Most annoying game crash you've had?

I was playing Roguebook yesterday, it's a deckbuilder like Slay the Spire, but you choose levels by exploring a hex map.

After repeated tries over a total of 13-14 hours, I beat the game for the first time. That run was an hour or so. The RNG had given me this build that made enemies bleed, that allowed me to make them bleed more, then double that bleed.

I also had daggers that I could get into my hand and use for zero mana, then double those daggers and double then again.

I had a modified card that with the highest block I've seen, that soaked up almost all damage - when it was lucky enough to appear.

I beat the final boss - a close match! - and got an achievement saying only 20% of players had beaten the final boss.

Then the game crashed. I could hear it playing in the background, but I had a screen full of red text and code errors.

I kept the achievement and lost everything else. I should have earned XP, modifiers, treasures, more cards and god knows what else. I suspect the game runs online, even though it's PvE. (The devs other game Faeria is like this.) If there's a crash, I suppose the server isn't notified about my game status.

Who's to say I'll ever have that combination of cards and circumstances again?

What's your most annoying crash?

Knights of the Old Republic on Xbox (1, not One, the original!) I experienced a crash where after reaching Tatooine any time I left the entry screen in the planet, I would crash no matter which direction I chose. I had one backup save a little earlier and I got the same crash after re-doing that progress. I was completely hosed.

I suspect this was caused by me actually killing or choosing not to pick up a possible party member earlier in the game. I forget which but it was a jedi or jedi adjacent lady. That was an unusual choice and the only reason I can think of for this not being something more people ran into.

When I was in high school my friend and I played through the entirety of The Simpsons arcade game at a local movie theater and the game froze during the final boss fight.

Playing EverQuest back in 1999 or 2000 and working on my Bard Epic Quest. I finally collected all of the dragon scales by repeatedly participating in every raid for Trakanon, Nagafen, and Lady Vox. This is hundreds of hours of EQ to get these damn things to drop at the time.

I find the NPC to turn in two of the 3 scales and right when I click trade my connection drops. After waiting for the system to go linkdead I restart and once I'm back in I don't have the two scales and I don't have the item the NPC gives me. I have to repeat the Nagafen and Lady Vox raids until I get more scales.

I never completed the bard epic, I ended up multiquesting the Trakanon item for another bard and started a new character.

After 3+ hrs, Moonlighter would freeze on me and my save would be unrecoverable on PS4. It was my jam so much that it took me three or more lockups to wait for a patch. IMAGE(https://emojipedia-us.s3.amazonaws.com/source/microsoft-teams/337/face-with-steam-from-nose_1f624.png)

trueheart78 wrote:

After 3+ hrs, Moonlighter would freeze on me and my save would be unrecoverable on PS4. It was my jam so much that it took me three or more lockups to wait for a patch. IMAGE(https://emojipedia-us.s3.amazonaws.com/source/microsoft-teams/337/face-with-steam-from-nose_1f624.png)

Oof that's a rough one. Reminds me that I had a bad one with Kingdom: Two Crowns on Switch, which wasnt patched for months either. Having more than 1 save with a reasonable amount of game progress would cause the save game file size to get too large. Your save would cause an error the next time it tries to autosave. Completely blocked progress unless you delete your other save.

Also, more recently, Moonglow Bay. Its a lovely little co-opable Stardew-like with fishing and cooking instead of farming. The first ~4 hours are great, then you run into more and more bugs until you can easily get a progression stopper at Chapter 4 (out of 5 or 6 I think). We've written the game off. There's too many bugs even if they fix that one and its been out for nearly a year.

A friend gave me his copy of TIE Fighter back in the 90's. I had just played X-Wing CD for the last 3 years straight and found out about the sequel. It was an official version and came in the form of 5 floppy discs needed for installation. The fifth disc was corrupted. It wouldn't install. It would hang my computer and force a restart which would eliminate the installation process. I tried on many, MANY occasions to install that game and it NEVER worked. X-Wing is one of my all time favorite games and I never got to play what is widely considered its superior sequel.

Clive Barker's Undying crashed on me right after I finally won a particularly difficult boss fight towards the end. So I got to do it again.

Not a game crash per se, but about 20 years ago I had to reformat my computer and it erased my record of 73 seconds on expert difficulty of Windows minesweeper.

Currently, the late-game bugouts in Civ 6 for PlayStation are super annoying ...

It's after turn 300, you're on the verge of winning (and having all the stats go into your Hall of Fame) and then the game enters "Russian Roulette" mode, where it could crash after any turn. It seems, once a game starts to crash, even after reloading, it is doomed to crash again. There hasn't been an update or patch since April 2021, so it may never be fixed. Really sours me on starting a new game, and it's one of my favourite games. Sad!

Of all time, Fallout: New Vegas' bugs and crashes on PS3 were most annoying/heartbreaking. They could happen any time, any where.

polypusher wrote:

Knights of the Old Republic on Xbox (1, not One, the original!) I experienced a crash where after reaching Tatooine any time I left the entry screen in the planet, I would crash no matter which direction I chose. I had one backup save a little earlier and I got the same crash after re-doing that progress. I was completely hosed.

I suspect this was caused by me actually killing or choosing not to pick up a possible party member earlier in the game. I forget which but it was a jedi or jedi adjacent lady. That was an unusual choice and the only reason I can think of for this not being something more people ran into.

I had something similar on KotOR II. I'd been playing for a couple hours and didn't bother saving, but was headed into what I suspected was a boss fight so I saved right after I went through a door. It was a little hallway where you went through another door and it triggered a cutscene, but the cutscene itself was bugged. So I couldn't go back, I couldn't go forward, and I had no other options. My previous save was hours old, so I'd lost all that progress.

I stopped playing for a few days until I found the restoration mod, which thankfully fixed the issue. But that would have been a game quitting moment for me had it not worked.

Have to think on this one for a bit...

But my most annoying cause of crash recently is my cats. 3 times, 2 different cats, in the past 9 months or so, they have stepped on the power or reset button on the top of my PC case and rebooted or powered off the machine mid-game.

If memory serves vampire the masquerade bloodlines was crashing on me because I had too much ram. The game to assumed I didn't have enough ram as I guess it wasn't able to count that high and it crashed.

Not a bug in the classical sense, but when they patched out GFWL from Trenched/Iron Brigade, my save games became unusable.
I had gotten through the main campaign and halfway through the (pretty difficult) DLC. Now, I will almost certainly never see the end of that game.

I can tell you an annoying crash I'm getting right now. the Xbox app crashes on startup. No amount of resetting, troubleshooting, or reinstalling it has helped. No gamepass for me

It’s a tie between all 53 crashes I had playing Cyberpunk 2077 on ps5

mrwynd wrote:

I find the NPC to turn in two of the 3 scales and right when I click trade my connection drops. After waiting for the system to go linkdead I restart and once I'm back in I don't have the two scales and I don't have the item the NPC gives me. I have to repeat the Nagafen and Lady Vox raids until I get more scales.

Okay, you win.

Not sure if it quite counts as a game crash, but I was on the final boss of Final Fantasy VII on the Playstation. Before finishing I had gone out to collect Knights of the Round and was on my way back to wrap up the game when my memory card corrupted and I lost the save.

Never did finish Final Fantasy VII and could never muster the energy to go through it again .

Dreaded Gazebo wrote:

Not sure if it quite counts as a game crash, but I was on the final boss of Final Fantasy VII on the Playstation. Before finishing I had gone out to collect Knights of the Round and was on my way back to wrap up the game when my memory card corrupted and I lost the save.

Never did finish Final Fantasy VII and could never muster the energy to go through it again .

It's ok, buddy. I beat it 11 times for you.

mrwynd wrote:

Playing EverQuest back in 1999 or 2000 and working on my Bard Epic Quest. I finally collected all of the dragon scales by repeatedly participating in every raid for Trakanon, Nagafen, and Lady Vox. This is hundreds of hours of EQ to get these damn things to drop at the time...(snip)

Oh the joys of the EQ 'epic quests'. That game was barely one as it was generally a chat room with some scripted add-ons that almost functioned. I never completed the Paladin quest, despite the 100s of hours I ploughed into achieving said goal.

Back to the thread topic though, the most annoying crash I had was mid way through a Call of Duty match that was ranked at the time. We were playing HQ mode and I was the last one standing, As I managed to secure the area around the HQ and the timer was ticking down, my ADSL model crash and I disconnected. We lost the match and my team mates were furious with me, as was I with my Internet provider. Oh and just to be clear, this was the original CoD, not the one we know today.

Playing on the last level of Dishonored, a hard crash where I ended up making the decision to get a new computer as it was at the end of it's life.. I was so frustrated that I haven't played that last level since.

Trying to think of one but I can't recall a specific crash that annoyed me. I did get a game breaking bug in Ni No Kuni that meant I couldn't go to the final dungeon and beat the final boss after spending 45 hours in the game.

After hours of struggling I finally got past the infamous battlements archers in Dark Souls. The next time i tried to turn on my ancient PS3 I found that it had bricked.

This was the older model that didn't support cloud save, so I removed the HDD and attached it to the replacement I bought. It turns out that PlayStation drives are heavily encrypted and keyed to the specific unit, so there was no recovering those save files.

Around the same time Sony managed to leak everyone's credit card details, so good to know that they could do encryption properly when they felt like it.

I don't have any specific examples, but I remember there being quite a few times where I'd get so far in a game, so late at night that I'd have to leave the NES on while I slept so I could pick it up the next morning. Plenty of times I'd just wake up to discover that it froze overnight.