XXX series video cards. 1997 mindset in regards to death penalty.
Pve grind for hours to be able to pvp.
Not even out 2 months and most servers are ghost towns. Long term beta players who loved the game are leaving.
Completely reworking the drops and cost of ships 1 week before release, nerfing drops and raising costs to the point of absurdity.
Only game other than Matrix Online that I regret spending my money on.

What about Final Fantasy Online, the bug where if you uninstall it you have to reformat your hard drive/reinstall windows because it deleted system files? Fun times.

Why is Tribes:Vengeance not on the list? Talk about screwing up a fantastic series of games...

Was 2001 really the time of 56k modem (Noted in ww2 online)..? I remember getting my first ADSL in 2001 and back then living in a small town of 12000 people in northern Europe. Had ISDN for a year or two before that.

Anyway, the only bad launch I have personally experience was the initial launch of Steam which I remember happening way before 2004, maybe a beta version or something? I didn't follow it up because the whole thing just made me stop playing any HL mods and switch to other games.

Duke Nukem Forever?

No Falcon 5.0, no Digg. It is hard enough to find a really good flight sim. With Microprose gone what do we have now? Ubisoft and... Ubisoft (Their games may look pretty, but for the most part are more arcade-like than simulators?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier:_First_Encou ...
"Due to a conflict between Braben and the game’s publishers Gametek, the game was shipped early, and as a result was riddled with bugs, such as an auto pilot that crashed."

==Why is Tribes:Vengeance not on the list? Talk about screwing up a fantastic series of games...==

Add Tribes 2 onto the list.
It got better. But OMG the launch was just abysmal.

Crashy as hell, hardcoded ESDF map keys, and no classic maps or modes.

If they had done a CCS style port, the game would have had a lot more appeal.

I'm surprised that star wars galaxies isn't on here. It was almost completely unplayable for the first couple of months.

i think all mmo's suck when they first come out

Games are going through a period of change, and they will be bloated for some time. Much like all software is getting larger in size (even Mac's optionals are getting large). But it is ok, because processing power, memory and storage are getting dirt cheap now. SSDs will be amazing when they are adapted widely, though.

No list of botched releases can possibly be complete without Daikatana. It's like listing the world's worst wars and forgetting about Hitler.

And while it technically hasn't been released yet, I think Duke Nukem Forever should qualify for number 2.

How could Vanguard not be #1???

No Halo 2 for Vista? Battlefield 2? Battlefield 2142? No Digg.

Some of these a freaking tame in comparison to some that I've seen. Pool of Radiance uninstalling system files when you uninstalled the game, now that was fun. The launch of the original EQ (packet loss and griffon vs innkeeper rooftop battles ftw!), our good friend Horizons and many others. Looks like they were just going for popular cheepshots. Glad to see Ultima IX got up there. I bought that sucker and about a gig of patches later was finally able to play it somewhat. Unfortunately, it still had a lovely issue with corrupting save games at random, and I lost my save half way, never to touch it again. Too bad since it was a fairly fun game otherwise.