How about Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor? That shit was wiping hard drives clean it was so bad. :)
Star Wars: Galaxies had an epic crash and burn because the login server couldn’t handle the load at all; the whole first day was completely lost and didn’t get much better for a while. Then like Horizons, they had database issues that crushed the game in lots of ways. Neither game was very finished, although obviously LA was able to fund the game long enough to find a more stable long term trajectory. Both had promise I didn’t stick around long enough to see fulfilled, though.
SWTOR had the queuing thing but I don’t remember it being too much worse than Rift, which was really excellent other than that.
WAR had a bad launch for me, not because of the game but because a hurricane had just hit us and I didn’t have internet at home for two weeks.
Wasn’t the problem with Conan not the launch but that once you got past Tortage, it slowly unraveled into unfinishville?
Myth 3 didn’t have a bad launch, it accidently the whole thing.
Sword of the Stars 2, the game just wasn’t nearly finished, it was barely alpha state, or a very weak beta. Took em another year to finish it but to Kerberos credit, they did finish it.
Diablo III was just as bad as this at the same point. Huge queues, errors, it was basically not playable during the first week. Except for a bit here, and then a bit there.
Guild Wars 2 had queues, but everything mostly worked quite well. They stopped selling the game for a couple of days as well, until they could serve all their existing customers before taking money from new ones, which was a classy move. There’s been nothing classy about this release. Diablo III had serious issues, but Blizzard were quite good about it - and at least they did pre-loading. That game did sell 10 million copies, too. I felt like a cared about customer with Diablo III, I like EA are just showing contempt for their customers in this case. I’m just glad I haven’t bought the game yet.
Off the top of my head, ones I was involved with:
SWG - The old launch day MMO server load thing.
WoW - Same thing. Except that went on for days.
Elemental - Just plain never worked for me.
Ones I managed to avoid by not quite biting on the game: The already mentioned SimCity and Diablo III
Strike Fighters.
Which is a shame, because it eventually evolved into the closest thing to a modern version of US Navy Fighters/ATF.
Amazingly it’s still around but with no programmers and artists on staff it merely exists in maintenance mode with no forward development whatsoever.
Eh, not for me. I got at least 60 hours in the first week.
I’m glad you said this - the comments up thread nicely demonstrate how Sim City 5’s launch will be remembered a year on. D3 was pretty bad indeed. I seem to remember login problems on and off for at least a week. Servers went down every so often for the first 2 weeks (at least) and there was some crazy lag over that period too.
Edit: And that’s playing UK peak time evenings & weekend daytimes. I’m pretty sure I’m underselling the problems myself, thinking about it.
I worked at Funcom up until about a month before Anarchy Online shipped (not involved in AO though). So, yeah, that’s the one for me. They were totally unprepared for the launch and the money had run out so it was launched in the state it was in.
they launched game as state as beta ? no way :)
I think this one may be the winner of The Most Awesome Disastrous Launch, simply for Lum’s IRC chat log while trying to play it… “I will taxi to victory!”
The original EverQuest had quite a bit of network-related trouble at launch. World of Warcraft had some fairly severe (for the time!) back-end stability issues at release (“looting lag”, etc). It was the first online game I can remember that implemented log-in queues. It took at least a couple weeks to settle down.
More recently, Torchlight II’s servers were crushed by popularity the first day. It was nearly impossible to set up an account so you could do multiplayer. Fortunately, the single player worked just fine! They did an amazing job recovering.
Outpost was the game that shattered my youth or my naïveté.
Yeah, I had a pretty easy time with Diablo 3, too. The problems were mostly getting through the initial login queue; if you were one of the lucky ones that cleared that (and I was, for once), everything else worked fine.
SimCity has been brutal, on the other hand, and I’ve gotten maybe two hours total in so far over three nights. Not to mention the other bugs with the game itself.
Those two are really just the most frustrating since there’s no (or at least less of a) reason for them to have had the server-based requirements that caused the trouble. I’m a veteran of pretty much every MMO launch, and most of those have been completely terrible and unplayable for the first day or two.
GW2 does not belong in any of the threads that have “disaster” in their title.
WWII Online, on the other hand, instantly wins all such threads. :) Good job, JMR, for reminding us about it. “You kids don’t know what a real launch disaster looks like!” :)
Fallout 2 had a bug in it, upon release, that resulted in your car’s trunk disappearing. With all your loot in it. Also the car would regularly crash the game. Patch 1.2 was the sheeeeit.
It seems like some of the recent games having huge release problems, are dealing with the flip side of digital distribution. When all games were being distributed via box form, there could literally only be as many copies sold as had been produced. These days, if something sells far more copies than expected, it can be an extra flood hitting the servers above and beyond expectations.
Apparently that was one of the issues with Diablo III. Mike Morhaime stated in an interview, “The Diablo III launch exceeded out forecasts by an order of magnitude; we were very far off. We outsold our full-year forecast in the matter of a week.” If you’re expecting to have a year before there are 10 million players connecting to play your game, it has to be a shock to instead see that many within a week.
That’s depressing. A few years after launch, it became great. I got my few years of fun out of it anyway.
That’s a bad bug, but hardly what is being talked about in this thread. And I can say that because I did have this bug :)
Indeed, I got into it after their reboot with v2.0 or w.e. it was quite a lot of fun. Remember someone on the Avault forums used to post videos of his air victories, made it look quite good as a pure air-combat sim.