text:
%% Image based on Image Picking Discussion found here: tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=1374157034001580500
%% Please don't replace or remove before starting a new thread.
%% Just testing something
[[quoteright:321:[[Webcomic/TheTrenches http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/beta-3491_1237.jpg]]]]
->''"Playing this game is like driving a beat up old car. You're always afraid it's going to break down."''
-->-- '''WebVideo/TheAngryVideoGameNerd''' on ''[[VideoGame/{{Pitfall}} Super Pitfall]]'' for [=NES=] (1986)
Before bringing out a product--in this case, specifically a game or program--it must be tested. The stages of testing are typically called alpha and beta, but may include gamma in some companies. Alpha testing is done by the developers themselves, while beta testing is done by a specific, outside team called quality assurance. In late phases of beta testing (this phase rarely called "gamma", "open beta", or "release candidate"), select members of the public are allowed to test the game. During alpha and beta tests, those doing the testing seek out bugs, note them down, and forward them to the parties responsible for fixing them. Those developers then either fix the bug, delay the fix due to whatever time or business constraints, or declare it as "will not be fixed". Ideally, testing will last long enough to fix the most noticeable bugs.
However, sometimes, this isn't the case. Software may be rushed for any number of reasons, which may include: [[ChristmasRushed A holiday release]], [[FollowTheLeader desire to compete with another company's product]], a [[OrphanedSeries studio's closing]], or [[TheyJustDidntCare outright laziness]]. When this happens testing can be shortened or outright skipped. This results in buggy, unstable programs that no one likes.
Companies take note: Spending time fixing any errors ''before'' releasing a program is a lot easier than trying to fix them ''after'' it's released. It results in fewer complaints, too! One of the problems is that marketing and development are done by different people and sometimes even different companies. [[ExecutiveMeddling Once the publisher starts to nag the developer]], rushed games happen....
On the other hand, companies may have to do this, particularly small ones. Not all companies have enough time, discipline, or money to go through all the development stages for what they're planning, and so have to release in the hopes enough people will buy it to get them going to go through the rest of the stages for them to better perfect it and then get attention to those changes to make more buy it later.
The practice of selling preorders has been blamed for the problem of obvious betas. Since game companies know that their games will sell well even before people have had a chance to actually play them, they can release half-baked games and promise to patch them later. There has been a backlash against preorders in the gaming community to attempt to encourage them to release their games in a playable state.
Naturally, the Obvious Beta skips the regular testing to go straight to release. In extreme cases, games have gone straight to release before it even enters the testing stage at all. To add to some confusion, the current paradigm in mainstream development renames and redefines some testing stages. Alpha, for instance, can be (depending on the company) used to denote a technically finished product (it's feature complete and could theoretically ship though it's probably still got issues of varying degrees) while beta can be used to note the same only with far fewer {{Game Breaking Bug}}s. Thus when the players talk about betas and a finished product with a developer, it can often mean two dramatically different things. The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_access early access]] model of development muddies the waters further, basically extending the "public beta" privileges to any paying customer (even if functionally the game would still have been in the alpha stage under older development models).
If the single-player mode of a game is fine but the multiplayer isn't, please put the example under MisbegottenMultiplayerMode. See UsefulNotes/BetaTest for more on the process and see PerpetualBeta for when the developers no longer have an excuse to update things. This trope can also overlap with PortingDisaster if it occurs when software is converted to run on a different platform.
* After the whole Siri-released-in-beta thing, Apple would have learned their lesson... right? Nope. Presenting [[http://theamazingios6maps.tumblr.com/ iOS 6 Maps]]. Where to begin.... The whole mess started when Apple chose to remove Google Maps as a native app in iOS 6, replacing it with their own four months ahead of schedule (even Google was surprised by how sudden it was launched). The result? Something that would make Steve Jobs hang his already dead self in shame. Entire ''cities'' have been renamed, designated as hospitals, or covered by clouds in satellite view. The general consensus was that the product was something that seemed to have been thrown together without a second look. It got even worse as the new iOS Maps had no public transit routes and route planning was sketchy at best, and God help you if you even thought about trying maps anywhere other than US. It has since been improved tremendously, but it remains one of Apple's only visible failures in a long time.
* Google's response was of course to make a freely downloadable iOS Google Maps app as soon as possible (it took a few weeks). Some with iPhone 4 actually ''delayed updating to iOS 6'' to give Google time to put up its app, and once it was up updated and replaced the Apple app with the Google one. While you cannot remove iOS 6 Maps, you can banish it to a lonely screen you never look at.
* iOS 8.0.1 was pulled a mere '''half hour''' after going live. Touted as a fix for, among other things, the bugs in the Health app that prevented [=HealthKit=]-enabled apps from going live on launch day, the update actually '''broke''' two very important features, namely giving the player no cellular data, thus cutting out the whole point of having a phone: The ability to make calls. As in, the phone part of the iPhone.
* Apple's next big blunder was Apple Music, a music subscription service that was supposed to revolutionize that field in the same way that the iTunes Store had revolutionized the DigitalDistribution of music over a decade earlier. When it was released, not only did it fail to offer many new features over competing services such as Spotify (which had already been out for a few years before Apple threw its hat into the ring), it was also dysfunctional and buggy. The glitches, as detailed in [[http://www.loopinsight.com/2015/07/22/apple-music-is-a-nightmare-and-im-done-with-it/ this blog post by long time Apple fan Jim Dalrymple]], included adding only parts of albums to users' libraries when they had requested the whole, mixing up the contents of albums and playlists, and a poor music recommendation program that could not properly identify users' taste, unless they (without any prompting from the service) went into the settings and told it what kind of music they liked. And to make it even worse, many people who got fed up with all of this, and decided to get rid of the service, reported that quitting Apple Music caused large chunks of their music libraries that they ''owned'' (as in purchased from iTunes or ripped from [=CDs=]) to suddenly disappear, with no apparent method of recovering it. Given that, around the same time that they released Apple Music, Apple was trying to improve the stability of its software by offering public betas of the upcoming iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan, it's surprising that they didn't offer a similar beta program for Apple Music that might have prevented its huge public debut from being ruined by all these technical problems.
* In 2015 the 4th generation Apple TV shipped with a new TV-optimized operating system dubbed tvOS, which lacked several capabilities of previous models. The new Apple TV didn't work with Apple's own Remote app, nor could it work with Bluetooth keyboards or iOS devices to enter text, which older models could do. There was no Podcasts app, a strange oversight as virtually every internet-connected Apple product since 2007 can natively play Podcasts and Apple's promotional videos clearly showed one on the home screen. Siri support worked for finding movies and TV shows, but not for music. Many users also weren't pleased there was no dark mode, an option found in older models and almost every streaming player. Many of these shortcomings were amending in the following months.
* The arcade version of ''VideoGame/{{beatmania}} IIDX'' ran on a [[http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=827 custom-made and very complicated PCB]] (it actually used a consumer DVD player controlled via a serial port to create video overlays, amongst other things), until the ninth version, whereupon it was dragged kicking and screaming onto a Windows XP-based PC platform. The transition was anything but smooth; as well as the general bugginess of the code, the game's timing measurement and response speed were extremely bad, two things which are critical in a music-based video game. One song, the One More Extra Stage song "quasar", periodically [[GameBreakingBug crashed the entire game]], forcing the player to get arcade staff's attention to get the machine reset. It wasn't until the 11th or 12th version that things were almost back to normal, though the home releases continue to exhibit smoother and more responsive gameplay than the arcade ones.
[[folder:Atari systems]]
* ''VideoGame/ETTheExtraTerrestrial'' for the UsefulNotes/{{Atari 2600}}. The developer was given only five weeks to make it (in order to [[ChristmasRushed make it in time for Christmas]]), solo, and as a result it was an utter mess. Coincidentally, this also makes this trope at least OlderThanTheNES. The backlash from this was so bad that a planned [[UsefulNotes/{{Atari 5200}} 5200]] version programmed by John Seghers (which was thankfully a completely different game) was aborted.
* The same applies to the 2600 port of ''VideoGame/PacMan'', which Atari released as soon as they got their hands on the programmer's alpha version. The two games are often mentioned as single-handedly causing UsefulNotes/TheGreatVideoGameCrashOf1983, which is probably an exaggeration... but Lord, they didn't help.
* ''Fight For Life'' for the UsefulNotes/AtariJaguar was actually shaping up to be a good fighting game. But Atari had gotten into the bad habit of shafting their employees, so the programmer decided to withhold the game until he got paid. Atari said "fuck it" and released the latest build they had -- perhaps 60% ready, slug-paced, and unbalanced. Much later he let a Jaguar fansite have the final build, so they produced the vastly improved "Limited Edition" from it. But talk about limited: only 28 cartridges were produced, making it one of the rarest games ever.[[http://thesonicreblog.com/the-terrible-tales-of-the-atari-jaguars-checkered-flag-and-fight-for-life/]]
* The sixth volume of the ''Literature/GrailQuest'' series, ''Realm of Chaos'', appears to have suffered from a severe lack of playtesting before being released (see the page for details).
* One of the most notorious is ''VideoGame/BigRigsOverTheRoadRacing''. Well beyond Obvious Beta, this is just some pre-alpha code that was hacked together into something they deemed "shippable". It's something akin to what what a game looks like in the first two weeks of development, when the team is expecting a two-year development cycle.
** For example, although it's supposedly a racing game, there are no opponents[[note]]Technically, there ''is'' an opponent car, but it doesn't do anything but sit at the starting line indefinitely. There is a patch available that will get it to move, but it still stops right before crossing the finish line (as there's no code for what happens when you lose a race), so it's impossible to not win.[[/note]], no timers, no obstacles, and no collision[[note]]The rigs usually won't go down through the ground, but besides that there is no collision detection whatsoever[[/note]]. Trying to drive over a bridge causes you to fall straight through to the valley beneath, but that's okay because you can drive straight up the vertical cliff on the other side of the valley without even slowing down. You can drive over mountains, through buildings, and off the sides of the map at your leisure. In fact, the only possible way to lose is for the game to crash. Admittedly, the game ''does'' crash pretty frequently. It's also worth mentioning that there's a level that doesn't work; your brake lights float a noticeable distance behind your vehicle; it's possible to drive infinitely fast in reverse; sometimes the game's code has trouble distinguishing between starting and finishing, so you win the race immediately....
** Just to add insult to injury, the available race mode is actually the custom race mode (presumably the first to make as it's easiest to test). The promised main campaign, which the back of the box claims involves evading police on public highways, ''does not exist''. In the earliest version sold, they couldn't even get the victory prompt right: "[[BlindIdiotTranslation You're Winner !]]"
* ''Infestation: Survivor Stories'' (initially named ''The War Z'') promised to be an MMO game where players can fight each other or the zombies in a huge open world with skills, abilities, weapons, and so on... except the majority of the features weren't even in the game when it launched and the game was riddled with bugs up the wazoo. The backlash from the customers was so intense that not only was the game was pulled from Steam, refunds were also given (before Steam introduced a refund policy in June 2015, this almost never happened). What makes the event even more shocking that the lead developer of ''War Z'' was Sergey Titov, who had also led the team responsible for ''Big Rigs''. It also did not help that said developer treated the angry customers with extreme disdain by saying that [[SmallNameBigEgo he is sorry that people had misinterpreted the description of the game]] (a much kinder way of telling people that they're stupid) [[http://kotaku.com/5969784/the-war-z-mess-every-crazy-detail-we-know-so-far in addition to banning those on the game's forums who had openly criticized the game]], all the while stating ''War Z'' is the best game he ever played. It's been speculated that this was a direct reason for the Steam Early Access "genre"/program (where a game would be ''more explicitly'' be a work in progress with players getting "early access" with the expectation that their feedback would drive development while devs would get access to similar benefits as "officially released" games).
* ''Videogame/TestDrive Unlimited 2'' suffered from a swarm of bugs and server issues when it was released on the PC. Since it had online activation and needed a connection to the game's master servers to play, the game would flat out ''refuse'' to let players start up the game, and it would often kick them out of the game without warning, due to massive server overload. The day-one DLC was broken and would eat players' in-game (monopoly) money, and the game had several game-breaking promotional cars like the Bugatti Veyron SS.
* The PC ports of ''VideoGame/{{Oddworld}}: Munch's Oddysee'' and ''Stranger's Wrath'' as part of the Oddboxx... they're more like obvious ''alphas'' at this stage. Terrible performance on even high-end gaming computers for UsefulNotes/{{Xbox}} ports that have had no graphical upgrades aside from resolution, resolution options with a nondescript "Low", "Medium", "High", and "Ultra" for the latter (1024×768, 1280×960, and 1600×1200 making up the latter three) that require an .ini file edit if you need a different res (say, 1920×1080), issues with the controls such as not being able to move with a gamepad in ''Munch's Oddysee'' and unchangeable inverse look in ''Stranger's Wrath''... even at 50% off for the whole Oddboxx on the first day, a lot of people are understandably pissed. At least they've promised patches to clean this mess up and even grant ''Stranger's Wrath'' the updated graphics intended for the [[UsefulNotes/PlayStation3 PS3]] UpdatedRerelease, though whether we'll ever get them is another question.
* The delayed demo of indie 2-D fighting game ''Beast's Fury'' turned out to be this, which was [[HypeBacklash pretty upsetting]] to eagerly-waiting fans. There were control problems, graphical issues and bugs galore, including [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjNVzON_res one humorous glitch]] that an official tester stumbled across. The developer, Evil Dog Productions, [[SkewedPriorities placed little importance on updating the demo]], and they would later pay for that choice when, in 2016, they would find themselves cancelling the game (the rest of [[TroubledProduction troubled production]] -- which is a story of its own -- didn't make things any better, though).
* ''VideoGame/EmpireTotalWar'', which has been somewhat fixed with a lot of patching. If you want to see what it was like on release, fire up the Road to Independence scenario, which for some reason seems largely unaffected by the bug-fixes. Marvel as your AI willfully ignores an order you've give dozens of times, and when it does listen, interpret your order to move 12 feet forward to mean go play grab-ass in a forest 5,000 miles away.
* ''{{Muelsfell}}'': since coming out of "Beta", there are just as many, if not more, bugs than there were in Beta. The features and monsters added later are particularly bad.
* ''AnarchyOnline'' version 1.0 was this, to the point where the original version ''would effectively force you to reinstall Windows''.
* ''Flanker 2.0'' was so unplayable that the cleaned, definitive version was... ''Flanker 2.5''. ''Falcon 4.0'' was the same as well.
* ''Streets of VideoGame/SimCity'' is a [=3D=] WideOpenSandbox DrivingGame spinoff of [=SimCity=] in which you can drive around cities. Unfortunately, it's riddled with tons of bugs. Likewise with ''[=SimCopter=]'', except with a helicopter. Both are good games with a good-sized fanbase, they just happen to have a ''lot'' of bugs. Still perfectly playable; it'll just crash every half hour or so.
* ''VideoGame/SimCity2013'' was released in a miserable state, which mostly stemmed from only two really big issues, the traffic and the DRM. The traffic in the game could easily bring any large city to a grinding halt, since drivers always would take the shortest route instead of the fastest route (for example, all the cars would pile onto a single-lane dirt road while ignoring the slightly longer four-lane avenue), sometimes going in endless loops, public services tended to follow each other (so having buses would only increase traffic woes instead of helping them, while firetrucks had serious problems putting our more than a single fire at a time), and other such nonsense. Meanwhile, the servers just ''couldn't'' handle all the players in the game, with wait times that could exceed an '''hour''', money disappearing into the ether when gifted to another city, and just crashing at points. EA was forced to take features out (most notably "Cheetah Speed") just to prevent the servers from imploding.
** It also came out that the game flat-out ''tricked'' the player by showing a much higher population than the city actually had, so you'd think your city had enough people to run it even as everything ground to a halt because of lack of manpower. And that the exceedingly diminutive maximum city size was artificially restricted -- by using an exploit it was possible to build outside the borders to no ill effects.
** It's also possible to log in to your account and edit and control some features in someone else's city in your region, making your co-player practically lose the game by having no money.
** While Electronic Arts has long sorted out the server connection issues (or server demand simply went down to the point where it wasn't a problem anymore), the game is still fundamentally broken -- RCI not working, traffic broken, water tables not recharging -- nearly two years later. "But hey, go ahead and buy that expansion pack!"
** Residential area: "Where's the shopping?" Commercial area next door: "Not enough shoppers." This happens even between wealth-compatible properties; the Sims just can't figure out how to make it between the two. Or maybe there's no problem at all when these comments appear, it's not like there's anything in the game that lets you see for yourself.
** After EA sorted out the server issue they created a "Launch Park" park for those players who had stuck with the game through the ugly opening months. A part of this park even had a wall of sparking system servers.
* The PC version of ''RedFaction 2'' had a multiplayer mode that didn't allow multiple players, and showed pickups as 2D sprites in spite of the working 3D models in the "Single Player" campaign. The campaign itself was a veritable glitch-fest, and the best ending was essentially impossible to get legitimately due to a bug where some civilians whom you were supposed to save would ''chase the player's vehicle down so they could die on contact'', which was completely unavoidable.
* ''VideoGame/{{Disciples}} III: Renaissance'' was a BaseBreaker for many reasons, but its glitchiness was universally reviled. Lowlights include long load times, bad triggers, and an overly aggressive AI that is content to ambush the player from offscreen and destroy his essential party. For an added bonus, due to the way the game's autosave works, such an ambush requires loading from a manually created save, as the autosave triggers at the end of the player's turn--meaning they have no resources to prevent it, even if they know it's coming.
* Creator/{{Sierra}}
** Most of the later VGA adventure games suffer from a profound lack of testing, and can crash randomly based upon any number of bugs. The worst example is probably ''VideoGame/QuestForGloryIV''.
** ''VideoGame/PoliceQuest: Open Season'' has countless bugs that randomly crash the game, corrupt saved games, or make the game {{unwinnable}}.
* ''VideoGame/UltimaIX''. The ending chapter of the Trilogy of Trilogies. The greatest RPG ever. And it was released as a mash of crap, unplayable on most hardware that was available at the time, and was a war crime against canon.
-->'''Erik Wolpaw of Old Man Murray''': [''Ultima IX'' is] ...a game in which programming errors battle each other gladiator-style for the privilege of crashing my computer...
** The original, unpatched version of ''VideoGame/UltimaVIII: Pagan'' is [[UnwinnableByMistake completely broken]]. What was released was basically an unfinished alpha version. Remember: ''Ultima VIII'' is the one where Creator/ElectronicArts wanted to turn it into an action RPG. Imagine a Mario game where it's impossible to estimate how far you need to jump and every gap has an instant-death pit. Unpatched ''Ultima VIII'' is like playing ''VideoGame/IWannaBeTheGuy'' blindfolded. With a mouse.
* Though it had no real GameBreakingBug, ''VideoGame/TheWitcher'' was such a bad case that the developers took pains to make up for it by producing the "Enhanced Edition" (free as an upgrade), which in addition to being "The game as it '''should''' have been released," also came with a host of bonus in-game content and ''eight'' complete language packages (audio and text).
** This all happened because the game was considered to be a niche product for a fantasy novel only really known in Poland at that time, so the international interest was a surprise and the localization rushed, resulting in sloppy English.
* Egosoft
** A recurring problem in the ''VideoGame/{{X}}-Universe'' series of space sims. In ''X3: Reunion'', the main plot had ''multiple'' unpassable stages.
** The company is so notoriously bad about this that several gaming sites have had to ''re-review'' their games after several months of bugfixes make them properly playable. In an interesting twist, they usually end up providing substantially more features than was actually promised in the original Obvious Beta.
** Egosoft has a history of releasing several minor patches after the game is out, presumably to stamp out the [[GameBreakingBug serious show-stoppers]] and prevent people from returning it, then exactly one year later releasing a "2.0" super-patch that fixes and improves the game to "how it should always have been" status. The smart (and patient) player will add one year to the release date of any Egosoft game. On the other hand, their later games are buggy at release, but significantly less so compared to the [[GameBreakingBug disastrous]] ''Reunion'' launch.
** Played straight yet again with the release of ''Videogame/XRebirth'', which was critically panned due to performance and stability issues, missing features (such as ship commands, radar and piloting multiple ships, the latter of which was a staple of the series ever since the days of X-Tension), and a convoluted user interface which was even harder to use than the much-maligned ones in previous games. The huge 2.0, 2.5, and upcoming 3.0 updates have fixed most of the performance/stability issues and added features that were missing at release, but it's still not what you'd call stable and you can still only control the one ship.
* The expansion packs to ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXI'' are {{egregious}} in this regard. If you buy them on their release date, one is not so much buying an expansion as one is buying access to a couple new areas without a whole lot to do in them and the promise that over the next eighteen months, they'll gradually let you access all the stuff they promised on the box.
* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV'' was released lacking so many features, and with so many known serious game design problems, that it was more of an obvious ''alpha''. Unusually, the developers actually apologized for it and canceled subscription fees until the game was fixed. The results definitely show. The 1.0 version was so obviously broken and unfinished that it was deemed "unfixable". Creator/SquareEnix fired the lead developer and promoted Naoki Yoshida to oversee the new version. He shuffled the team around, then they quickly determined that ''FFXIV'' was not fixable (the original lead developer had focused solely on graphics to the exclusion of everything else, including gameplay). They suspended subscription fees, provided about a year and a half worth of story updates to bridge the gap with the new version they were making, and ''completely remade the game from scratch''. ''FFXIV: A Realm Reborn'' isn't a fixed version of the 1.0 ''FFXIV'', it's a new game set in the same world five years later.
* ''Videogame/EverQuest'' was terrible at release: Mobs randomly could or couldn't enter water and some areas they couldn't travel to/from, and there was bad pathing, falling through the world, inaccessible zones, instant death drops from falling 2 cm, and the boats didn't work consistently for years.
* ''VideoGame/HellgateLondon'' was released in a woefully buggy and unbalanced state, after a too-short beta period. It rapidly improved... but by that time, most people had already written it off.
* The first two ''VideoGame/{{STALKER}}'' games shipped with a great many glitches and bugs. ''Clear Sky'' was especially bad, where the state of the game could change ''between quick saves'' (the ''WebAnimation/ZeroPunctuation'' review noted a case where Yahtzee quicksaved behind cover, promptly died to a grenade, quickloaded, and the grenade-thrower completely forgot he was supposed to be hostile [[RefugeInAudacity until a couple minutes after agreeing to lead him somewhere else]]). The first game was also rushed in many other ways: Translation errors in the English version meant a lot of confusion ("shotgun" was translated as "rifle" and "attic" as "basement"), vital [=NPCs=] could die in random locations, it was possible to sequence-break to the point that the game took ten minutes to finish, and there was a lot of obviously cut content. Fishing around in the game files showed [[DummiedOut entire missing levels, fully programmed weapons that never actually appeared]], and camera settings for drivable cars and helicopters. Most of the dummied-out content can be restored via {{Game Mod}}s. Notable was the infamous [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc5rB-0ZBcI "Singularity Car"]] glitch, back in the day.
* ''VideoGame/EvilGenius'', though a perfectly playable and fun game, has some bugs that are unforgivable. Examples include the impassable Persian rug, and the science henchmen who actually make your plans harder to complete. These bugs can be fixed with a simple edit of game files (conveniently stored in text form), but since the developer went belly-up shortly after the game was released, you have to do it yourself. Thankfully, the version released on Steam and GOG.com comes with the majority of these bugs fixed.
* ''Epic'', a space flight sim on the Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS, shipped in a hideously unfinished state. The waypoint system would only point you to a single target even if you'd already destroyed it, the manual was confusingly written and incomplete (including a statement that an ion "is a particle of FILL IN LATER"), a cheat was printed on the control summary card, and early versions of the game crashed so often than many retailers returned their copies and refused to buy fixed ones. To make matters worse for buyers, the game received rave reviews in several magazines based on alpha code upwards of seven months before it was actually released.
* ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}''
** Not every page on [[http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_Wiki The Fallout Wiki]] ends with a list of bugs, but it sometimes seems that way.
** ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 2}}'' shipped with some game-breaking bugs (your car vanishing, as well as certain quests that would cause the game to crash if you tried to complete them, for example) and quite a bit of cut out content that leaves certain minor plot-lines completely unsolved. Fan-made patches, such as the [[http://www.killap.net/fallout2/web/Downloads.html Fallout 2 Restoration Project]], seek to restore the missing content to a playable state.
** ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}}'':
*** The game didn't have any obviously missing content, but had serious stability issues, with crashes still not uncommon even in patched versions. In addition, an entire new story branch was added after the original ending with DLC. The most blatant bugs were the glitches that occurred if you did certain missions in the wrong order that made the game {{Unwinnable}}, such as starting "The American Dream" before finishing "Scientific Pursuits". The fact that the game ''allowed'' you to attempt this ''without'' compensating the programming for it ''nor'' [[GuideDangIt letting you know about any of this]] was a major oversight on the developers' part.
*** It also has a bug that screws the Pip-Boy's ability to receive radio music if you're running the game on Windows Vista or newer. What happened was that [=DirectSound=], which the game uses, doesn't work properly with Microsoft's new and shiny UAA driver architecture which is used by Windows Vista and newer, but Microsoft decides to officially announce [=DirectSound=] as being dead instead of even thinking of attempting to fix it, shipping the broken library with the [=DirectX=] 9 runtime for Windows Vista and 7 instead[[note]]despite shipping with [=DirectX=] 10 and newer, some [=DirectX=] 9 libraries are not included and need to be installed separately[[/note]]. There is no explanation to this except laziness, as Microsoft already made the announcement while Bethesda was still developing the game, they had the chance to change to a different audio method, but they didn't and they have yet to fix the problem to this day.
** ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas''. There's no blatant content removal unless you ''really'' look, but the bugs were out of control at release, comparable to ''Fallout 3'' and often worse due to the complex web of scripts working under the hood and Obsidian's pushing of Gamebryo to its limits. Subsequent patches greatly increased stability and removed a plethora of bugs, though the process itself wasn't without its own bumps (a patch released a day after release rendered the game unplayable on some systems, requiring ''another'' patch the next day to correct it). Obsidian has been quite honest that the initial release ''was'' the beta build, because Bethesda told them to make the game in 14 months. Making a AAA game in that short period of time is like asking Michelangelo to sculpt you a masterpiece in a week. The [=DLCs=], which recycle less from ''Fallout 3'' and had proper time to be beta tested, were noted for having a much higher level of quality and significantly fewer game-breaking bugs, showing what New Vegas could have been if Bethesda didn't want the game done so rushed for the sake of not pissing on ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim Skyrim]]'', their next planned "big hit".
** And now ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 4}}'' has continued this notorious tradition, to the point of InternetBackdraft. Rather than having cut content, the game suffers from tremendous stability issues on different computers and wildly varying performance, with some people on ''weaker'' computers getting better performance than more powerful ones. Several quests are prone to glitching out, dialogue can sometimes either overlap or simply cut out entirely, subtitles are out of sync....
* The English version of ''VideoGame/PrincessMaker 2'' was never finished before it was scrapped and subsequently leaked. Several endings lack text, and there's a hidden "Beta Shop" that lets the player fiddle with stats and trigger any ending they want (or an instant GameOver).
* ''Videogame/WorldOfWarcraft'' suffered from this for quite some time, though it has (mostly) stopped doing so. Helped by the fact that content patches are regularly available for testing on the "Public Test Realm" for anyone interested.
** In the early days of ''Burning Crusade'', for example, the final bosses in the two main dungeons were not only horribly unbalanced to the point of being effectively undefeatable, but the first time that any guild managed to kill Lady Vashj, she ''instantly respawned'' and killed the entire raid. This made infamous by the controversy of two guilds competing for the ''world first''. Since both kills were bugged, they were dubbed the world first second, and the world second first.
** Also in ''Burning Crusade'' was a case of "The beta didn't consider how many people play this multiplayer game". Hellfire Peninsula was the first zone in Outland and it was ''swamped'' with players all fighting to complete the same quests at the same time for the first four days. Servers crashed, tempers flared, and all following expansions had either ''two'' starting zones or started the Alliance/Horde factions on opposite sides of a very large zone. Blizzard learned and came out with some great ideas in dealing with this over the years, but Hellfire Peninsula was an Obvious Beta. This was especially puzzling since that issue wasn't even new to the game: Both factions have had huge issues with their auction house Capital city being flooded with players wanting to use the feature, zones with expanded endgame content were likewise swarmed for a while, and even the instance servers sometimes couldn't keep up with the demand. Shattrah being the Hub for both factions in Outlands didn't help either, though they at least avoided making it worse by still having players to go back to the old cities for the Auction House, class trainers etc.
** Before any of the expansions came out, most final raid bosses were rendered unkillable or unreachable by {{Game Breaking Bug}}s ([[UnwinnableByDesign sometimes on purpose]] to keep players from getting too far and flooding the forums [[UnpleasableFanbase complaining that they don't have anything to do and that the dungeon sucks BECAUSE they got that far so quick]]). Ragnaros would never come out of submerge and just keep throwing Sons until you ran out of mana and died. C'thun would eye beam you while you were in the stomach. (And nobody really knows about Naxxramas, because you can probably count how many guilds ''entered'' Naxxramas on just your hands.) The most amusing one was Chromaggus, who was [[HopelessBossFight overscaled on purpose]] to prevent players from reaching Nefarian ''because the Nefarian encounter wasn't fully coded''.
** Silithus in general was an Obvious Beta zone. It was this little corner in Kalimdor that, for some reason, wasn't covered in the guide, but there were actually a few quest chains in there. Strange. When you entered, you found this wall that you couldn't get past; literally ''half the map'' of Silithus was unfinished. It also became an obvious beta (along with Eastern Plaguelands) for an attempt at creating world PvP. It was later finished in patch 1.8. However it still is plagued with a problem of mob-density, but it had been improved in other patches.
** The high-level neutral zone Azshara, while not quite as bad as very early Silithus, was generally something of a dead end zone until ''Cataclysm''. There weren't many questlines in the zone, and most of those that did essentially had NoEnding and would just no longer continue at seemingly random points, many areas in this huge zone that the player never needs to go to for any reason, and no checkpoints, friendly, or neutral settlements further east than the western edge of the zone. A big reason was likely an entire PVP battleground that this zone was supposed to host being DummiedOut, meaning the zone was practically empty until it was revamped into a low-level Horde zone in ''Cataclysm''.
** Expansions typically have growing pains and players expect it, but ''Cataclysm'' was notoriously buggy at launch, largely due to the sheer amount of content Blizzard crammed into it with a relatively short beta testing period. Numerous quests were glitchy or outright broken (Vashj'ir being the biggest culprit), mob spawning was out of control, phasing caused any number of headaches, achievements were busted, you name it and it was screwed up. Loads of hotfixes were a daily occurrence for weeks, and even after the first major patch (4.1), there's still lingering issues.
** A feature intended to alleviate the previously mentioned swamped zone issues by essentially creating copies of these zones (or merging the zones of several servers to keep them from being too deserted) naturally had a lot of this itself at first.
** The introduction of certain trinkets in ''the Siege of Orgrimmar'' with effects that Blizzard was planning to implement as regular stats in the next expansion, such as Multistrike (a new form of CriticalHit, basically) and Readiness (lowering the cooldown of certain abilities).
** ''Warlords of Draenor'' shipped with so many bugs that the game was literally unplayable; insanely long server queues, broken starter quests, and glitched phasing rendered countless players stuck on flight paths or in the middle of thin air. Garrison missions were easily exploited and several of the newer stats added to the game either were completely useless or utterly overpowered. While mostly fixed with a lot of hotfixes and patching, some of these issues are still there.
* Creator/ArtixEntertainment like to do a fairly tolerable version of this, on purpose. Both ''VideoGame/{{Dragonfable}}'' and ''VideoGame/{{MechQuest}}'' were initially released in a fairly unfinished, but playable, state, only available to [[{{Bribing Your Way to Victory}} paying players of their previous games]]. There was only one (or practically no) quest, only a few items, no stats, one or two areas, very few monsters, etc. The players play the game, offer suggestions and report bugs to the devs, and slowly, the kinks are hammered out and the product is released to the public. New content is then continually added and modified throughout the lifespan of the game. In the pre-release VideoGame/MechQuest design notes, Artix mentioned that, due to time constraints, the game would be released without thorough beta testing, and the players would just have to see whether it broke or not. He dubbed this practice "gamma testing," and so far, it seems to be working out just fine.
* ''VideoGame/{{Gothic}} 3 Forsaken Gods'', the standalone expansion to the third game, is this in spades. The game is so bugged it took a 240 MB patch (latest one) to make the most basic features (like shield parrying) work properly, and it's still a bug riddled minefield anyway. It also has worse cell load skips than its predecessor when unpatched, and is prone to crashing and generally taking its massively high requirements and running subpar at best. As further insult to injury, the whole game was made by developers totally unfamiliar with the engine who slapped this sucker together in a few months and was shoved out the door before it had been properly playtested, basically rendering it critically flawed on arrival.
* Many, many versions of Windows have been hit with this over the years:
** Legend has it that the Windows ME launch party coincided with the filing of the 500th urgent bug entered into the tracking system.
** Windows XP ran into several problems early in its life, which led to it being criticized by tech sites (though not to the same extent as ME). Later on, particularly upon the release of Service Pack 1, it became usable to the point that it had a longer lifespan than previous versions of Windows.
** Vista seems to have released in a similar state, but it was very usable after Service Pack 1. Certainly every Vista video card driver released in the first six months of Vista's life qualifies, as they were responsible for the majority of Vista crashes. The stated minimum hardware specifications being optimistic to the point of outright misleading didn't help either.
** Microsoft has a history of this: Word 3.0 for the Macintosh was released in 1987 with about 700 bugs.
** MS-DOS 4.0 suffered massive problems on its release in 1988, including poor compatibility with older programs and even a number of potential data corruption issues. This one wasn't entirely Microsoft's fault, though -- IBM were the main culprits here, as they forced Microsoft to shoehorn in a number of OS/2 features at the last minute, then insisted on releasing the resulting product before adequate testing could be done. This lead to a subsequent 4.01 release which fixed the major problems. You'd think Microsoft would have learned something from this experience, but unfortunately it was just the beginning.
** The original release of Windows 98 was horribly bugged, to the point of being physically unable to run longer than 49.7 days without crashing due to a serious timing bug -- though this was a rarely seen problem, as the system was overwhelmingly likely to crash from any of a zillion other bugs ''long'' before such an uptime could be achieved. It was so bad that that they had to release a Second Edition in order to patch everything. Admittedly, 98 SE went on to become the most stable and successful branch of the "[[FanNickname 9x]]" branch of Windows.
** It's often said that the even releases of Windows are the obvious betas where Microsoft likes to experiment, while the odd releases are an attempt to perfect the previous release. This is most visible when noting the differences between XP (which itself was compared to 2000 this way early in its life) and Vista, and Windows 7 and the current concepts for Windows 8. In essence, what happens is that Microsoft releases a ''new'' OS (such as Vista) which quickly garners a reputation as crap due to unforeseen bugs. Even after the bugs are fixed, no one wants to buy "that crappy, buggy Vista." So Microsoft releases a "new" OS (Windows 7 in this case) that is essentially the previous one with all the bugs patched out. Windows 8 is a bit of a subversion because while the radical UI changes have become the subject of a huge BrokenBase, stability and performance have so far not been an issue.
** It does seem though now that Microsoft does seem intent on bucking the "every other version is good" trend. Probably the most significant thing they've done is actually offer up new releases with widespread, freely available public beta testing, something they had never done before Vista[[note]]and probably did because people were going to pirate leaked builds anyway, as happened with the paid beta programs for 2000 and XP[[/note]]. Ironically, the beta releases of both 7 and 8 ended up being much more stable and usable than the shipped versions of many of their obvious beta predecessors.
** Developers at the small set of companies who were sold Microsoft's Visual Interdev when it was released were dismayed to see the splash screen labelled 1.0a and a large Alpha after the name. The actual product crashed regularly, lacked key documentation, generated non-functional code, and had unremoved warnings that it was not for public release, possibly making it an obvious alpha.
** Windows 10 has had some growing pains. One of the mandatory updates caused some users' computers to enter an infinite reboot loop.
* The initial demo release of ''VideoGame/{{Painkiller}} Resurrection'' was an absolute disaster -- the developers accidentally released a much older version of the demo than they had intended, and it shows: [[LoadsAndLoadsOfLoading Loading up the level takes a good five minutes]], particle textures appear as orange-brown cubes, the finicky draw distance causes distant church towers to hang in the air miles away, and players couldn't even finish half the level because a [[WreakingHavok physics-enabled rope bridge]] kept tossing them over the edge or pushing them '''straight through itself'''.
** The UsefulNotes/{{Steam}} release of the game wasn't much better either, thanks to dodgy [[ArtificialStupidity AI programming]], painfully long load times and frequent crashes. And even in the retail version, the [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea7qTUvs4Qs multiplayer mode is an absolute joke]]: Players can dart up along walls, the weapon pickup models are completely botched, and ''firing the electrodriver crashes the game on the spot''.
* ''VideoGame/{{Daikatana}}'' was noted for excessive delays/slippages and a ridiculously arrogant advertising campaign. It shipped with broken AI, insanely unfinished levels, and dozens of bugs and glitches. The game was a mess in co-op as well: {{Cutscene}}s (and their subsequent event flags) were removed entirely, causing the players to spawn stuck behind closed doors that were supposed to open in cutscenes, first rearing its ugly head in the ''second level of the game''. The readme recommends playing the single-player mode first to get an idea of the story. The co-op has a host of bugs on its own -- the best being a glitch that causes players to spawn stuck partly in the floor, {{telefrag}}ging each other in an infinite loop.
* ''VideoGame/SupremeCommander'' shipped in an Obvious Beta state including severe game balance issues (most notably regarding the Aeon faction being a gigantic GameBreaker) that had been identified during Beta testing but weren't fixed prior to launch, pathfinding problems, engine problems and hardware compatibility issues. Despite being promoted heavily as a [=DX10=] showcase, the [=DX10=] support was never added; in addition, the promised SDK and editors never materialized due to proprietary code used in them. The majority of these issues were fixed by further patching and the ''Forged Alliance'' expansion, and even more have been fixed since by the modding community
** ''VideoGame/PlanetaryAnnihilation'' exited Early Access with insane amounts of bugs, pathfinding issues, lag spikes, promised content that wasn't included in the game such as the Unit Cannon, always-online DRM, an unfinished Planet Editor, and severe RAM issues that caused it to become nearly unplayable on certain systems. Most of these problems have been fixed with patches since release.
* It is rare to see an enemy in an unpatched copy of ''Hidden & Dangerous 2'' not floating ten feet above the ground. Other show-stopping bugs include not being able to interact with any object in the level [including mission objectives], enemies moving behind locked doors they have the only key to, and the AI's disturbing tendency to blow itself up if left with anything explosive.
* ''VideoGame/JurassicParkTrespasser'' was more like a beta design idea. Instead of a regular FPS setup, the player controls the character's right arm by holding down keys and moving the mouse. Aiming a gun requires careful alignment of both the player's body and their arm to line up the iron sights, which makes combat impractical. Further, the game was equipped with a severely broken physics engine that, according to Wikipedia, allowed the player to lift several-hundred-pound steel girders with one arm but did not allow the player to be pulled over a chest-high wall by that same arm. The very same physics engine also lacked friction, meaning stacked objects would simply slide or push off one another if misaligned regardless of mass, thus meaning nearly all of the physics puzzles in the game are simply "stack crates and then climb over them before they slowly slide off each other". On the flip side, this very physics engine may have very well inspired later works such as ''VideoGame/HalfLife2'', as it was very advanced by 1998 standards.
** Also, since any stowed melee weapon SticksToTheBack, and since a weapon's damage is determined when the weapon intersects with a character model, some weapons actually cause continual damage to the player when stowed; the devs "fixed" this by removing all mass from the melee weapons that did this, meaning they didn't kill the player when stowed, but now ''couldn't damage enemies either'' (the sole exception is Nedry's Mace, which you can't even properly use because [[BagOfSpilling you can't keep weapons between levels]] and said mace is found a couple minutes and a single raptor away from the end of the level it appears in).
** The game's 3D engine rendered distant objects as scaled sprites, which popped abruptly into polygons as the player approached them. It was released at the dawn of the era of hardware 3D acceleration, and actually looked ''worse'' when run with a 3D card; software mode used system memory to store textures, whereas the accelerated version was limited to the small texture memory of contemporary 3D cards. The software mode also used a clever form of bumpmapping which was incompatible with 3D accelerators, and so as a consequence the game looked better and ran faster in software more than with a 3D card.
** And that's not even getting into the hilarious deforming dinosaurs who had to be "dumbed down" due to the mishandled coding of their AI -- save for a couple of friendly raptors in level 3 that the developers forgot to tinker with.
* ''VideoGame/HeartsOfIron III'', a World War II strategy game, shipped with extremely broken AI. The AI countries would join factions seemingly at random; it wasn't uncommon for Japan to join the Allies or the US to join the Axis. Save games got corrupted all the time. The game ran incredibly slowly even on computers that far exceeded the system requirements and crashes were very common. The AI failed to research certain very valuable techs, giving the player a huge advantage. Totally improbable events, particularly involving naval landings, happened practically every game, such as Brazil invading Germany in 1941.
* Creator/{{Valve|Software}} in general has a habit of releasing games with {{Game Breaking Bug}}s, although they are generally prompt about patching them. However, they also have a habit of releasing patches that cause brand new bugs in addition to fixing old ones (and sometimes not even that; they've "fixed" the spy's backstab register at least twice without actually fixing it). Special mention goes to the 2010 ''VideoGame/HalfLife2'' update, which ported the entire game and its Episodes over to the newer version of their engine but introduced a host of new problems, at least some of which are present on all or at least most users' systems. The patch was released in May 2010, and to date only one bug (which made the AI crash at a critical point) has been patched.
** Also worth mentioning is the OS X and Linux versions of ''VideoGame/HalfLife1 Source'', doubling as a PortingDisaster. The port was released barely playable, suffering crippling problems, such as spawning with no weapons, HEV suit, or even a HUD. To make matters worse, these errors were even present in the Windows version.
* ''VideoGame/ElementalWarOfMagic'' was released in a buggy state. Given that it's Stardock, this by itself isn't too terribly surprising. What is surprising is that said "buggy state" is horribly, horribly buggy and received more patches ('''''six''''') in four days than ''[[VideoGame/GalacticCivilizations GalCiv2]]'' and ''VideoGame/SinsOfASolarEmpire'' did the entire ''month'' of their respective releases. And it's still missing content, [[ArtificialStupidity like competent AI]]. If [[WordOfGod Brad Wardell]] is to believed, this was deliberate -- as a substitute for CopyProtection. Reviewers did not wait for the six patches to hit before slamming the game for being unfinished.
* ''VideoGame/{{Elite}} 3'', a.k.a. ''Frontier: First Encounters'', is a great game, and the fact it's still played after more than ten years (after being reverse-engineered and spawning [[http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/GLFFE advanced graphics clones]] with the same gameplay) proves this. But [[http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Gametek Gametek]] took ExecutiveMeddling UpToEleven, went behind Frontier's back and released the closest thing to a complete version they had (or so Frontier's official site says). Ugly bugs spoiled the release as a result. For example, when flying into the atmosphere of a gas giant to scoop up hydrogen fuel (a useful (and oft-used) feature in the previous two games in the series), as soon as the scoop activates, the game crashes spectacularly. Even after the game was patched, it still refused to run in anything that wasn't a pure DOS environment - which prompted the aforementioned hacking of the game by the fans over the years so that they could at the very least run it in Windows.
* In ''Frontier - Elite 2'' (at least on the UsefulNotes/{{Amiga}} version), {{Game Breaking Bug}}s appeared over time (150 hours or so). It, therefore, most irritated players who had put the most into the (otherwise excellent) game. It basically became impossible to access the bulletin board to take missions and other features became disabled. The fact that Gametek released several improved versions cemented its position as an Obvious Beta for those who played it for the requisite length of time.
* ''VideoGame/MightAndMagic'':
** ''Might & Magic IX'' is a clear example of this trope, though it is partially excusable due to {{3D0}} [[AuthorExistenceFailure going bankrupt]] during the development process. The result was a game loaded with [[GameBreakingBug bugs]], [[{{Unwinnable}} glitches]], and [[EmptyRoomPsych strangely empty buildings]].
** ''Might and Magic VII'' was nowhere near as bad as ''IX'', but it still has an assortment of problems -- overpowered and underpowered classes, extreme laziness in the sprites (they didn't even bother with {{Palette Swap}}s and just tinted them single colors) and obvious unfinished content.
** ''VIII'' had less class balance (fewer classes and a simpler class promotion system) and sprite-tinting (more recycled sprites) problems, but also more obvious unfinished content (an entire dungeon placed along the way to one of the main quest areas in which the ''only'' interesting item is a quest item that isn't connected to any quest).
* ''VideoGame/DungeonLords'' was released with many missing features, despite them being stated in the game manual and advertised as such. Buttons, sliders and icons were present in the game and didn't do anything. Game patches gradually implemented some of those elements. The developers later released a collector's edition with "new stuff" which were actually, you guessed it, the missing features... which ''still'' didn't made the game complete in the end. To add insult to injury, the very last patch doesn't upgrade the original release to the "collector's edition" version.
* ''VideoGame/StarTrekLegacy''. The Xbox 360 version wasn't too bad, although it suffered more bugs than a console game really should. The PC version on the other hand was a total mess, riddled with bugs and controls that obviously hadn't been tested properly, if at all. Also, when players looked through the game directory, they found huge chunks of legacy code from the ancient ''VideoGame/StarTrekArmada'' engine, just proving [[TheyJustDidntCare how little effort had truly gone into the game's development]].
* ''Pool of Radiance: Return to Myth Drannor'' was so buggy that some gamers reported it destroying their OS. Even the install shield had a crippling bugs which prevented players from installing the game to a folder other than the default. It was so bad that the developer needed to release not just an update patch, but a completely new installer, meaning the user has to download this to ''install'' the game rather than going through the autorun setup from the disc. Most users would not be aware of this fact and will install it from the disc anyway, making it pointless.
* After the closure of Black Isle Studios, producers of ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}'', ''VideoGame/IcewindDale'' and ''VideoGame/PlanescapeTorment'', the studio was 'resurrected' through SpiritualSuccessor studios made up of much of their old staff, Obsidian Entertainment and Troika Games. Both studios have become renowned (or reviled) for their tendency to release unfinished or incomplete games:
** ''VideoGame/KnightsOfTheOldRepublicIITheSithLords'' is Obsidian's crowning example. Due to Lucasarts pushing for a Christmas release, much of the last third of the game is missing, including lots of voice files and code left in that details entirely new planets, a more satisfying ending, and a bit more character exploration and personal sidequests. A fan mod was eventually released to try to implement some of it. Compounding this was some ''massive'' ExecutiveMeddling, as Obsidian was fully willing to release the rest of the game in a free patch... LucasArts said ''no'', presumably because the Xbox version wasn't Live-enabled, but still.
** ''VideoGame/NeverwinterNights2'' was fairly buggy upon release and suffered from memory leak issues and a lack of polish. Then both expansions introduced {{Game Breaking Bug}}s that made the previous campaign literally unplayable: ''Mask of the Betrayer'' made a PlotLock in the original campaign fail to unlock, and ''Storm of Zehir'' deleted all of ''MOTB's'' voiceovers. And then when several more minor bugs introduced by ''SOZ'' were still extant, [[ScrewedByTheNetwork Hasbro sued Atari]] over ''TabletopGame/ForgottenRealms'' license agreement violations and all patches stopped.
** ''VideoGame/AlphaProtocol'' also has several bugs, including some that include flags not being thrown correctly in response to some of your actions and leaving you with odd results. Trying to sneak into the US embassy in Moscow will make the game think you butchered your way in, and Shaheed will mysteriously come back from the dead in the epilogue if you arrest him.
** ''VideoGame/ArcanumOfSteamworksAndMagickObscura'' had a lot of bugs and incomplete content. These included such things as as certain spells and items not working as they should have, sound glitches, incomplete animations and missing dialogue.
** ''VideoGame/TempleOfElementalEvil'' was riddled with several bugs and was generally unstable as heck. There are also references to some minor cut content in the second town. The bugs come both in [[GameBreakingBug game-breaking]] (like chests glitching out when doing anything with their content) and [[GoodBadBugs positive]] flavors (like using an enlarging spell to equip two two-handed weapons which count as one-handed due to size, then shrinking back and realizing you didn't drop your weapons and are free to use them or being able to equip both a bow and a sword leading to your character [[HilarityEnsues slashing at the thin air with arrow "shooting" out of the sword]]).
** ''VideoGame/VampireTheMasqueradeBloodlines'' was playable from the outset but had many physics flaws and bugs. A number of Troika programmers stayed on after the company went bankrupt and was able to finish an official patch that fixed many of these errors. Fans latched on to this and went on to produce several years' worth of unofficial patches that have fixed most of the game's errors and restored cut content.
* ''VideoGame/DragonAgeOrigins'' is rough around the edges in hindsight. First of all, the endgame (everything post-Landsmeet) is extremely bugged, failing to recognize who was made ruler of Fereldan and ''even your character's gender''. Also, the Dwarf Noble-only sidequest, "The Prodigal Son", was so bugged that it is ''literally'' {{Unwinnable}} without mods. Most of the DLC post-Warden's Keep were notoriously full of bugs and glitches upon initial release, most notable "Return to Ostagar" (which had to be delayed for ''over a month'' because it was practically unplayable), "[[VideoGame/DragonAgeOriginsAwakening Awakening]]" (which even those who liked it agreeing it was most likely rushed) and "Witch Hunt". Thankfully, the combination of patches (both Bioware and fanmade) and special mods have removed these issues, or at the very least mitigated them.
** To this day (in the Xbox 360 version, at least), "The Prodigal Son" will sometimes pop up in the "Completed Quests" folder with the notation that you failed to provide a noble home for your son... even if your character isn't a Dwarf Noble and has no son.
** ''VideoGame/DragonAgeII'' had some problems on release, including a way that the game could be made {{Unwinnable}} early on by killing a major NPC who is important to one of the late-game mandatory quests. Save file corruption has also been known to happen. Patches have fixed most of these, though even with 1.04 Sebastian and Isabela's character quests for Act III have to be completed at the beginning of the act or the game will crash when you play them (and with Sebastian's you can't have Anders in the party unless you also have Fenris). The game also has an overuse of CutAndPasteEnvironments and has a small variety of enemies. The developers have confirmed that these problems were the result of a rushed development cycle.
** ''VideoGame/DragonAgeInquisition'' was loaded with both major and minor bugs from the very beginning. Unparallelled among them, however, is the notorious Patch 4. Bad enough that the whole thing was nearly seven gigabytes, but an error in programming it for the Xbox One ports caused it to ''[[EpicFail automatically uninstall and reinstall the entire game.]]''
* Several of ''VideoGame/EVEOnline'''s expansions have been considered this, although CCP has got better over time, many earlier ones introduced {{Game Breaking Bug}}s, lag, and desync issues, which then required entire patches dedicated simply to resolving those.
* DarkSun Wake of the Ravager was plagued with such issues as disappearing doors that left the player permanently stuck, [=NPCs=] who continued to speak and act after death, inability to complete quests, and best of all, enemies, allies, terrain, and even equipment vanishing permanently for no good reason. An official patch fixed only a small amount of game-breaking problems. Completing this bug-encrusted piece of shit is only possible through extreme abuse of multiple save slots.
* ''Franchise/TheElderScrolls'' series is notorious for this.
** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIVOblivion Oblivion]]'' has the "honor" of {{Game Breaking Bug}}s all over, even early on the main quest. The developers fixed barely anything, with fans having to rely on the unofficial patch which other fans made, which is only available on PC.
** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIIMorrowind Morrowind]]'', of course, had a number of bugs on release but its expansions landed like a wrecking ball: ''[[ExpansionPack Tribunal]]'' had a number of elite assassins attacking you night after night regardless of level, and having the audacity to even ''install'' ''[[ExpansionPack Bloodmoon]]'' rendered both the original campaign and the ''Tribunal'' expansion unwinnable and broken. A fan patch had largely taken care of this until Bethesda released their own which just created loads of new problems and questionable design decisions (Ice Armor going from the best new light armor to a mediocre medium, among others).
** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim Skyrim]]'' carried on the trend; however, most of the Obvious Beta was with the ''[=PS3=]'' version rather than the PC, which Bethesda is used to. A couple of patches have been released to assess bugs, but plenty of bugs remain. Some of which will intentionally never be fixed because [[RuleOfFunny they're funny]]. While still buggy (with players reporting having to console-command through quests due to broken quests), the game's the ''least'' buggy of the Elder Scrolls game next to ''Morrowind''. The [=PS3=] uses a different OS. The Xbox consoles are based on Windows, with mod support planned for ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 4}}'' for the Xbox One before the [=PlayStation=] 4 even. However, the [=PlayStation=] and Nintendo's myriad consoles are not, which often means that bugs that exist in an Xbox or PC version of a game will not be in those, or vice versa. In effect, the [=PS3=] version is a PortingDisaster. It doesn't mean Bethesda's innocent, but it's far easier to understand the issue when you understand these facts, especially since Bethesda has a small staff in comparison to the size of their games. The team that worked on Skyrim was around 100 people, their largest up to then, with only Fallout 4 topping it.
** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIDaggerfall Daggerfall]]'' takes the cake, however. Even though several games were shipped with design flaws or glitches, ''Daggerfall'' was the worst. How bad was it? You could at least complete the main quest in the other games without a bug making the game {{Unwinnable}}. ''Daggerfall'' was also the game where one of the patches included an official tool entitled FIXSAVE.EXE, which [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin as its name implies]], was meant to repair errors in saved game files because they were too common to tell all affected players to restart the game. They also ended up publicizing some cheats, such as a dungeon teleportation spell, because the glitchy collision system in the engine tended to let people slip between the world geometry and into "The Void", where they'd fall forever otherwise, and because of the game's use of randomly generated dungeons could often result in dungeons without exits.
* The PC release of ''VideoGame/{{Rampage}}: World Edition'' was a ''literal'' Obvious Beta. '''If''' you were able to get it to run at all, it had the words "Beta Release" in all four corners of the screen.
* ''VideoGame/LordsOfMagic'' remained beta for a very long time after release. The developers admitted they [[ChristmasRushed rushed it out to cash in on holiday sales]].
* While ''VideoGame/LeagueOfLegends'' went live without many hitches, Yorick the Gravedigger could be considered this. When he was released, he was considered "Worthless" because his abilities were, well, practically a beta. It also didn't help that his ult was supposedly changed from development to release and was full of bugs.
* On the ''VideoGame/{{Glider}}PRO CD'', the final [[StarShapedCoupon star]] in "Grand Prix" appears in a room whose title promises one more. A half-built, unplayable sequence of rooms lies beyond. The house was supposedly completed, but no patch was ever released.
* ''VideoGame/TheOregonTrail 5th Edition'', especially version 1.0, is riddled with glitches and compatibility issues; it requires a patch to work at all on XP (otherwise it crashes on launch), and is not compatible with Vista. Stick with ''II'' or the ''25th Anniversary Edition''.
* Having been shipped hastily just before the company went under, Mac RPG ''VideoGame/TheTombOfTheTaskMaker'' has some noticeable glitches and DummiedOut content. Read the section on underdevelopment at [[http://web.archive.org/web/20040605131022/http://www.btinternet.com/~G.Janacek/Taskmaker.html this site]].
* The sequel to ''VideoGame/SwordOfTheStars'', ''Lords of Winter'', was released as a ''literal'' beta in November 2011 due to an erroneous upload of a pre-release candidate to the Steam servers instead of the intended release candidate. It was successfully replaced by the release candidate 24 hours later, at which point the delighted audience discovered that the actual release candidate wasn't much of an improvement and was riddled with several bugs. Kerberos Productions have yet, as of January 2012, declared that they feel the game is at the 'release' stage and bugfixes keep coming out on a near-weekly basis.
* ''Might and Magic: Heroes VI'' is this despite testing including open beta. At the moment of this entry developer is working on a patch that should fix some issues that were known since then; fan created bug list contains over 120 issues and quite a bit of them almost game breaking.
* ''VideoGame/{{Postal}} III''. While the Postal series isn't known for its high production values, the game's initial release suffers from frequent crashing on some systems, the AI failing, broken Steam achievements, sound issues, [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRJIXCPYY6c among other things]]. Additionally the style was quite a departure from what RWS had in mind before Akella took over production, making it much more cartoonish. Free-roam mode was cut and later put out in a patch and there is no multiplayer, despite its development being credited, as it was canned at some point. Also, the game was quite underpromoted and wasn't out on Steam until two months after its official release date, instead having to be purchased directly from RWS' website or other minor retailers. Reception (fan and critical) is mixed to negative, with one of RWS' developers saying "the whole thing was rather tragic".
* ''VideoGame/{{Magicka}}'' had numerous game-breaking or crashing bugs on release; multiplayer was especially buggy, and laggy because it used ridiculous amounts of bandwidth (far more than an average FPS game). After many of these bugs were fixed, the developers added the [[SelfDeprecation "Bug Staff" and "Crash To Desktop" spell]] to the game.
* ''VideoGame/CitiesXL'', a ''VideoGame/SimCity'' clone, suffered this. An UpdatedRerelease, ''Cities XL 2011'', fixed most of the huge bugs, but many remain.
* Merit Software's ''Command Adventures: Starship'' can become unplayable about halfway through. When you attempt to send a team to a planet, the default action sound will 'bleep' three times and you're kicked back into space. At times, you'll find crew members vanishing and eventually it gets so bad you can't even get into the shop and other sections of the Starbases. Merit intended Starship to be the first in a series of Command Adventures games but it ended up being a StillbornFranchise instead.
* o3 Games gave too much control over ''The Outforce'' to their publisher, who committed ExecutiveMeddling upon it, pushing it to be released with only the Terran campaign finished. Even worse, the units for the Terran, Crion, and Gobin races have identical capabilities, even some of the unit names are the same across all three. Nonetheless, the AI is killer, it may have been the first RTS to support unlimited group sizes and the graphics are beautiful. Multiplayer also works and there are no game breaking bugs. It just needed more time in the oven to bake in more content and de-clone the three races.
* The ''Franchise/RockRaiders'' PC game featured rampant ArtificialStupidity and literally impossible requirements for OneHundredPercentCompletion.
* ''VideoGame/LEGOIsland 2'' was beyond rushed in the middle of its development. Almost 50% of what was intended was cut entirely (for instance, there was going to be a cave area with many more sub-games). And the fifty percent that was done didn't even look half-complete; the physics were basic, the graphics were very texture-filled, [[GuideDangIt the instructions would barely give you a hint on what to do]], there was no replayability, [[LoadsAndLoadsOfLoading the load times were inexcusably long]] (sometimes going as long as ''two minutes''), and it was filled with various glitches, not uncommonly [[GameBreakingBug game-breaking]]. The [=PlayStation=] version was based on this one, so it too was incomplete in the same way. The Game Boy Color/Advance versions weren't, though, although opinions still tend to vary on them.
* The PC version of ''VideoGame/LEGOHarryPotter Years 1-4'' is so full of game-crashing glitches, it's unplayable.
* The PC version of ''VideoGame/DeadIsland'', at launch, turned out to be an earlier developer build instead of the final retail build, and the Xbox 360 developer build at that. It even came with a built-in noclip button (which can crash the game if used).
* Freeware {{Metroidvania}} ''Legend Garden'' suffers from this. It's UnwinnableByMistake, over half the bosses are hideously broken, things have a tendency to get stuck in walls, and some items are unobtainable.
* ''VideoGame/TheSims3'' [[http://www.thesims3.com/game/patches suffered badly]] from this. What makes it frustrating isn't just that most of the glitches come from expansion packs, but also by the patches ''themselves'', because they're designed to work with the upcoming expansion packs, which messes up your game in its own right (e.g. telescopes not working and sims being unable to marry) and if you do buy the new expansion, ''of course'' it brings in its own set of glitches, prolonging the cycle. One of the more glaring release-day bugs? If you gave your sim a unique hair colour, ''the game would glitch them bald''.
* The ''VideoGame/{{Metroid}}'' fan game ''[[http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/284725 Metroid; Beginings]]'' [sic], made with UsefulNotes/AdobeFlash in 2005 and [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWTWfz4-YBc discovered]] by WebVideo/{{Retsupurae}} in 2013, qualifies on a spectacular level. The collision detection is so buggy that you can often fall through the floor for no apparent reason, and it's possible early on to get stuck in a door--the twist being that ''opening the door doesn't fix it''. It also has NoEnding, in that the author simply did not program one into the game. Lest you think we're kidding, the player who recorded WebVideo/{{Retsupurae}}'s source footage confirmed this using a ''Flash decompiler''.
* ''FBI Hostage Rescue''. Full of ArtificialStupidity, NintendoHard difficulty, [[GameBreakingBug Game Breaking Bugs]], ludicrous time limits, lack of multiplayer mode, no AI squadmates/allies, and uncomfortable-to-use weapons. Even worse, the levels can be easily UnwinnableByMistake.
* Anything from the website for Website/YoyoGames, creators of Game Maker. Game Maker, like a fanfiction website, allows anyone to try their hand at game making and upload them without any screening, exposing the users to the full brunt of SturgeonsLaw. Imagine hundreds upon hundreds of "games" that resemble a grade schooler's first attempt at a video game, only [[TheyJustDidntCare released to the actual public]] rather than scrapped in a moment of self-awareness. Calling them "obvious pre-alphas" is a much undeserved compliment. MS Paint graphics, non-present and/or completely inappropriate sound effects, low-resolution sprites that make the UsefulNotes/{{Commodore 64}} look futuristic, blatant disregard for the most basic of design rules (e.g. zero-pixel walls), physics that go beyond broken to point of being outright shattered, [[BlindIdiotTranslation barely legible English]] (if not [[TranslationTrainwreck outright illegible]]), music being either nonexistent or [[SuspiciouslySimilarSong stolen]], content vital to the game's very functions completely missing, games that are either {{Unwinnable}} or incomplete to the point where [[NoEnding there is no ending]], games that... well, let's just say it's better to [[http://www.youtube.com/user/lowtaxico see for yourself]].
* VideoGame/{{Furcadia}} is an inversion: It's a complete, working game, with no more [[{{Pun}} Bugges]] than most finished games--but has been in ''Alpha'' stage for nearly 17 years.
* The ''Extreme Paintbrawl'' series of video games. Your team had [[ArtificialStupidity no programmed AI routines]], so they would either run straight into a wall at the beginning of a match or randomly flail around like they were having epileptic seizures. You could shoot paint at the sky, and it wouldn't disappear. The "practice mode" was just an empty arena. And so on.
* Parodied by ''VideoGame/DLCQuest'', which contains a zone named "Allan Please Add Zone Name". It's a completely empty rectangle, save for one sign in the middle which reads "ALLAN PLEASE ADD WORLD." This is a direct reference to a placeholder item description that was accidentally left in the final version of ''VideoGame/HitmanBloodMoney''.
* As memorably revealed [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3VaSl5jhPA here]], ''Gettysburg: Armored Warfare'' lacks certain features, like reliably being able to run, not exploding your entire army, spawning the sky dome more than half the time, etc.
* ''VideoGame/StarTrekOnline'' launched as this basically. Almost identical to the ''Fallout: New Vegas'' example above, the team at Cryptic bought the rights after Perpetual had dicked for about [[{{Vaporware}} half a decade not making the game]]. With the license on a tight deadline for release, they got the game out in about a year, and had crappy content, crappy graphics and a buggy as hell game. The plus side is, Cryptic spent the next 4 years of the game's life burying this content (and in the last two seasons, straight up replacing the story missions from launch with remastered versions) and making actual quality content. The dev team has been on the record that they will eventually get around to replacing ''all'' of the old story missions with properly done versions [[ThatOneLevel (with a few unwanted missions torn out entirely)]].
* ''VideoGame/PlanetSide 2'' launched out of beta with beautiful grapichs paired with [[TechDemoGame massive performance issues]] due to a near total lack of optimization, and what little optimization it had only applied to a very specific set of hardware (Intel i5 or i7 CPU, NVIDIA GPU) that caused players on cheap $500 Intel rigs to have twice the framerate of players on monstrous $2,000 AMD setups. It launched with only two continents and a [[RiskStyleMap territory control system]] that made large direct fights very rare; players instead simply captured bases around the defenders and ignored them entirely. After release, the ''Operation Make Faster Game'' ([[FunWithAcronyms OMFG]]) update effectively doubled everyone's framerate and made the game playable on AMD hardware, along with loads of incremental content updates (such as a new map and a [[CoolCar sweet new dune buggy]]).
* ''VideoGame/SecondLife'' became a horribly buggy mess when Linden Labs forced Viewer 2, the successor to Viewer 1, onto its users. Viewer 2 had terrible UI design that couldn't be customized, overall performance took a nosedive, and new users couldn't choose a last name when signing up for a Second Life account. The redesigned viewer was clearly not ready to be launched and it took Linden Labs ''years'' to remedy most of the problems after the user base loudly complained about the changes that were pushed onto them without notice.
* In the PC version of ''VideoGame/TombRaider2013'', the button prompts for [[PressXToNotDie QTEs]] will randomly cease to appear, turning the game into a LuckBasedMission. Not only that, but there's a late game bug when you [[spoiler:return to the ruins of the Endurance]] that literally makes the game {{Unwinnable}}.
* The ''VideoGame/{{Doom}} II'' [[GameMod PWAD]] ''[[http://doomwiki.org/wiki/NewDoom_Community_Project_II NewDoom Community Project II]]'' spent three years in development, only to be released in a terribly buggy state. How bad are we talking? Among other things, you can't finish the second level without cheating (with a code or an [[SequenceBreaking exploit]]) because you otherwise get locked in a required room with no way out. The [=NewDoom=] community died a few months later, leaving an official fixed version in limbo.
* Parodied in the StylisticSuck ''VideoGame/MarioKart'' parody ''VideoGame/SupraMayroKratt''. There are only three characters, slapped-on graphics for the skybox and terrains, and two levels.
* While quest- or combat-related bugs were relatively few, ''VideoGame/WarhammerOnline'' shipped without several major features: Each racial pairing set of zones were supposed to have their own capitol cities, but only the Order/Chaos (human) ones were ready to actually be entered (and the other cities were never completed, with '''all''' characters eventually starting in the human zones); two of the classes had been going through constant rewrites and changes and weren't released (finally put out as the Dwarf Slayer and the Ork Choppa) until several patches in; instanced PVP matches were quite badly implemented and lead to interminable queuing. On top of all that, the standard "load lag" of large numbers of player characters coming on screen at once ended up being either individual floating body-parts or totally invisible. The given statements stated that "due to late-developmental issues, the team was simply unable to compensate for all issues before release," which many fans took to mean "The bigwigs at EA that bought Mythic are [[ExecutiveMeddling sticking their noses in everything]] and forcing us to release early," especially in retrospect for some of their decisions with other games. There was also a severe issue involving server stability above certain (incredibly low) population levels, despite being released with several dozen servers to log into that caused player population to always be distressingly small in any one area outside a major city.
* The PC release of ''VideoGame/DarkSouls'' was both this and a PortingDisaster. Creator/FromSoftware slapped the port together and put it on PC simply due to a fan petition (despite their admitted inexperience with PC games) and it shows. Tiny resolution, terrible controls, garbled sound, and bad graphics were only the beginning. It also had plenty of bugs before patches -- it was possible to skip everything after getting the Lordvessel by glitching through doors to get to the final boss, severals spells were so massively overtuned and/or buggy that they made the game trivial, and just hitting Black Knights with certain weapons would ''[[GameBreakingBug instantly crash the game]]''. While the major bugs were fixed very quickly, the resolution and controls were never patched, although the modding community has fixed them since release.
** While not nearly as bad as the original, the PC version of ''VideoGame/DarkSoulsII'' also shipped with technical issues on release, including unresponsive controls and a scaled-back graphics engine completely different than the one used in promotional materials. It also had many GoodBadBugs, such as the famous binocular speed glitch and the ability to glitch out of a roll and fly through the air. These were eventually fixed.
** While there aren't really any blatant gameplay bugs, the port of ''DarkSoulsIII'' is a technical mess filled with frequent slowdowns and crashing. One of the more crippling - and hilariously ironic - bugs causes the game to crash when using a bonfire.
* ''Battlecruiser 3000AD'' was launched far [[ExecutiveMeddling too early by its publisher]] after existing in an (apparent) state of nigh-VaporWare for years - being an "everything" simulator a la today's ''Videogame/StarCitizen'' but with a tiny fraction of the budget and employees tends to do that -- leading to the game being critically panned due to a plethora of bugs and lack of documentation. The creator sued, settled out-of-court, and released several patches and an UpdatedReRelease to address the bugs.
* ''VideoGame/{{Rage}}'' is filled with so many graphical and engine glitches, seen on a wide variety of hardware, that it seems it wasn't even playtested for anything other than the consoles. The fact that it apparently wasn't designed to work at all with ATI video cards (which are a third of all cards in existence) doesn't exactly help matters, either.
* ''Air Control'' was a game released on Steam that has errors apparant right from the beginning of gameplay. The player character's head moves around while selecting menu options, several debug buttons appear at times, the gameplay chaotically switches from one style and storyline to another, giant green blocks presumably indicating something is clickable appears... it was eventually pulled from Steam and there is still some debate as to if this was all [[StylisticSuck an intentional attempt at making a bad game]] to show how gullible people are to buying anything without getting review info, or if it really was rushed.
* ''VideoGame/RavensCry'', a game about WoodenShipsAndIronMen, is a hearty tale of pirates and game engine errors. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI_SvrECKIk Multiple]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lofR-R_rFJ0 videos]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjeliI79Zek exist]] on the subject. To summarize: Collision errors, voiced dialogue that doesn't play, and texture faults are common. Add to that odd (right at the edge of scaffolding ripe to be pushed off) or incorrect NPC placement (that woman urinating into the bush probably isn't meant to be), poor NPC behavior (like the guy who keeps "waking up" when a gun is pointed at him only to lie back down right afterwards), and some plain weird dialogue (such as the guy who keeps saying "Be brave" followed by some random expletive; something that was actually patched out of the game shortly after the video that made reference to it) and you have one unfinished and buggy game (albeit quite a humorous end product).
* While ''VideoGame/{{Blood}}'' is a consistently functional game with some GoodBadBugs, the same can't be said for the sequel, ''Blood II: The Chosen'', who plays the trope as straight as a laser beam.
** DamageSpongeBoss battles like [[spoiler:Gideon]] end earlier than their last sliver of health being expended. In his second form, he's the diametric opposite of ImmuneToFlinching, and when he dies his body is almost guaranteed to clip through the floor and drop to the lower boundaries of the level.
** The SawedOffShotgun can be wielded GunsAkimbo, but the second one doesn't have its viewmodel mirrored, so Caleb ends up with two right hands.
** Fire just doesn't work right, with only the Flare Gun's primary fire actually lighting enemies up -- secondary wastes eight flares to do nothing except look pretty, the Insect-a-Cutioner bug spray's secondary fire likewise does nothing but waste ammo better put to use with the M16's GrenadeLauncher, and the Napalm Launcher fails to set enemies on fire under any circumstances as well.
** Killing a Death Shroud with a weapon that gibs on death will keep its "presence" sound running.
** Characters that are friendly have in-game entities hostile to Caleb. If a cutscene ends too early, which is a bug of its own, they ''will'' attack you if you're close enough, and given the power of their weapons, they '''''will''''' kill you. In turn, you can slaughter them to no ill effects. Gabriella at the end of Chapter One is a notable example.
** By dropping a weapon you're holding and staying on top of it, when you pick it up it'll come with a full serving of ammo as if you've picked it up for the very first time.
** Some enemies, like the third Soul Drudge in Love Canal, will be permanently stuck attacking the air (often several times faster than normal despite not corresponding to the animation playing) until you shoot them. If you don't, they'll just stay there and can be safely ignored.
** The Behemoth has its AI set so it starts {{Shockwave Stomp}}ing the ground when its health is below a certain level and it takes damage. However, it's not immune to its own shockwaves -- each causes a tiny bit of damage to it. If you hide while it's pounding the ground after you hurt it enough for the behaviour to trigger, it'll eventually gib itself, though it takes a very long time.
** There's one that elevates the Drudge Lord from GiantMook to {{Demonic Spider|s}}: If you aggro it and hide, it'll sometimes move forward at walking speed while it launches its set of three fireballs, something it's not supposed to do. If you don't run away far enough to see the fireballs coming, you're bound to catch the third one with your face when it turns the corner.
** Enemies tend to get frozen at the end of an attack/flinch animation if they can't see or get to the player by the end of it, instead of going idle or prowling the level.
** Doors are [[TheDoorSlamsYou particularly deadly]] if you don't show the proper respect for them. A cutscene in Chapter Two, in particular, can end up with you ''dying'' a few seconds into it, because it starts up while you're partway through a door, which will automatically close during the cutscene, and which if you're in the wrong spot will promptly crush you between the door and its frame.
* ''[[VideoGame/RealmsOfArkania Realms of Arkania HD]]'' remake was rushed out in ''pre-alpha'' stage at best, with many obvious missing features and loads of bugs. It was vastly improved with more than 30 patches released within the year. The rush was a [[ExecutiveMeddling direct order from the publisher's order]], despite the protest from the developers.
* The main reason for ''VideoGame/LordsOfTheFallen'''s average reviews was its utterly staggering amount of bugs at launch, including several game-breaking script failures that could make the game {{Unwinnable}}. It also suffered from severe crashing and stuttering issues (most of which stemmed from the game's Denuvo DRM), enemies getting stuck in scenery, etc. The vast majority of these issues were eventually fixed with a lot of patching.
* ''VideoGame/{{Hatred}}'' was strongly criticized for this trope on its release. Its near-lack of optimization and anemic options menu caused massive slowdowns even on powerful machines (in a ''top-down twin stick shooter'' no less). The devs later released the free ''Survival'' DLC which fixed nearly all the optimization issues, along with adding many more options and expanding the single player campaign to boot.
* The PC version of ''VideoGame/BatmanArkhamKnight'' was handled by Creator/IronGalaxyStudios and was wrought with lots of glitches and graphical issues on launch ([[http://kotaku.com/sources-warner-bros-knew-that-arkham-knight-pc-was-a-1714915219 known for months prior to release]], apparently). This was so bad that the game was almost immediately rescinded after launching from stores like Steam in order to try to suss them out. This happened in June 2015 and the game was not returned to digital distribution storefronts until the very end of October... where it was ''still'' steeped with problems (such as requiring an absurd ''12 GB'' of RAM to run on Windows 10 without issue). WB Games have, tragically, [[http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/11/warner-issues-refunds-for-broken-batman-arkham-knight-again/ basically washed their hands of the matter]] by offering refunds (regardless of playtime) until the end of 2015 and admitting there are things they simply ''can't'' fix (a similar story was told of the PC version of ''Arkham Origins'', which had several [[UnwinnableByMistake progression-halting issues]] and WB walked away from it in order to put their resources into DownloadableContent for the game).
* The launch version of ''VIdeogame/XCOM2'' is very unoptimized. At best, players will experience some slowdowns from time to time despite system specs, especially on the Avenger. At worst, the game will run out of RAM/VRAM and crash after playing the game for some time, or the CPU and/or GPU will be extremely stressed to the point they'll overheat and take down the entire system, or in some cases the game just won't load at all (again, despite system specs). And all of this is ''after'' the game was delayed for three months.
* ''VideoGame/AirControl'' is more like an Obvious Pre-Alpha, because of the numerous bugs, the simultaneous mouselook and mouse cursor, and the fact that the menu and restart buttons don't work properly.
* ''Pinball/StarWarsTrilogy'' has a couple of aspects in the game software that imply it was rushed out the door. For instance, the "Bounty Hunter" mode features an animated display of Boba Fett pointing to a random selection, but the result is always "Video Mode".
* Interplay's ''VideoGame/StarTrekPinball'' was a rushed cash grab, filled with numerous bugs, a wildly unrealistic and inconsistent physics engine, and frequent game crashes. To add insult to injury, a note in the package mentions that the advertised network multiplayer feature was not completed in time for the game's release.
* Creator/SternPinball's ''[[Pinball/BatmanStern Batman]]'' had several truncated modes which indicate the game was unfinished before it shipped. The most prominent example is "Final Challenge", the game's WizardMode... which was completely absent until a 2010 software update added one.
* Only one revision of the software was released for ''Pinball/BramStokersDracula'', because Bill Pfutzenreuter, the game's programmer, left Williams after the game's release.
* Jersey Jack Pinball's ''Pinball/TheWizardOfOz'' had some clearly incomplete software features, most notably some missing bonuses and the absent {{Wizard Mode}}s. Various software updates have addressed the issues, however.
* This has become such an issue regarding Stern releases, as not only did the aforementioned ''Batman'' succumb to this, but so did ''Pinball/SpiderManStern'', ''Pinball/TheWalkingDead'', ''Pinball/{{Metallica}}'', and especially ''WWE Wrestlemania'', that a movement built up on the Pinside Forums and Facebook called [[https://creditdotpinball.com/2015/03/05/feature-code-breaker-the-rise-of-wheresthecode/ "Where's the Code?"]] This was significant enough for Stern -- who is fairly notorious for not replying to anything on social media -- to respond within hours. Over the course of months, several highly-requested updates would then be released for these machines. However, the "Where's the Code" people are still keeping an eye on Stern to step in on behalf of customers if more new machines get depraved of much-needed polish in the software department.
* In the case of ''WWE Wrestlemania'', the only parts of the game that were available at launch were multiballs and modes pertaining to the tiny wrestling ring near the top, which meant that gameplay was extremely centralized in an area that doesn't even take up one-tenth of the playfield.
* ''Pinball/CactusCanyon'' was being designed during a time when Williams (and by extension, Bally) was beginning pre-production on their ill-fated Pinball 2000 engine. As a result, the higher-ups forced the game to go into production before all the proper coding was in place. As a result, several things were left uncoded, including a few rules, a proper MatchSequence, a music track to accompany said MatchSequence, one or two game modes, and a couple animations. It took 14 years before Eric Priepke introduced a mod for the game called ''Cactus Canyon Continued'' that put everything mentioned back in.
[[folder:[=PlayStation=] 3/Xbox 360/Wii]]
* ''[[VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog2006 Sonic the Hedgehog]]'' for UsefulNotes/{{Xbox 360}} and UsefulNotes/{{PlayStation 3}} (AKA ''Sonic '06'', to distinguish it from [[VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog1 the 16-bit and 8-bit games]]) featured poor controls, poor hit detection, graphical errors, framerate problems, placeholder graphics from the old UsefulNotes/SegaDreamcast games and LoadsAndLoadsOfLoading, with a distinct possibility of spending more time loading the game than playing it. It ended up that way due to [[ChristmasRushed rushing for a Christmas release]].
** See [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01mrBqkoOis this]] playtest.
** Describing this game's issues alone could take up this entire page. Numerous features that were intended to be part of the final game, including more abilities and daytime transitions were dropped/incomplete, and the physics engine is [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze582VGaAkY notoriously buggy]]. Fans eventually found out that [[ExecutiveMeddling Sega had fired its entire bug testing crew prior to the game's completion]].
* ''VideoGame/FarCry: Vengeance'' for the Wii was a mess of a game with laggy framerates, [[{{DummiedOut}} cut content]], and sloppily done visuals, obviously rushed out just to put a Far Cry game on the Wii for the sake of it.
* The in-game LoadingScreen hints in ''VideoGame/TimeShift'' frequently refer to features that don't actually exist, and the rewind function spends much of the game disabled because the developers didn't feel like resolving the minor issues that it could present. For example, if a character is scripted to open a door, then the player could have used the rewind function to be either inside the room before the door opened, or outside of the room after it closed.
* ''VideoGame/{{Haze}}'' at first was promoted as having a new task-based AI system which was licensed by Free Radical Design, then found not to work at all on the hardware they were designing for. The game slipped for over a year, with early trailers having nothing to do with the final plotline. The end result had obvious missing functions [the two rifles were clearly designed with underbarrel mounts], poor visuals, stodgy AI, ridiculously repeated samples and a disjointed, pretentious plotline. Since FRD had promoted all their other projects as using the distinctly unimpressive Haze engine, they duly lost all their custom and collapsed shortly afterwards.
* ''VideoGame/TheLastRemnant'' for the UsefulNotes/{{Xbox 360}} is plagued by massive slowdown during battles which, coupled with the amount of grinding that you have to do and LoadsAndLoadsOfLoading, makes the game drag to an infuriating extent. The PC version successfully fixed all of these problems and even included a Turbo Mode to make battles go faster. You'd think that they would be working on a patch to fix the graphical problems in the Xbox 360 version, but seems to have been abandoned entirely. The [=PlayStation=] 3 version that was supposed to come out simultaneously with the 360 version has vanished entirely into the ether and Square refuses to speak of it.
* ''VideoGame/TheKingOfFighters XII'' has been accused of being an obvious beta. The playable character roster had been cut nearly in half between ''XI'' and ''XII'' (a few players have browsed through the index files of the UsefulNotes/{{Xbox 360}} version and discovered files for several unused characters in the game such as Yuri and Takuma Sakazaki, fan-favorite Mai Shiranui, and even long-unused ''VideoGame/FatalFury'' SubBoss Hwa Jai), the main arcade mode is little more than a glorified time trial with only five stages and no proper end boss (though given [[SNKBoss SNK's reputation for making extremely punishing bosses]], this change would be a good thing), and until a version 1.02 patch fixed it, the netcode for online play was extremely unreliable, leaving some players stuck on the loading screen for minutes before even being able to select a character.
* Notoriously, the XBox360 version of ''Videogame/AloneInTheDark2008''. The UsefulNotes/PlayStation3 version fared better, but still had its issues.
* ''VideoGame/AnotherCenturysEpisode R'' is, by [[WordOfGod direct admission]], an Obvious Beta to allow the team behind the ''ACE'' trilogy to get adjusted to the [=PlayStation=] 3 architecture. This entails rebuilding the game engine from the ground up and focusing on gameplay and graphics rather than LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters, as the previous two games did.
* ''Major League Baseball 2K9'' for the Xbox 360. [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbIVUgW0t0o This video sums it up pretty well]]. Not enough proof? Okay, [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN3cGmtm81g one more]].\\
The developers were surprisingly upfront about this in later interviews. ExecutiveMeddling led to them having only nine months to develop the game instead of the usual (for that series) 12 months.
* The 2010 reboot of ''VideoGame/MedalOfHonor'' is a glitchfest riddled with {{Game Breaking Bug}}s. Creator/ElectronicArts doesn't usually rush out games like this. What were they thinking? One level has a huge glitch that causes an entire section of the level to go missing, leaving only the bottomless void.
* If ''VideoGame/HarryPotter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One'' was ever tested, it wasn't done very thoroughly; the game's makers and testers never picked up on the fact that the invisibility cloak (when it actually works) breaks most levels wide open, causing event triggers to fail, enemies to simply stand stock still and, hilariously, putting it on while fighting the final boss ''causes you to win the entire game almost instantly''.
* ''WesternAnimation/KungFuPanda2'' for the [=PS3=]. While the Xbox 360 version is subpar in its own right, the [=PS3=] version looks like a meeting pitch prototype that was shown to a publisher in order to get further development funds but got shoved out the door as a finished product instead.
* The original Wii version of ''VideoGame/TalesOfGraces'' was recalled in 2010 due to the number of game-breaking bugs and glitches. It went all right on its first playthrough, but on repeat playthroughs the game just imploded on itself. Sometimes the music would glitch during fights, too. (Note that these issues do not apply to ''[[PolishedPort Tales of Graces ]]'' for the [=PlayStation=] 3.)
* ''VideoGame/TalesOfXillia'' is again, playable, but was ChristmasRushed for the 15th anniversary of the series, and it shows. All the port areas are laid out exactly the same to the point where the only differences are NPC dialogue, the endgame is very rushed, and the CoOpMultiplayer was very poorly implemented (it is very easy to lock the other player out of the game completely simply by pushing the wrong button at the wrong time). Its sequel, ''VideoGame/TalesOfXillia2'', also has many complaints (mostly boiling down to how short it is and how it feels more like DLC to the first game rather than a sequel in its own right).
* The ''Franchise/SilentHill HD Collection'' was made with incomplete versions of the games' source code--because Konami had lost the complete code--with predictable results. However, Konami is patching the [=PS3=] version to correct the problems ([[ScrewedByTheNetwork sadly, not the X360 version, though]]), and the problems have been mitigated somewhat.
* ''[[Videogame/SoulSeries Soul Calibur V]]'' was released with only 1/4 of its story mode completed due to the development team running out of time.
* ''Blacksite: [[VideoGame/Area51FPS Area 51]]'' was released in an obviously unfinished state, to the point that project lead Harvey Smith admitted it went straight from alpha to gold. Among other things, visual glitches and oddities run rampant (intel and ammo frequently floats in midair, there's no animation for [=NPCs=] entering vehicles, so your teammates entering a Humvee is represented by them standing next to the vehicle and reappearing inside of it), the squad control and morale mechanics barely work, the game is short on content (short campaign, only 6 guns and a bare-bones multiplayer mode) and the final boss had no AI before patch, he simply stood still after the end of his short scripted behavior.
* The [=PS3=] port of ''The Orange Box'' was handled by EA Games, with disastrous results. ''VideoGame/TeamFortress2'' got hit with this the hardest, being nearly unplayable on the [=PS3=]; bugs continued running rampant more than a year after they had been fixed on the original PC and 360 versions.
* The Wii port of ''VideoGame/SamAndMax: Season 1'' suffers from countless problems: The cursor getting permanently stuck in the lower-right corner of the screen, horrible texture compression (leaving several visual or text-based gags incomprehensible), random crashing, [[LoadsAndLoadsOfLoading long loading times]], the list goes on. Whatever you do, never, '''ever''' buy the Wii port.
* ''VideoGame/TonyHawkProSkater HD'' fell victim to Summer of Arcade. Summer of Arcade is a special event that Microsoft holds for Xbox Live Arcade every year. It's held because Microsoft wants to get some timed exclusives (or [[VideoGame/SplosionMan permanent]] [[VideoGame/ShadowComplex exclusives]]) to the Xbox 360. Tony Hawk HD was one of them. As a result, one of the levels (Downhill Jam) is so glitchy it's borderline unplayable, the physics aren't polished, some of the tricks are glitched, and there's a huge glitch where you can't use tricks that you buy.
* ''Videogame/{{Mercenaries}} 2: World in Flames'' was another EA victim, with not only glitches with terrain that would occasionally cause vehicles to act as if they'd run into solid walls while going across level surfaces, objects to spawn on top of buildings that had previously been destroyed so that they were just suspended in midair, and most glaringly, in-game tips to use Vehicle Repair Crates and Vehicle Ammo Crates to repair and reload your vehicles despite neither of these items actually being present in the game. These issues were especially problematic in light of the game's release having already been delayed for over a year by the time it came out.
* ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog4: Episode I'' was essentially an experiment, as its glitchy physics engine can attest to. Sega was depending on its reception to determine what should be improved in ''Episode II'', or whether there should even be one. It being downloadable and not actually a physical release gave them less to lose.
* ''VideoGame/BatmanArkhamOrigins'' generally got good reviews but became rather famous for being '''a lot''' more buggy than the other ''VideoGame/BatmanArkhamSeries'' titles. A couple of them were {{Game Breaking Bug}}s, preventing you from progressing through a story-relevant location and leaving you stuck. Others included enemies who were obviously incapacitated but still trying to hit you, getting stuck in a landing pose with your cape expanded, and sometimes just unrefined combat controls. The game was outsourced to WB Games Montreal with all the game programming Creator/{{Rocksteady}} made for the other games, leading to a lot of OnlyTheCreatorDoesItRight. Although the management of WB Games did apologize for how glitchy it turned out, and released patches for all of the major issues.
* The console and PC versions of ''VideoGame/PrinceOfPersiaTheSandsOfTime'' have terrible issues with tracking [=NPCs'=] data. If you happen to trigger certain events (such as a door unlocking after defeating all mobs, or just mob spawning), there's a chance that Farah or a mook will be stuck behind a gate that just closed up, forcing you to either suicide or reload your save. And ''never'' [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQQh2yFLrxc save near a death trap]]. Farah's stupidity will ensure you won't be able to continue from there.
* ''VideoGame/DarksidersII''. The controls randomly stop working completely (at least in the PC version) whenever you exit the Chronicle and the game randomly crashes after certain cutscenes, most infamously the ones before and after the [[spoiler:Lilith]] boss fight. In fact, that one crash can literally make the game {{Unwinnable}} since there is ''no'' solution to it other than ''completely starting the game over''. And due to THQ going under, it is ''highly'' unlikely any of this will ever be fixed.
* ''[[VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoV Grand Theft Auto Online]]'' is considered to be this by a rather large portion of those who have played it. Over a year after its initial release, it's still filled with {{Game Breaking Bug}}s and exploits that have yet to be patched, [[GameBreaker grossly overpowered]] vehicles and weapons that are still unbalanced, and the use of mods that can easily give one GodMode with no repercussions whatsoever still runs rampant. Most suspect this constant rebalancing and bug fixing is the #1 reason why heists, the most anticipated feature of Online, [[{{Vaporware}} were MIA far longer than intended]].
* The Xbox version of ''VideoGame/SupremeCommander'' would grind to a halt whenever battles got at all large despite having drastically reduced the graphics quality. Throw in a completely unintuitive control scheme and you have a clearly unfinished product.
* ''VideoGame/RetroCityRampage'' intentionally invokes this with a minigame based on the pre-alpha NES prototype of the game, ''Grandtheftendo''.
[[folder:[=PlayStation=] 4/Xbox One/Wii U]]
* ''VideoGame/SonicBoom: Rise of Lyric'' for the UsefulNotes/WiiU took four years to make, yet looks like a beta version rushed to release thanks to a TroubledProduction. It's possible to [[GameBreaker infinitely extend Knuckles' jump]] by ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPwXKHqdXDw pausing the game mid-jump]]''; you can [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8V0vM_ra6M respawn outside arenas]] with forcefields that turn off only when you kill the enemies ''in'' them ([[GameBreakingBug making the level]] UnwinnableByMistake); and it's far too easy to go [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3gpRHPuifg out]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSxzOxGb_bE of]] [[http://i.imgur.com/LIzFmYC.jpg bounds]].
* ''VideoGame/ZombiU'' was clearly rushed to meet the Wii U's launch. It was absolutely chock full of game-breaking bugs, a startling number of which forced you to restart the entire game from scratch. They weren't patched until about half a year later.
* ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreedUnity'' suffered horrendous bugs that, among other things, caused facial textures to disappear (only leaving eyeballs and teeth behind). It was so bad that Ubisoft nixed their Season Pass for the game and offered up paid DownloadableContent for free; anyone who did buy a Season Pass was given a free Ubisoft game.
* ''Franchise/{{Halo}}: The Master Chief Collection'' has been plagued with a string of matchmaking issues from the day it launched (never connecting to other players, games being unevenly divided, etc.). 343 Industries has tried to patch the game but to no real avail (in some cases with players reporting a ''drop'' in matchmaking consistency). Add to that the already protracted installation times and a significant number of players turned to demanding refunds. Most infuriating is that the matchmaking is merely a port of the four existing games' matchmaking system, and was one of only three things that were "changed" about the games for the release of MCC (the other two being the audio/visual overlay for Halo 2 and the addition of 5 completely remade maps for "Halo 2 Anniversary" multiplayer). Meaning that this is a combination of Obvious Beta and PortingDisaster as they basically ported the four multiplayer systems from ''Halo PC'', ''Halo 2 Vista'', ''Halo 3'', and ''Halo 4'' and it still remains broken. Kotaku alone ran '''twelve''' separate articles on how ''The Master Chief Collection'' has tried to get itself working, yet remains buggy and broken as all hell six months after release. All of them can be linked from a post in [[http://kotaku.com/the-splatoon-demo-is-very-limited-1702814575 this]] ''VideoGame/{{Splatoon}}'' article. Clearly, Creator/{{Nintendo}} is ''not'' keen on repeating that whopper.
* The UsefulNotes/PlayStation4 version of ''Ultra VideoGame/StreetFighterIV'' launched in a bug-ridden state. Graphical errors like invisible Sonic Booms, background sound effects triggering in time with character movements, and worst of all, behavioral glitches that do not exist on any other version of the game (such as attacks teleporting through characters when they would connect on any other port). Furthermore the game's menus and character selection screen are very slow (running at a cut frame rate) and the input lag is even ''worse'' than the already too-high [=PlayStation=] 3 port. Capcom attempting to move the community to the [=PS4=] version was stopped dead in its tracks due to these issues and major tournaments are reverting back to the already standard Xbox 360 version of the game. The bulk of the blame in this case falls to Other Ocean, a porting house Sony used to convert the game to the [=PS4=] and not known for having a good track record. Like the above ''Master Chief Collection'', ''[=USF4=]'' is simultaneously an Obvious Beta and a PortingDisaster since we're talking about a game that is based on code from more than six years ago, already exists on platforms that run the same architecture as the [=PlayStation=] 4 ([=x86=], same as the PC and arcade versions of the game and what is supposed to be an advantage of developing for the [=PS4=]), and is coming from consoles nearing a ''solid decade'' on the market and have seen numerous other remastered ports on current generation systems that show none of the bad programming that ''Ultra Street Fighter IV'' has.
* The [=PlayStation=] 4 and UsefulNotes/XboxOne versions of ''VideoGame/TonyHawksProSkater 5'' quickly became notorious for its hilariously buggy physics engine and heaping lack of polish. For starters, a day-one patch for the game that went live with the game's released was found to have a file size ''larger than the base game itself'' (vanilla game: ''4.6GB''; day-one patch: '''''7.7GB'''''). [[note]]This sparked a rumor that the patch included the majority of the game, and that people with the base game could only play the tutorial and Create-A-Skater mode, but this was later debunked.[[/note]] And when playing the game, it's not too difficult to see why. It is not uncommon for the player to see their character glitch into the walls, into the ground, or even [[UpToEleven into the air]] when grinding, using the game's "slam" mechanic (which immediately forces the player onto the ground or a rail when pressed) or even simply landing incorrectly when falling down from a ramp. A [[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-09-29-watch-tony-hawks-pro-skater-5-is-a-bit-of-a-glitchy-mess video from Eurogamer]] that showcases many glitches noted that they were found in merely ''one hour'' of gameplay time--and this was ''after'' the patch was applied. Some copies of the game also became prone to ''actually crashing'' when people tried to play them.
* ''VideoGame/{{Brawl}}'' was first released under the title ''Basement Crawl''. This version of the game allowed eight players to battle at once, but had only four player character models and no [[ColorCodedMultiplayer color-coding]], [[PaletteSwap palette-swapping]] or tags to tell them apart. The online multiplayer experience was ridden with {{Game Breaking Bug}}s, and the promised tutorial-oriented single-player mode (realized in ''Brawl'') was absent. Bloober Team apologized for ''Basement Crawl'' and rebuilt the game, adding many new features.
* ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 4}}:'' The 1.3 patch, in addition to a variety of cross-platform bug fixes and feature tweaks, promised to dramatically increase object fading distances on consoles. This had not been a big problem, but if the developers could not find the time to fully optimise the game for fixed, well-known, popular platforms before release, then they may have been rushing it a bit.
[[folder:Handheld Systems]]
* ''[[Videogame/SonicTheHedgehog1 Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis]]'' for the Game Boy Advance, the port of the first game, was a [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmN5eDIOJqY failure of epic nature]] despite the GBA having over ''twice'' the processing power of the UsefulNotes/SegaGenesis. It was rushed to come out on ''Sonic'''s 15th Anniversary. The developers did a quick and dirty port job, inserting the ''Sonic 1'' map data into the ''Sonic Advance'' engine. The problem was that the engine was designed to handle data created around the GBA's 240×160 screen resolution, even though Sega Genesis games use a higher resolution. This caused the ''Sonic 1'' data to overload the engine, making it take up too much memory.
* ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehogChaos'' is essentially a beta version of ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehogTripleTrouble''. All the levels are very short and devoid of life, with little to no badniks around. The physics are also very clunky, and even though you can play as Sonic or Tails, there is only one available ending: Sonic's default ending. Beating the game as Tails or as Sonic with all emeralds will lead up to [[AWinnerIsYou a generic "Congratulations" screen]]. Also, the Master System version of ''Chaos'' seems to be a beta of the Game Gear version! Several music tracks are either unrefined or missing entirely, the presentation is lacking compared to the Game Gear version and some of the stages have their objects in different places. The biggest telltale sign however is Sonic's bad ending -- in the Game Gear version he chases Robotnik and trips, falling on his face before jumping up and down on the spot in frustration. In the Master System version all of this animation for Sonic is missing and he simply rolls the whole time.
* ''VideoGame/SonicChronicles'' was released in the late beta phase. It's not unplayable by any means, and most of the fans enjoyed it, but it had an abnormal amount of cut content (including the ''soundtrack'', which was just fan remixes downloaded from the internet in MIDI format). What evidently happened was that Creator/BioWare was acquired by EA and decided to work on ''Franchise/DragonAge'', since they had already fulfilled their contract to Sega. This isn't so much of a case of "poorly released game" as it is "game could have been ''much'' better than it actually was."
* ''Virtual Lab'', a puzzle game that was the last game released on the UsefulNotes/VirtualBoy in Japan, misspells "Nintendo" two different ways on its box and title screen, gives passwords after completing each level but lacks a menu to input them, and has speed settings that are wrong ("MID" is the fastest setting).
* ''Franchise/MortalKombat Advance'' was (in theory) meant to give a bone to MK fans wanting to play ''[[VideoGame/MortalKombat3 UMK 3]]'' on the go with their Game Boy Advance back in 2002. Midway, however, handed the license to an outside third party away from Ed Boon and his team and gave them four months to turn it out for a quick profit. Unsurprisingly, the game came rife with glitches, incomplete AI (either motionless or [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard cheating]]), and unresponsive controls. The game proved to be a bit profitable for Midway, but this kind of practice foretold the future bankruptcy of the company.
* ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}''
** [[VideoGame/PokemonRedAndBlue The original games]], especially the original ''Red'' and ''Green'', released only in Japan (after five years of development!), were notorious for this. The updated ''Blue'' engine (which was used for the games released outside of Japan), despite fixing some of the more painful bugs, was still a mess, with the infamous Mew glitch, Glitch City, the old man exploit, as well as [[TheMissingno Missingno.]], due to being a beta and because of some of the shortcuts taken to fit the game on the cartridge. Even the UpdatedRerelease ''Yellow'' didn't fix much. By Generation II, which uses an upgraded engine, most of the bugs were fixed, but exploits involving the PC boxes that had a similar effect to the Mew glitch (i.e. manipulating cloning and PC boxes to get any Pokémon) remained. Note that this isn't always a bad thing -- the games were indeed playable (and many glitches you had to actually go ''out of your way'' to exploit) but it was one of those rare instances where they released a late beta and it actually ''worked''.
** There were a couple glitches that did affect normal gameplay. Several moves did not work as intended[[labelnote:Example]]Focus Energy, for example ''lowered'' your crit chance instead of increasing it.[[/labelnote]], and [[GameBreaker Psychic-types]] were immune to Ghost-type attacks [[FakeBalance (not that it mattered anyway since the only damaging Ghost attack had one of the lowest Base Damages in the game)]].
** While not nearly as bugged as the Generation I games, ''[[VideoGame/PokemonGoldAndSilver Gold/Silver/Crystal]]'' have glitches as well, such as the Celebi egg glitch and the Johto guard glitch. Furthermore, even without the Johto guard glitch (which uses the product of another glitch to bypass the protection against bringing Generation II exclusive moves or Pokémon into the time capsule), the methods used to prevent Generation II exclusives from being sent to Generation I proved incomplete, which is likely why all future intergenerational Pokémon transfer methods have been one-way, going from the older generation to the newer one.[[note]]If a Pokémon evolves at a level at which it would normally learn a move in its evolved form, it tries to learn that move immediately upon evolution. If one were to trade a level 16 or 34 Graveler, level 13 Haunter, level 34 or 43 Machoke, or level 32 Kadabra from a Generation I game to a Generation II game, it would evolve and then try to learn Magnitude, Rollout, Mean Look, Vital Throw, Cross Chop, and Future Sight, respectively. The newly evolved Golem/Gengar/Machamp/Alakazam could then be traded back to the Generation I game, whereupon its new move would become a glitch move. Many glitch moves crash the game when used, though, and even those that don't are rarely useful. Also, where are you supposed to get a Graveler or Haunter with a level in the teens?[[/note]]
** ''VideoGame/PokemonDiamondAndPearl'', while largely free of such glitches, are infamous for their sluggish frame rate. The sister version ''Platinum'' ends up feeling like the finished product.
* ''VideoGame/SoulCalibur: Broken Destiny'' for the PSP was obviously rushed out for a Summer Holiday release. It is supposed to be a port of ''Soul Calibur IV'' with extra characters and modes... but to get it out in time, there is no story mode or proper arcade mode. The options mode doesn't let you adjust the difficulty or number of rounds, the create-a-character mode is very lacking, and there is no money system or internet play. The game's makers lampshade this by saying that it's a 'simpler ''[=SoulCalibur=]'' game for novice players'. ''VideoGame/{{Tekken}}: Dark Resurrection'', which came out several years before, is not lacking in any of the modes its home version offers, and thus, Broken Destiny could have been much better.
* Franchise/ShinMegamiTensei's ''VideoGame/DevilSurvivor''
** The original has a few lines left in Japanese. Considering how many lines there are, it's possible that the beta testers couldn't find them all... except that one of the lines has to be seen in order to get '''five''' of the six MultipleEndings. Also, one of the skill descriptions is BlatantLies, being the exact opposite of what the skill really does.
** The UpdatedRerelease ''Devil Survivor Overclocked'' could actually be considered ''worse'' than the original. Lag is everywhere, and grinding is bad when the game's form of InexplicableTreasureChests can randomly freeze your game.
* While fun to play, the two ''Franchise/PrinceOfPersia'' sidescrollers for the UsefulNotes/NintendoDS (''The Fallen King'' and ''[[VideoGame/PrinceOfPersiaTheForgottenSands The Forgotten Sands]]'') are so glitchy and unpolished that it's obvious they were rush jobs. The {{Boss Battle}}s are particularly embarrassing.
* While it's playable; ''VideoGame/TalesOfTheTempest'' feels like this. It seems almost like it was an attempt to get used to the relatively new (at the time) DS hardware. Compare ''VideoGame/TalesOfTheTempest'' to even ''VideoGame/TalesOfInnocence'' and you can notice a pretty big difference between the two (in areas outside of [[SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic soundtracks]]).
* The DLC for the North American version of ''VideoGame/{{Disgaea 2|CursedMemories}}: Dark Hero Days'' had so many bugs and glitches that the developers actually had to pull them from PSN so they could work on fixing them. When first released, they had no voice, but random noises played whenever the characters would say something during battle, such as menu scrolling and selecting sounds, and their attacks were completely messed up in area and damage (to the point that Sapphire's Ultimate move did reverse damage, thus healing enemies). The DLC was later put on back on sale with the attack glitches fixed, but the random noises still play up when they are fighting.
* ''[[VideoGame/CallOfDutyBlackOps2 Call of Duty: Black Ops: Declassified]]'' for the UsefulNotes/PlayStationVita. The graphics aren't up to PS Vita standards. The enemy AI is abysmal. The single-player campaign can be finished in less than an hour. Multiplayer is very hard to get working properly, and the maps are small. Oh, and Nazi Zombies is conspicuously absent.
* While ''VideoGame/SandsOfDestruction'' is very playable, it's still got a few issues. Most of them are purely graphical and result in characters who [[OffModel are not quite the color they should be]] - note, for example, that [[http://dsmedia.ign.com/ds/image/article/106/1062013/sands-of-destruction-20100119054610026.jpg Morte's hair isn't the same color between her sprite and portrait]] (is it ''that'' difficult to use the eyedropper in Photoshop and make sure your palettes are consistent?). The game also has a ridiculous number of RandomEncounters; the rate was supposedly adjusted for the American release, but it's still pretty high. And while the story is perfectly serviceable, it lacks a certain amount of polish, particularly when compared to the staff's previous ''VideoGame/{{Xenogears}}''.
* ''VideoGame/{{Action 52}}'' was, at its most generous, an obvious ''alpha''. In fact, it was pure incompetence. For example, while any competent NES game would switch levels by swapping out the bank that holds the level data, ''Cheetahmen'' (and other ''Action 52'' games with more than one level) accomplished it by swapping out the entire PRG ROM. The net result is that every level is in fact a different ''game'', which is why bugs can occur in some levels but not in others, why each Cheetahman's level set has different sound effects, animations, etc., and why the end result cost $200. Some of the different levels in games have the same level number.
* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyI'' has so many features that literally do not work (such as elemental swords that ''don't'' get any ElementalRockPaperScissors bonuses, or spells that never take effect) that it's hard to find something that ''does'' work as intended[[note]]Mercifully, every EventFlag seems to be unbugged, so as not to render the game {{Unwinnable}}[[/note]].
* The NES version of ''VideoGame/{{Strider}}'' looks like a late beta, due to things like uneven collisions, odd borders for platforms and walls, enemies and [=NPCs=] that appear and disappear at weird times or don't disappear when they should, and a poor translation. The third-to-last boss does not disappear or change in any way after his defeat, and the final boss simply does not appear in his room for several seconds. When he does, he just pops into the middle of the room as if by a glitch. The first Data Disk you analyze unlocks Australia as a stage, even though the actual clue in the disk refers to the location of the Attack Boots you get at China. Not only that, there's no reason to go Australia until very late in the game (it's the final area you need to explore before visiting the Red Dragon). Further credence to this theory is the fact that the Japanese version was canceled before the release of the arcade version, even though a [[ComicBookAdaptation tie-in manga adaptation]] was already published for it.
[[folder:Master System]]
* The [[http://segaretro.org/Battletoads_in_Battlemaniacs port]] of ''[[VideoGame/{{Battletoads}} Battletoads in Battlemaniacs]]'' for the UsefulNotes/SegaMasterSystem, which only saw release in Brazil but was intended to be released in Europe as well. The most obvious signs of the unfinished port are the missing, misplaced, and incomplete cutscenes and music.
[[folder:Super NES]]
* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVI'' may be considered one of the greatest video games of all time, but it's hard to ignore the fact that it's ''incredibly'' buggy and unbalanced. Infamously, [[http://masterzed.cavesofnarshe.com/GameDocs/ff3sktch.txt messing with Sketch]] in version 1.0 of the SNES version of the game (1.1 fixed it) can load the inventory with tons of items, cause graphical errors or freezing, or ''erase save data'', with battles with the Intangir being particularly unpredictable. On emulators, the bug can crash the emulator and cause problems that save states can't fix, requiring the ROM to be reloaded or the game reset. In terms of less severe issues, the evade stat does absolutely nothing and the battle speed option in the settings only affects ''enemy'' speed, which makes the game substantially easier or harder if the player changes it. And that's just the start.
* ''VideoGame/MakaMaka'': An obscure Japanese-exclusive RPG had several obviously unfinished parts and many bugs, some of which are [[GameBreaker game breaking]]. In fact, word has it that the game was released in its prototype form due to time constraints.
* ''VideoGame/LufiaIIRiseOfTheSinistrals'': The Dual Blade Shrine is garbled in the North American version, making navigation through the dungeon difficult. There are also places where dungeon names are untranslated, with the removal of the Japanese font resulting in these being rendered as gibberish, and enemies bear Engrish names such as "Hidora" and "Gorem".
* ''VideoGame/StarOcean1'': The original SFC version came with several crashing bugs, an item creation system whose success rate in some circumstances was so low it almost wasn't worth trying, items that were obviously meant to exist (and referenced in places) but couldn't be found, and a final dungeon that (story-wise) came out of nowhere on a planet you couldn't explore. The enhanced remake for the PSP corrected most of these issues.
* ''Super VideoGame/DoubleDragon'', which was ChristmasRushed in North America by its publisher Tradewest. It's impossible to catch your own [[PrecisionGuidedBoomerang boomerangs]], knives do far too much damage, and you can't switch weapons once you pick one up. The Japanese version, ''Return of Double Dragon'', which came out a few months later, is more complete than the American version (it even has an additional level, albeit a rather glitchy unfinished one), but is obviously far from finished (the game still lacks any sort of plot [[AWinnerIsYou or even a proper ending]]).
[[folder:Genesis/Sega CD]]
* ''Annet Futatabi'' (''Annet Again''): A somewhat obscure Japanese Sega Mega CD sequel to the Genesis semi-classic ''VideoGame/ElViento'' that was released in a very unfinished state. The protagonist's flashy spells are all unfinished, usually resulting in just a single animation frame blinking in and out. Basic combat controls work correctly, but enemies swarm you any time you get knocked down, effectively making getting up an impossibility. Enemies and even bosses will occasionally wander off screen and not return for anywhere between 1-5 minutes... or never, making the game randomly unwinnable. It is little surprise that the game was never released outside Japan.
* ''VideoGame/JurassicPark'': While not buggy, this game was released in a very unfinished state. Velociraptors, for instance, were the scariest and deadliest dinosaurs in the film, but here became slow, lumbering idiots who basically farted about the levels waiting to get shot, and the mighty T. rex can be thwarted as easily as chucking a single grenade at her and strolling by as she's stunned. Two things support the theory that it was a rushed project: the first being that the actual beta ROM is almost identical to the finished product, and the second is that developer Blue Sky software later released a loose sequel ''VideoGame/JurassicParkRampageEdition'' which ratcheted up the action and made all the dinosaurs significantly more dangerous enemies (for instance, Velociraptor encounters are now downright terrifying because of their aggressiveness, and the T. rex still only appears from the shoulders up, but now she ''chases you''). While the original was still an okay game, it's pretty obvious that ''Rampage Edition'' was the version Blue Sky meant to make the first time.
* ''[[VideoGame/Sonic3AndKnuckles Sonic the Hedgehog 3]]'': The initial release, while nowhere near as bad as other examples on this page, did have a load of glitches (such as getting stuck in the walls in Carnival Night Zone), but most of these were fixed when locked onto ''Sonic & Knuckles''.
** The game, despite its excellent regard in the community, is very clearly rushed (and when the game was explicitly divided into two parts so it could meet the deadline, that should be obvious). Particularly, pairing Sonic and Tails together and then using a second controller to have Tails lift Sonic while he's looking up can cause an almost innumerable amount of glitches and odd effects (this could easily have been solved by having the screen re-center when Tails is lifting Sonic, but instead it stays in the same state as when Sonic is looking up, which can cause collision errors with things that are just offscreen).
** A number of other glitches, however, are only possible ''in'' the locked-on game--namely, those revolving around the Hyper Sonic transformation unlocked after upgrading all seven Chaos Emeralds to Super Emeralds. Hyper Sonic moves insanely fast and can do a double jump similar to that of the Lightning Shield, which put together can cause enough speed to actually briefly wind up offscreen--resulting in the same collision errors as mentioned above with Tails, especially if the offscreen barrier is to the left rather than the right. (Though it's still possible to phase past some barriers on the right side.) Generally, this means that it's usually possible for Sonic to reach parts of levels that were only meant to be accessed with Knuckles; the opposite is sometimes true, but usually more convoluted. On one particular level, however, an oversight made it possible to reach Sonic's boss arena with Knuckles without any glitching at all if you're a skilled enough gamer.
[[folder:[=PlayStation=]/Nintendo 64/Sega Saturn]]
* ''[[VideoGame/{{Bubsy}} Bubsy 3D]]'' for the PS1 hit the PolygonCeiling hard because of this; it was given [[ChristmasRushed such a rushed development cycle]], that it only got a barely finished ''alpha'' done that was shoved out the door in order [[FollowTheLeader to play catch up to]] VideoGame/SuperMario64. The result was a clunky to play, sloppy looking and all around embarrassing rush job that was critically panned, tanked at retail, [[FranchiseKiller and killed the franchise dead.]]
* ''VideoGame/MegaManX6'' isn't glitchy or unplayable, but it's painfully obvious during a playthrough that the game was rushed out in ten months. Many enemy sprites and music tracks are lazily recycled from previous entries (curiously, the latter tracks are missing from the sound test), and the newer sprites are much choppier in motion than previous games. The level design ranges from barren and bland to very sloppy and uneven, and the games main source of challenge is [[FakeDifficulty cheap difficulty tricks]]--Blaze Heatnik's stage is most notorious for it, since it's almost impossible to hit certain weak points of the Nightmare Snakes except in very awkward spots and times, and enemy and reploid placements tend to be just as sloppy (and in some cases, unfairly difficult to avoid or reach). Plus, it's extremely hard to play through the game as unarmored X, because the game is practically designed to be played with the Falcon Armor and the upgrades. On top of all that, there are parts of the game that are even harder or ''literally impossible'' to complete without finding a specific part or armor (e.g. the Dash part which makes it possible to dodge the Nightmare Mothers attacks, the armor you need to build to even get past the first part of Gate's Lab), the former of which can be permanently lost if you don't rescue its specific reploid, and [[GuideDangIt the game never instructs you to find them beforehand]]--It's clear that the game wasn't even properly playtested! On top of that, the English localization was rushed out so fast, that the translation is extremely sloppy, and the original Japanese voice tracks were left intact.
* ''VideoGame/SpaceStationSiliconValley'' famously shipped with no collision detection enabled on one of the souvenir objects, making it impossible to pick up. Since you had to get OneHundredPercentCompletion to unlock the bonus stage, this actually makes the game UnwinnableByMistake if you want the TrueEnding.
* The North American release of ''VideoGame/SuikodenII'' has several places where dialogue simply ''wasn't translated at all''. And because Konami also removed the Japanese font, the result is characters who speak [[http://www.rpgamer.com/games/suiko/suik2/reviews/suik2strev1.html indecipherable gibberish]] (see the second screenshot), not unlike the ''Lufia II'' example in the SNES section. The German version also has untranslated dialogue, like Lorelei, Gordon, and almost the entire Rokkaku Village speaking French.
* The N64 port of ''VideoGame/IndianaJonesAndTheInfernalMachine'' was so full of {{Game Breaking Bug}}s that it was only released as a Blockbuster rental (or a direct purchase from Creator/LucasArts). One of the most memorable glitches had to be the fact that in one level, when you tried to drop into a cave since access seemed impossible, when Indy fell in the water and you tried to resurface, he just swam through the air. Effective for getting in the cave, but he just drowned.
* ''VideoGame/StarOceanTheSecondStory'' has a game crasher that would "randomly" occur after completing a battle, the overworld/dungeon screen would fail to load, leaving just a black screen and no music, forcing a reset. The game crashes if you push any button while the screen is black. It's not black for long, but if you happen to do it by accident, especially in the [[BonusDungeon Cave of Trials]], it'll be a hard moment. Furthermore, when leveling up, Claude sometimes says "Crawd has advanced forward!", with Crawd being his Japanese name, an indicator the voicework was done before the script was translated, and Lena's voice clip for the Tractor Beam spell remains in Japanese.
* ''VideoGame/{{Superman 64}}'' has insane glitches, horrible controls, awkward animations, a very short draw distance, largely nondescript textures, a telling lack of content (well, unless overuse of PassThroughTheRings counts as content), [[DevelopmentHell two years in development and not much to show for it]]... it's basically unrefined in nearly every aspect. Where it gets ''really'' interesting is the actual beta release was '''better''' than the finished product... apparently due to ExecutiveMeddling, the company was forced to change a lot, as they began to run out of time....
* ''[[Wrestling/WWESmackDown WWF Smackdown!]]'' for the PS1 is clearly an Obvious Beta of ''WWF Smackdown! 2: Know Your Role''. They were both made in the same year and built on the same engine, with many things being left over from the first game in the second. The oddness about the first game is as follows:
** The menu descriptions are written in sloppy English, including a Create a PPV mode called 'Match Making'.
** The season mode is limited: Hardly any backstage story, no feuds, the ability to skip matches, and the ability to be eligible for any title at the same time with little reason.
** The create a character mode is limited with the only parts you can select being head, upper body and lower body. In the sequel, the same parts return as 'standard' parts, individual parts now are under 'advanced'.
** Instead of unlocking characters, you unlock their parts.
* The original copies of ''VideoGame/SpyroYearOfTheDragon'' were very glitchy due to [[ChristmasRushed being rushed for release]] [[MeaningfulReleaseDate before the Year of the Dragon ended]]. The Greatest Hits and Platinum releases fixed these problems and this game is regarded by many as one of the best games released on the UsefulNotes/PlayStation, but the [=PlayStation=] Network version is based on the glitchy version.
* The [=PlayStation=] version of ''VideoGame/TacticsOgre'' has a major bug: Sometimes your save file will fail to load.
* In the American version of ''VideoGame/ArcTheLad II'', completing the pyramid dungeon takes the player back to the nearby town, where all character sprites, including that representing the player's party, are invisible, with only their shadows showing. Exiting the town will cause an error message to pop up, but the game continues normally afterward.
* The second disc of ''VideoGame/{{Xenogears}}'' feels this way, given the altered method of storytelling and lack of access to the overworld until late in the disc.
* In a subversion, the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_Analog_Controller Dual Analog Controller]] has quite the feature set over the later released [=DualShock=] (which may even make it better than the [=DualShock=]). However, it was probably a rushed release to compete with the UsefulNotes/Nintendo64 and its Rumble Pak, since later hardware doesn't know what to do with it.
* ''Formula 1 '98'' on the [=PlayStation=] was developed in six months by a new developer, Visual Science, after Creator/BizarreCreations (and the intended replacement, Reflections) opted not to work on the sequel to the very popular ''Formula 1 '97''. Whilst the Arcade mode is somewhat polished and playable, Grand Prix mode (which most people would have been buying the game to play) was an unfinished, buggy mess. Amongst the many problems were cars turning into what resembled Atari 2600-style Pole Position cars when too many of them were on screen, a motion captured pit crew which did nothing but crouch beside the car for a few seconds, very poor handling, almost non-existant crash physics (you would simply stop on the spot with the other car getting a bump-boost), distorted commentary, and a game-breaking bug in which you would be disqualified after making a pit-stop if you chose to run with the flags on. Amazingly, the same developer was recruited by EA to make the console versions of their ''F1'' series and were able to prove that with a little more time ('98 had been rushed out to coincide with the final race that season) they could make a decent racing game.
* ''VideoGame/SonicR'': While there aren't a lot of obvious glitches, other elements suggest that that the developers could have used a little more time to work on it. [[ItsShortSoItSucks There are only five race courses]], the controls handle poorly, and the racers are poorly balanced. Sega clearly ChristmasRushed it in a desperate attempt to give the UsefulNotes/SegaSaturn a KillerApp for the 1997 holiday season, and it backfired horribly, seeing as the game ([[SoundtrackDissonance especially its music]]) has become SnarkBait for Sonic fans.
** There is also a bug in the Saturn version of the game that got corrected in later releases that creates an odd example of FakeLongevity: if you complete a course with the Chaos Emeralds, all the Sonic medallions, ''and'' finish first (which is required to hold onto the Chaos Emeralds after the race ends), you go onto fight the course boss as usual but when that race is over, it negates the first place victory you won in the original race and you can't keep the Chaos Emerald(s) you collected. Thus you have to redo the course to get the Emeralds (meaning there's no point in trying to do both things because they're mutually exclusive). The PC version of the game rectified this and since the ''Gems Collection'' version is an emulation of that one, it doesn't have the problem either (the PC version also adds seasonal effects to the tracks that aren't present in the Saturn version).
* ''Franchise/TombRaider'':
** ''VideoGame/TombRaiderAngelOfDarkness'' was released in an infamously unfinished state and garnered many comments from reviewers along the lines of "it might be good when it's finished". Problems included the inability to dual-wield weapons despite Lara's twin holsters, the sea monster with an untextured belly, Lara's ability to beat a timed door puzzle without the allegedly necessary jumping upgrade, and Lara's clothes miraculously changing themselves.
** While far more solid than ''Angel'' (outside the [[PortingDisaster PS2 version]]), ''VideoGame/TombRaiderUnderworld'' is also quite buggy, with various rough edges and some {{Gamebreaking Bug}}s.
* ''VideoGame/SpyroEnterTheDragonfly''. You can swim in the air if you get through a certain gap in the net in a pond, allowing you to ''swim'' to later levels and do the boss battle early. If you're directly above or below something but actually far away from it, it sounds close. Spyro sometimes freezes and slides around like he's ice-skating. Visual effects go wrong a lot. Sometimes you arrive in a level and have to wait for it to appear. [=NPCs=] twitch and bounce like spastic Jell-O molds for no good reason. Sometimes the dang thing just freezes. When you press "Look", occasionally Spyro would headbutt instead of looking. There are copious spelling errors. [[GameBreakingBug The gateway to the second world sometimes doesn't work]].
** ''[[VideoGame/SpyroAHerosTail A Hero's Tail]]'' on [=PS2=] was glitchy and the camera sucked, but it wasn't as completely disgraceful as ''Enter the Dragonfly''.
* Creator/NipponIchi also ran into this problem with the US version of ''VideoGame/ArTonelicoIIMelodyOfMetafalica'', which has a GameBreakingBug around the endgame, a badly translated fourth Cosmosphere, and even spots where there's still kanji floating around.
* ''VideoGame/GrandiaIII'' is a case of this. The whole bit about airplanes and flying that the game makes a big deal about early on in the story is almost completely abandoned once you actually get a plane, the second disc is very rushed, and one of the main villains is PutOnABus, never to be seen again.
* ''VideoGame/{{Vexx}}'' is complete from a gameplay perspective, and everything works. But the story is rather skeletal (with tons of hints that it was supposed to be much grander), a number of power-ups/game aspects pop up all of once and are never referenced again, and certain things in the main game hint at a multiplayer mode that simply never happened.
* The Dreamcast port of ''VideoGame/SlaveZero'', which was one of the few games released in the first year of the system. All of the ingame music is removed with only the intro and ending themes remaining, the menus in languages other than English are glitched and not fully translated, the framerate is far lower than the PC version and dips inexplicably during the ''cutscenes'' and the game is filled with all manner of bizarre bugs, such as falling infinitely off a BottomlessPit or [[GoodBadBugs getting killed by the checkpoint transition and becoming invincible as a result]]. Superior PC-to-Dreamcast ports showed Infogrames plainly didn't care and rushed the game to get a quick buck.
* The Japanese release for ''VideoGame/TalesOfTheAbyss'' was actually an Obvious Beta. There were several items that were DummiedOut (Mystic Artes and cut-ins that weren't accessible in-game, a potential part in which '''Van''' was playable) as well as several bad bugs (Tear and Jade freezing while casting in overlimit) and plenty of {{Good Bad Bug}}s (being able to go ''anywhere'' on the world map, perfect because there are parts that can be LostForever). What appears to be a RegionalBonus for North America was actually more of a completion, despite several bugs that weren't removed (Luke has an extension to his Mystic Arte if Ion is in the party; Guy and Natalia have two Mystic Artes; Fortunes Arc has an extension; the final boss has a second Mystic Arte; Nebilim had around '''seven''' Mystic Artes added; the cameo bosses not only have their cut-ins, but Philia and Reid actually had two).
* ''VideoGame/CrashTwinsanity'': There are certain cinematics in the game that lack appropriate sound effects (in a couple cases, music), which makes it seem like parts of the game were rushed before release... and they very well ''were'', considering [[WhatCouldHaveBeen the sheer amount of cut content]] that one of the developers of the game [[http://crashmania.net/?menu=ts&page=concepts-1 decided to share on a Crash forum]]....
--> You also have the cutscenes and world layout. After you complete certain cutscenes and the stages with it, you go back to the world map, giving you some kind of free roaming until the next cutscene continues the game. Although this free roaming zone tends to be really linear, you could go back to previous part of the world map, even though you were not meant to do so. Literally. Doing so means that all the cutscenes and stages get reset, meaning that you would have to play all of them again until you reached the point where you screwed up. The game just treats you as it was your first time reaching each zone. This can be seen after you complete Cavern Catastrophe, where you can find a tunnel that will get you back to N.Sanity Island.
* It's hard to tell if ''VideoGame/DrakeOfThe99Dragons'' was ever beta tested at all, or if it just sucked. If ''anyone'' had played it before release, it would have been obvious that the controls were absolutely miserable and impossible to use.
* ''VideoGame/RedNinjaEndOfHonor'', or ''Kurenai Ninja: Kekka no Mai'' (Dance of Blood) in Japan by Vivendi Universal Games. On paper, it is very much a potential Tenchu-killer, with its wire-based action, greater emphasis on platforming and maneuvers, Seduction mechanic, and artwork done by D.K who later did the art for ''VideoGame/{{NieR}}''. On implementation, the game, while not exactly buggy, is completely unrefined. The wire combat, despite having a versatile potential, is often too situational (for a ''main weapon'', being situational is not good). Camera controls were atrocious, and poor camera with platforming is a recipe for disaster. Level designs can only be described as malicious, relying too much on BottomlessPits and other frustrating design choices. Platforming elements were consequently also harsh, with one level segment entirely relying on it. Items were often of no importance or too much importance, with no happy medium in-between. While the controls work for most times, the "wall run" mechanic relies on dashing, which is accomplished by ''pressing forward long enough''. In a stealth game that rewards precision, that is a very vague input design, causing tremendous frustration. Despite controlling a lethal MsFanservice, the vaunted Seduction mechanic is too randomly determined to be of any practical use. The use of CG animation in the ending is downright atrocious, and the soundtrack is very much below-par. The most griping point is that, with a few more playtesting and refinement, the game could have been much better, especially with a camera fix.
* The Korean release of ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaFourSwordsAdventures'' includes the elusive Navi Trackers mode. This mode is an Obvious Beta in the Korean release -- ''nothing'' is translated even though the rest of the game is. Even after almost six years of waiting (FSA was originally released in 2004 in other regions and in Korea in ''2010''), Koreans still don't get Navi Trackers in their own language.
** Even the game packaging is an Obvious Beta. Although the game's logo is translated on the title screen, the logo on the outer box is not, despite the fact that the rest of the outer box is translated. The inner box (containing the game disc) the game manual, and even the game disc itself (containing the Korean edition) aren't translated -- they seem to be surplus from unsold Japanese editions. The inner box even has a CERO rating instead of a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Rating_Board Game Rating Board]] rating. At least the game software itself is in Korean....
* The European version of ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaTheMinishCap'' appears to be based on an earlier, less polished build than every other version of the game, as noted on [[https://tcrf.net/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_The_Minish_Cap The Cutting Room Floor]]. For example, there are bugs that don't exist in the Japanese or North American versions (such as one Kinstone Fusion becoming unintentionally LostForever), features missing (such as the shop's Bomb Bag upgrade), and even a reference to the Fire Rod, an item that only exists in DummiedOut form (the figurine for Ice Wizzrobes says to use the Fire Rod on them in that version). The North American version, which came out after the European and Japanese releases, seems to be based directly on the final Japanese release (for example, the text saying to use the Fire Rod on Ice Wizzrobes now simply says to use fire).
* The rushed PAL release of ''Metropolis Street Racer'' for the Dreamcast was riddled with game-breaking, save-corrupting bugs. Sega quickly recalled it, but the second version was still somewhat buggy. The third PAL release, as well as the NTSC release, were more solid.
* ''VideoGame/DualHearts'' feels this way at times, given the constant fuzziness of one world's graphics and the choppiness of the storybook stage.
* ''VideoGame/SensibleSoccer 2006'' was rushed through development so that its release could coincide with the World Cup. The many glitches included teleporting goalkeepers and frequent crashes.
* The original, [=PS2=] North American version of ''VideoGame/{{ICO}}''. Yorda's AI is almost entirely unresponsive, puzzles were completely different and too easy, and several bonuses were missing. Fortunately, the HD version released for [=PS3=] in NA is based on the more polished Japanese/PAL version.
* Even ''systems'' often count as an Obvious Beta. Consoles and handhelds, especially the latter, often have an UpdatedRerelease/updated model released a couple years later that addresses several bugs/design quirks. This can sometimes lead to the original models seeming a bit [[SeinfeldIsUnfunny odd to play]] after you got spoiled by the newer ones. The UsefulNotes/SegaGenesis alone had a ''lot'' of models (some of the later ones came with the add-ons built in) and Nintendo's handheld systems generally have at least two models.
** The UsefulNotes/GameBoyAdvance had gone through many redesigns, many of which were fixes for obvious flaws in older versions. The original GBA had no form of lighting on the screen, which meant playing without an adequate light source was a huge hassle. The GBA SP fixed the lighting issue by having a frontlight and the handheld got redesigned by being smaller, having a flip screen, and having a rechargeable battery. The GBA SP got another redesign by making the frontlight into a backlight instead so the colors looked more vibrant instead of washed-out.
* Many cell phone models often fall into this trope, considering how many updated models come around that improve bugs and complaints about the previous models.\\
Nokia's 3600/3650, for one, was the butt of numerous complaints due to its unique circular keypad layout. Some people actually found the keypad easier to use, though. Nevertheless, an updated variant of the phone, the 3620 (3660 for the Eurasian market) was released with a conventional layout, and a 16-bit, 65K-color screen compared to the 3600's 4096-color display.
* The Sony PSP models, although the PSP Go was often considered a downgrade by fans -- and it's also an Obvious Beta for the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, affectionately dubbed the [=PlayStation=] Phone.
* The infamous toilet bowl-shaped Atari Jaguar CD addon, which, due to faulty connections, rarely worked at all.
--> '''[[WebVideo/TheSpoonyExperiment Spoony]] (as Dr. Insano), who struggled to get one working to review a game''': [N]ot only is it prone to hardware failures, it's prone to about five different ways it can fail. It can fail if [it] isn't perfectly placed on the [Jaguar]. It can fail if the contacts aren't clean. It can fail if the Memory Track cartridge isn't perfectly set, and it can easily fail because the laser itself or the motor mechanism are defective, and they often are, and in [Spoony's] case, it would often fail because the lid is so poorly designed that, when closed, it actually closes too tightly and mashes the CD against the inside of the drive, preventing it from spinning, and that could easily cause additional internal damage[...E]ven when I did get it to work [it] still froze all the time, and I do mean ''all the damn time!''
** When the same was attempted by WebVideo/TheAngryVideoGameNerd, he couldn't get it working either, and so handed off his Jaguar and CD addon to his repairman Richard [=DaLuz=], creator of the [=NinToaster=] and Super Genintari (a NES, Super NES, Genesis, and Atari 2600 in the same box). It seemed like if anyone had the skill set to get such things working, it would be him. Even after he soldered the CD addon to the console, thus eliminating any possibility of a connection problem, it refused to work.
* Early adopters of the UsefulNotes/{{Xbox 360}} found themselves acting as beta testers for the machine's cooling system, then as beta testers for the various fixes for this. Depending on who you believe and which motherboard variants you include, the failure rate within three years was anywhere between 30 and 70%, with many customers requiring multiple replacements. These issues were only finally fixed[[labelnote:*]]although die shrinks and the ability to install disc images--avoiding the extra heat, wear, and noise from the 12x DVD drive spinning constantly at full speed--helped, they couldn't solve the fundamentally flawed cooling model of pushing hot air out from a rear panel which the air vents had to share with various AV connectors[[/labelnote]] with the release of the slim redesign ''five years'' after the original launch.
* OCZ's "Agility 3" series of SSD hard drives featured a controller that was prone to failure, which was fixed in the next generation.
* AMD's "Bulldozer" series of [=CPUs=], known as the FX series, serve as an example. AMD introduced a new process with the Bulldozer, which involved pairing every two integer cores with a single floating-point core, and using an extended pipeline for instruction execution in order to ramp up the clock speed (a technique known as "hyperpipelining", which Intel had previously experimented with in the Pentium 4 and Pentium D processors). Unfortunately, these new techniques failed to boost the new chip to Intel's performance standards, and in some applications, they actually performed worse than AMD's previous-generation Phenom II chips (mostly due to the large penalty for branch prediction failures introduced by the extended pipeline).[[note]]It's worth noting that Intel had the exact same issue with the P4, and that's the issue that allowed AMD to elevate themselves from a second-tier chipmaker to genuine competition for Intel[[/note]] The second generation core developed with this process, "Piledriver", may not have quite caught up to Intel's performance levels, but it did fix many of the mistakes of Bulldozer and represents an objective improvement over AMD's older chips.
* The [[http://www.nngroup.com/articles/kindle-fire-usability-findings/ first version]] of Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet. It had a slow screen refresh rate; the device was too heavy to hold comfortably for any length of time; the web browser was clunky at best; and items on the screen were so small it was easy to accidentally select something you didn't want, to the point that one could struggle to log onto a website with ''two text fields and a button''.
* When NVIDIA released the [=GeForce 8=] series and [=ATi=] released the Radeon X2000 series, there was some excitement over the new architecture topology. Except in both cases, only the flagship, high-end card and the one below it performed convincingly well against the previous generation. Everything below it couldn't really perform any better than previous generation cards that dropped to a similar price value. It took another spin of the GPU to get it right, which NVIDIA did at least with the well remembered G92 GPU debuted as the [=GeForce=] 8800GT and 8800GTS 512MB. [=ATi's=] next generation, the HD 3000 series, also pulled off a similar feat.
** When the [=GeForce=] 400 series was released, the high end card, the GTX 480, ran really hot, loud, and it was actually defective from a manufacturing standpoint, containing about 15 of the 16 shader clusters from the original design. In the next generation, the GTX 580 was a fully implemented version of the GPU design and this time had a better cooling solution.
** While not as bad, NVIDIA's [=GeForce=] 600 series was also "release defective chip first, release fully implemented when refined later". The GTX 680 (which was a good performer in its own right) is a defective version of the later released GTX Titan.
** [[InvokedTrope Invoked]] with the [=GeForce GTX 750 Ti=], which is based on NVIDIA's upcoming Maxwell architecture. Rather than wait for the new 22 nm process to be refined for full scale production, NVIDIA built the GPU using the tried and true 28 nm process. This way, any design issues either on the hardware or software side can be stamped out when the 22 nm version (and presumably the [=GeForce 800=] series) is ready to go.
* The Atari 5200 itself, especially its controller, designed by someone who had never played a video game before. The controller was the first to feature a pause button and the analog joystick was ahead of its time, but it didn't center itself and was prone to breakage. Working controllers are incredibly rare in the wild, though you can buy a special mod kit that makes the controller much more reliable if you're willing to shell out big bucks for it.\\\
Rumors are that, despite knowing about its numerous flaws, a senior engineer at Atari mandated the use of the 5200 controller [[MoneyDearBoy because he owned the patent for it and would collect royalties for each one sold]].
* According to its creator Gunpei Yokoi, the UsefulNotes/VirtualBoy was only a proof-of-concept prototype when Nintendo halted its development because they wanted to devote all of their hardware development resources to the then-upcoming Nintendo 64. However, rather than scrapping the project entirely like they should have done, they released the Virtual Boy as-is, ensuring its place in history as the worst piece of hardware Nintendo has ever made.
* Early Color Dreams games cartridges may count, as they tried to get games to work by bypassing the lockout chip that was present in the NES. Earlier models were prone to render the games unwinnable, give it glitchy textures, hardly controllable etc. Later models worked much better.
[[folder: Software]]
* This was how many computer professionals who worked with mainframe and minicomputer operating systems like VMS saw UsefulNotes/{{UNIX}} in TheSeventies and TheEighties. (It was originally a research project designed for internal use, after all.) Unix was a much simpler system back then. ''[[http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/weise/unix-haters.html The Unix Hater's Handbook]]'' gives a good overview of many of the complaints. A lot of BSD people see Linux as an Obvious Beta today.
* vBulletin 5. Indeed, for supposedly 'beta' software, it's buggy as heck, lacking in at least 50% of the features found in the last version yet still being sold for near 300 dollars. Oh wait, the whole thing won't work without [=JavaScript=]. And it changes every single URL on a website that upgrades to it, causing them to lose half their search engine rankings. For a supposed beta, it's more like an Obvious Alpha being sold at full price.
* Microsoft have a bad reputation for this; Vista is the most notorious and damaging example but it stretches back at least as far as Windows 95. The plug and play functionality was nicknamed "plug and pray" because it was that unreliable. To their credit, it's usually sorted out after the first few months, but upgrading to the new OS before at least Service Pack 1 is a bit of a gamble.
* Microsoft Word 6.0 for Mac. Despite Word for Mac 5.0 being considered one of the best word processors of all time, Microsoft decided that it wanted the next Mac version of Word to share the same code-base as the Windows one, and thus they abandoned all traces for 5.0 in favor of a direct port from Windows. Not only did this alter the user interface into something that felt very out-of-place in Mac OS, it also produced a PortingDisaster that was so buggy, slow, and unstable that the Windows version ran faster ''under emulation''.
* The non-LTS versions of Ubuntu are notorious for this, as Canonical tends to make major changes without adequate testing. Canonical seems to position the non-LTS versions as public betas, directing most people to install the LTS versions on the Ubuntu download page.
* The Virtual Boy Emulator [=WiirtualBoy=] was plagued with slow frame rate, inaccurate sound, and graphical corruption with frameskip (which is used to bypass the slow frame rate). [=Raz0red=], the emulator's author, less than ''four months'' later, released the much-improved [=WiiMednafen=], which emulates NES, Game Boy, GBC, GBA, UsefulNotes/SegaMasterSystem, Game Gear, PC Engine, PC-FX, Lynx, UsefulNotes/WonderSwan, [=WonderSwan=] Color, UsefulNotes/NeoGeoPocket, NGP Color, and Virtual Boy. [=WiirtualBoy=] was removed from the Homebrew Channel shortly after.
* Canon's first DSLR with video recording, the EOS 5D Mark II, hit the market with a limited video feature set. There was no manual control of the lens aperture or shutter speed other than an "exposure lock" button that set the exposure when it looked about right. The video recorded 30 frames per second with no option for the common drop-frame rate of 29.97 or the film-like 23.98. The video files also had a tendency to come out of the camera significantly brighter than they looked on the LCD, but leveled out if converted to another format. Canon updated the firmware over the next few months, adding full exposure control, 23.98 and 29.97 frame rates, audio level control, and correcting exposure inconsistencies.
* Recent drivers for Nvidia [=GeForce GPUs,=] particularly the 364.xx releases, were considered by some PC gamers as this. [[https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/49cy4i/new_36447_driver_released_with_vulkan_support_in/ This thread]] on /r/nvidia, along with [[http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1194687&page=3 a few]] [[https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/921332/geforce-drivers/official-364-47-game-ready-whql-display-driver-feedback-thread-released-3-7-16-/25/ others]], are chock-full of stories from disgruntled users who either had their rigs locking up upon playing certain games, or claimed that their video cards went toast due to instability, the most common workaround being to downgrade to 362.00 or earlier.
[[folder: Tabletop Games]]
* Avalon Hill's board game ''Assassin'' was shipped with rules that clearly had not been properly playtested, making legitimate moves ridiculously rare. The game's designer blames ExecutiveMeddling (it was a localization of a game originally titled ''Eurohit'').
* ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' Third Edition was laden with this stuff; it was pretty obvious that the designers were still trying to work out the kinks of the new system. A lot of it resulted from things that had been [[TheArtifact retained from AD&D but now didn't work,]] including a major problem with EmptyLevels and a lot of {{Game Breaker}}s. This lasted until around when 3.5 showed up, by which point the designers had (generally) figured out what worked and what didn't.
** Recreating every NPC in the ''TabletopGame/ForgottenRealms Campaign Setting'' from scratch would have taken a lot of time, so most [=NPCs=] were run through a fairly basic conversion guide and then shipped out the door. Of course, given that AD&D and 3rd Edition have very different mechanics, this led to a lot of [=NPCs=] having [[MasterOfNone bizarre builds]], too-high stats, and often vestigial abilities. For instance, Elminister retains his immunity to Time Stop, even though the 3rd Edition Time Stop is a burst of SuperSpeed and not anything that affects other individuals, and Drizzt has taken five levels of Ranger despite the fact that he gets almost nothing out of them (unless he went eleven levels before taking two-weapon fighting).
* The board game ''TabletopGame/BetrayalAtHouseOnTheHill'' originally shipped with several errors in the instructions -- particularly in the game's various Scenarios. (For example, the Underground Lake is on an Upstairs tile.) This obviously could cause gameplay to grind to a halt as the confused players tried to sort things out... which was made much harder by the game's primary conceit: that one or more of the players pulls a FaceHeelTurn and starts actively working against the group. Errata for the game can now be found online.
* The second edition of ''TabletopGame/{{Exalted}}'' was so buggy that the Scroll of Errata has more pages of rules than any given {{Splat}}book -- and that's not a joke, the Scroll of Errata weighs in at 205 pages while the rules sections of ''Manual of Exalted Power: Dragon-Blooded'' are only about 120 pages long. In brief, when you take a cluster of freelancers, don't require them to communicate, don't have enough good crunch writers to keep up with your schedule, and care more about the release date than whether something is in a releasable state, you get a desperate need for errata (some of it going down to the most basic functional elements, like the combat system).
-->'''Robert "The Demented One" Vance''': On page 49 of Scroll of Fallen Races, right under that big sidebar, there's a paragraph detailing the Leadership keyword. It's something that exists to tag effects that effect groups of Jadeborn based on their caste. Seems like a cool, thematic mechanic you could structure some of the Enlightened Pattern stuff around, sure. Now, try to find a Leadership Charm in [=SoFR=]. Try to find one in any of the books. You won't, because there are none. I think that's fairly indicative of the kinds of problems you're going to see in the Mountain Folk mechanics.
* ''[[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast Racial Holy War]]'' is a game about [[ThoseWackyNazis Neo-Nazis]] (you) trying to kill all non-whites. It is at ''pre-Alpha'' at best: There are rules for making Swastika shirts, [[HealThyself healing yourself]] by reading racist propaganda, and [[GreedyJew Jews using "jewgold"]] ''to bribe White Warriors into skipping their turn'' ("explained" by "brain polution")--but no mechanical values for [[VideoGameWeaponStats weapons]], [[InformedAttribute stats]], or accuracy. [[PoesLaw And yes, the authors were serious]].
[[folder: Media]]
* ''Tintin and the Alph-Art'' features tons of scenarios that were supposed to be in the new album of ComicBook/TheAdventuresOfTintin , but as the name implies most of them did not even get past scenario. The stories themselves are also incomplete.
* Harper Lee's manuscript ''Literature/GoSetAWatchman'', written before her agent advised her to instead do a story set in the main character's childhood that became ''Literature/ToKillAMockingbird'', was released without any editing work in 2015. This resulted in several awkward bits, as Lee had altered several plot points mentioned in ''Watchman'' for ''Mockingbird'' and reused several entire paragraphs for ''Mockingbird'' almost verbatim.
* The release of Kanye West's 2015 album ''The Life of Pablo'' seemed mostly slapped together. Originally titled ''Swish'', West changed the title to ''Waves'' less than a month before its release, then changed it again four days before the planned release to ''T.L.O.P.'' and then announced two days later that title actually stood for ''The Life of Pablo''. West posted several track lists on his Twitter account, continuously adding new tracks, and oddly dropping "Only One", a duet with Paul McCartney which West had already released as a single and shot a music video for. The album's February 13 release date came and went with no sign of the album on any major retailers, though West staged a concert/fashion show at Madison Square Garden and performed several tracks. West later stated the album was delayed by Chance the Rapper, who needed to rerecord portions of the track "Waves". The album was released late on February 14 to coincide with West's performance on ''Saturday Night Live'', streamable on Tidal and available for purchase on West's official site, the latter promptly crashed due to high traffic. The track "Fade" was missing, with an early version of "Facts" uploaded in its place by mistake, though the error was quickly fixed. West then removed the option to purchase the album from his site and refunded customers, and announced the album would never be available to purchase ''ever'' and would be accessible solely by streaming on Tidal, despite a download of the album being included in the cost of tickets to West's aforementioned Madison Square Garden event. West stated later that week the version of ''The Life of Pablo'' on Tidal was essentially a draft, and several tracks were being remastered.
* ''The Exorcist II'' was pulled from theaters, recut, and reissued twice during its theatrical run due to negative audience reactions.
[[folder: Other]]
* Clive Sinclair, head of Sinclair Radionics and later of Sinclair Research, which brought the UsefulNotes/ZXSpectrum to Britain and helped kickstart its home computer market, valued [[{{Minimalism}} minimalist]] designs that the British public could afford, at the cost of neglecting to have his creations properly tested and polished. By far the most infamous example is the [[http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/other/blackwatch.htm Sinclair Black Watch]], an early digital watch that used an LED and sold for either £17.95 or £24.95 depending on whether you got it in a do-it-yourself kit (like most home electronics of the time) or preassembled. The kit was notoriously difficult to assemble; it had a battery life of only ten days (resulting in many preassembled watches arriving already dead) and its batteries were just as difficult to replace; its integrated chip [[WeaksauceWeakness could be destroyed by static from nylon clothing]]; and most damning of all, it was unreliable in keeping time because [[EpicFail it ran at different speeds depending on the weather]]. Oh, and just for kicks, it could ''[[ExplosiveInstrumentation explode]]'' if you left it powered on for too long. The product was such a gigantic flop that Sinclair Radionics would've gone bankrupt if the British government hadn't stepped in to provide subsidies.
** Early versions of Sinclair's 1984 QL computer had bug-ridden firmware, which also spilled out into an external dongle[[note]] It was originally claimed that this was because they couldn't fit the 48KB ROM onto the internal PCB as originally designed, but [[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/12/archaeologic_sinclair_ql/?page=2 a 30th anniversary retrospective]] suggests this may have just been an excuse.[[/note]]. In addition, there were reliability problems with the microdrives. While all these were later fixed, they probably contributed to its commercial failure. Even at the time Your Computer magazine said "I sense that the time for foisting unproven products on the marketplace has gone [..] The QL may have been announced six months too soon."
* Website/YouTube (after Google purchased it) is so full of issues, including:
** Bad gateways and terrible excuse of auto caption -- just imagine it, you go there to watch a video, it shifts through all qualities because of some error in their server and then prints out the video could not be loaded and next thing you know is that it also froze your sound driver, forcing you to reboot to get your sound driver back to normal.
** Try to report a playback issue. It either refreshes the Report Playback Issue page or says an error occured when sending a request.
** You might choose to upload a video only to find out that the file does not process, or doesn't even cue for uploading despite a reliable internet connection. This is likely a drawback of now being able to upload multiple videos at once, itself a questionable idea to begin with compared to uploading one video at a time quickly.
** As of August 2013, uploading videos in WMV format now causes hideous artifacts on any color flashes or fadeouts.
** Their "Content Identification" system could be considered an obvious alpha. Since about 2009, any video that is only believed to have copyrighted material is automatically considered a match, even resulting in complete false positives (including to third-party content that was created '''after the video upload'''). This doesn't even take into account when Google turned up the heat in late 2013.
* The Boeing 787 Dreamliner, including its notorious battery fires.
* Similarly, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress suffered from numerous reliability problems, most famously the overtaxed engines that would sometimes set themselves on fire in flight. In this case the problems due to the need to rush the new bomber into production during the height of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, and they were ironed out by the time the B-29D was designed (and re-christened as the B-50A Superfortress in 1948, just in time for WWII to end three years beforehand).
* The B-36 was like that, except more so. Among numerous problems its engines had such a tendency to spontaneously catch fire that in at least one instance the engine was shut down and the mission was allowed to continue on the remaining five. Needless to say, it didn't end well - not because of that fire, but because of the ''others that followed''.
* The very complicated nature and large scale involved in building ships means that a "shakedown cruise" is a routine step in any ship's construction whereby they spend time figuring out all of the things that are wrong with the ship for them to fix or correct back in port. During the [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarII Battle of Denmark Strait]], HMS ''Prince of Wales'' suffered numerous problems while fighting the ''Bismark'' because she was pressed into service before she could do her shakedown cruise.
* The video game database [[http://www.mobygames.com/ MobyGames]]'s 2013 redesign was practically unusable, as glitches greatly complicated or prevented contributing any new info. There were also errors visible to regular visitors, such as screenshots which never loaded (apparently, in order to display an ordinary image, you needed a complex, failure-prone script). What made this even more ridiculous is that the redesign was presented months prior to the users, who proceeded to give their feedback and report the numerous bugs--and all of it was promptly ''ignored''. Tellingly, when [=GameFly=] sold the site to Blue Flame Labs on December 20 of the same year, the very first thing the new owner did was to revert the site design back to the previous one.
* Wikia, a wiki hoster, did the same thing as Moby Games. Not only did they introduce a new page skin that simply does not work the way it is supposed to while also managing to cut the usable page in half (the other half permanently displaying useless information that ''cannot be minimized to give space''), they '''also''' ignored hundreds of thousands of user complains against the new skin. Worst of all, not only did they force the skin as the default so that not logged in users are forced to use it, they also removed the much more popular and infinitely more functional skin "Monaco".
* The Healthcare.gov website has numerous bugs and issues, which has caused a great deal of controversy.
* Wiki/TVTropes's reworked design in 2015 was initially released with a number of errors and bugs, before being recalled and returned to the previous site design and working on those errors.
* Sling TV, Dish Network's TV streaming service geared toward "cord cutters" has suffered from lots of performance problems, but the worst so far has been its failure during the premiere of ''Series/FearTheWalkingDead''. Any streaming service that's not Creator/{{Netflix}} tends to fall over under heavy load, actually. Crunchyroll is also notorious for this.
* Amusement parks will often quietly open new attractions to the public before the official date as a "technical rehearsal" to work out kinks and train staff. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Hollywood allowed park guests in two months before its official April 2016 opening date.
[[folder: In-Universe Examples]]
[[folder: Anime and Manga ]]
* ''Manga/TheWorldGodOnlyKnows'' has an early story where DatingSim {{Otaku}} Keima Katsuragi struggles to get through one of these. Filled with every bug imaginable, the biggest one he has to overcome is getting stuck in a loop that prevents him from reaching the ending. Not only that, but trying to save the game will fry his [[BlandNameProduct PFP]], so in order to find a way around the loop, he has to try every single route. And when he finally ''does'' manage to get past the loop, the result is corrupted graphics and text that make it completely unplayable.
* In episode 5 of ''LightNovel/BokuWaTomodachiGaSukunai'', the characters play an MMO game using virtual reality headsets. The game is in a playable state, but the first enemies they encounter haven't even been programmed with attacks yet, nor does the main character Kodaka have any abilities to use despite being a "wizard". There are also balancing issues as the boss they fight is a bit too tough, though to be fair their healer was taking a nap (since she's only a ten-year-old) and they weren't coordinating their moves very well either.
[[folder: Live Action TV ]]
* Kenneth the Page of ''Series/ThirtyRock'' once invented a game show similar to DealOrNoDeal in which contestants had to choose which model was holding a case full of solid gold. They caught on in no time that it was always the model struggling with a case full of heavy gold bricks.
* On ''Series/TheMuppetShow'', pretty much any invention highlighted on a Muppet Labs sketch.
[[folder: Video Games ]]
* At one point in his video game, VideoGame/{{Deadpool}} runs into an area full of wire frames and enemies clumsily pathfinding, requiring him to call up High Moon Studios and fund an emergency patch to continue playing.
** At another point in the game, due to blowing out the game's in-universe budget on expensive explosion effects, it reverts to an 8-bit side-scroller.
[[folder: Webcomics ]]
* "Mad Snacks, Yo!" in ''Webcomic/{{Homestuck}}'' is a skateboard game riddled with glitches that get the PlayerCharacter stuck in walls or other decor elements, assuming the game doesn't crash first.
* In [[http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/illusory this]] strip of ''Webcomic/TheTrenches'', after Quentin wows the staff with "in-game" footage, they discover that most of the game is so thoroughly Beta that ''[[http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/ascension it doesn't know where the ground is]].'' The actual development state of the "game" is this article's page image. But at least the game isn't released in this state.
[[folder: Western Animation ]]
* In ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'' episode "500 Keys", the CouchGag uses this trope, right down to Maggie's pacifier sucking noise.