The 10 Most Broken Games on Release, From Destiny to Halo: The Master Chief Collection

The trend in video games, as I saw it in early 2015, was developers blatantly putting out unfinished games, and it really annoyed me. I stopped pre-ordering games a while before I put together this list of the top 10 broken games on release, because it felt like every single game that came out was never finished on day one.

Here is my countdown, from the launches that were the least broken to the one I consider the most broken release of them all.

Destiny's launch kept kicking me out of my strike team

Coming in at number 10 is Destiny. By early 2015 I did not have many problems with it, but at release time things were different. Whenever I wanted to play with my buddies in a strike team, I would join and then just randomly disconnect.

I did that for literally three hours. I was on the game and all I did was disconnect from my strike team. It was not that big of an issue, but it was still really annoying, and it should have been fixed on day one.

Dying Light's PC port had no optimization

At number nine is Dying Light. My biggest issue with it is that I bought it on PC, because I had a GTX 980 and wanted to play the game on PC. The problem was optimization: there was none, and when I wrote this list in January 2015 there still was not any.

I would have loved to pull more than 30 fps with my 980, but it just was not possible. There was some kind of bottlenecking, multithreading issue that had still not been fixed at the time. I am not sure whether it was Nvidia's problem or Techland's problem, but as far as I was concerned the game was unplayable on PC.

On PS4 and Xbox One, it worked amazingly. That is what I just do not understand: why game developers can release a PC port that is completely broken.

Fallout: New Vegas suffered from Bethesda engine bugs

The next two entries use the same engine, and they are the two I spent the most time playing and had the most frustrating times with. At number eight is Fallout: New Vegas. It used Bethesda's game engine, which was plagued with similar bugs across the board, and I have no idea how they could release both of these games without fixing them.

The NPCs in New Vegas would completely disappear or clip through the landscape and just be gone. In one experience I had, they became completely invincible, so you could not kill them at all, and that prevented you from getting through some of the quests you had to do.

On top of that, on the 360 there was an autosave issue that could corrupt your save. It was just a big old mess.

Skyrim was even more broken, but I still loved it

Number seven also uses the Bethesda engine: Skyrim. I have never spent so much time playing a broken video game. In my words at the time, "it was unprecedented how broken this game was." There were so many game breaking glitches that it was basically Fallout: New Vegas but even worse.

It was still fun, though. I spent a lot of time on it and had a lot of fun. I pretty much stayed away from the glitches, because they were still in there. As of early 2015, I reckoned I could probably go in and get about a billion arrows right off the bat. It is crazy how broken the game was, but that still does not take away from how fun it is.

On PC you can download all kinds of mods, both visual and quest mods, and have the time of your life, which I was still doing at the time. Skyrim is always going to be a game I play, and as broken as it was, I was proud to say I was still playing it. About six months before I wrote this list, I could easily have put it at number one for worst launches in history.

GTA Online went offline when the hype was highest

At number six is GTA Online. Everybody knows the issues it had within roughly the first six or seven days after release. It was a cluster, and I felt Rockstar did not know what they were doing in that first week.

They put GTA Online out when everybody had already beaten the campaign and was ready to play online. The hype was real. Then you went to log on after downloading the huge update, got to the character creation, and found that "gta online is offline." It was crazy.

They did eventually get it fixed, and as of early 2015 it was still playing amazingly.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's connections made it almost unplayable

Kicking off the top five, and I expected this one to be controversial because a lot of people would say it was not that broken, is Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. As I put it, "she wasn't ready." Advanced Warfare had a pretty good launch compared to what everybody was saying on Twitter, but it still had some huge flaws that made it almost unplayable.

Say you joined a game of Team Deathmatch and started talking to the people in the lobby, only to find out they were from Australia. I had a 20 megabyte download connection, and that just does not work. I could not get a single kill. My bullets did not even register.

I would say it was still broken at the time because of skill based matchmaking. I am all for facing people at my skill level, but not without dedicated servers, and I did not believe there were any, because we had been using the same tech for seven years. They may have said they had global dedicated servers, but I thought that was nonsense.

My connection should not be affected because I am in Illinois and I get matched with somebody from California. Connecting to a game should be regionalized first. Region should come first, not skill.

Driveclub's server problems were too many to list

At number four, I would like a moment of silence for Driveclub. I am not going to go into the issues, because there were so many server issues when this game released that I do not even want to talk about it.

Assassin's Creed Unity was blatantly unfinished

Number three is Assassin's Creed Unity, and I have to thank Ubisoft, sarcastically, for letting down PC players and pretty much gamers in general. Unity is another example of a completely broken PC port that was not optimized for pretty much any platform.

It was okay on PS4, Xbox One and other consoles, but even there the game suffered massive frame drops. It was not optimized, and it was blatantly unfinished on release.

Battlefield 4 was rushed out by EA

At number two is Battlefield 4. I spent more time trying to load this game on my PC than I did actually playing it. It took them so long to update the game, or really, to finish it, because on release it was so unfinished that it was just ridiculous.

In my words, "i blame this solely on ea for rushing this game's release." They did the same with Titanfall: they rushed and rushed, pushing to get the game out because they had to sell it alongside the Xbox One, and it was completely broken too. Both games were broken. I left Titanfall off this list because I considered it irrelevant by that point.

As much of a failure as Battlefield 4 was, I felt there was still hope because of the community test environment I believed DICE was running, which would let a game be tested by a massive number of people and still release finished. And I warned EA that if they rushed a game again, I would be coming for them once more.

Halo: The Master Chief Collection is the most broken release of all

The number one broken game on release has to go to none other than Halo: The Master Chief Collection. I did not buy this one, because I knew it was going to have some issues. It used Microsoft Azure servers, which were dedicated, and those would have been perfect if the game had been fixed on day one. It was not.

There were so many server issues that even when you could get into a game, it would not be balanced. I am not much of a Halo player, so I asked for advice from someone who had been playing Halo forever, and if the teams are not balanced, the game is unplayable and broken. It really saddened me that the game died off that quickly.

After this long list, my plea is simple: please stop pre-ordering games. Let reviewers take the bullets, make the reviews, and show you whether games are broken or actually fixed. Wait for a review instead of pre-ordering.

Was Advanced Warfare really as broken at launch as I made it out to be, or did it deserve a spot further down the list?