I keep coming across it with new titles these days and it's not a hardware problem as douchebags will inevitably claim. How many times have you guys found a title you think "Okay, maybe I'll give that a chance" you install it and after awhile of playing there's an instant CTD.
Or as is often the case because big game studios insist vomiting high polygon count everywhere the FPS is atrocious even on high end machines because they don't understand that the majority of people don't have 4090 gtx cards and 8k monitors. There's all kinds of basic stability shit going on that makes me feel like I'm looking through someone's alpha project they've barely started debugging yet and it pisses me off. It's no surprise that 2D games are regularly hitting the charts because I wonder if it's people getting sick of all this and defaulting to 2D games because they can't trust a 3D game to run properly.
My standards are so fucking low in a game now the first thing I have to ask is, will it run? And will it crash? If the answer is yes to either of those things then you just immediately move on. Game devs seriously need to learn to stop the fucking polygon vomit. I mean Cities Skylines 2 is a great example of this and it's interesting how pissed off gamers are getting with these titles nowadays.
Edit: Oh yeah I can't forget game breaking bugs in the pathfinding AI etc. that quite a few devs are guilty of. You often have to dig through forum posts to find out about those.
You don't know CTD pain until you've played a full campaign of Misery for STALKER Call of Pripyat. 32-bit executable with 4gb limited memory. Memory leaks like a faucet. And I'm sure it was just as painful if not more in some large mods for Shadow of Chernobyl.
Or a modded out Xcom 2 that is... not happy with the abuse you've caused it.
Granted, in these cases, it's because of mods trying to squeeze every bit out of a game that the game was never designed to be able to handle it, lol.
Sadly accurate. I really need to figure out what causes Avengers defence missions to just hang in my playthroughs because not only does it obviously prevent me from playing, but I actually really enjoy those missions so it's not like I want to simply skip them to avoid the problem.
Give how many hours I dumped into a lagtastic modded setup, you'd think I'd remember more clearly what I suspected was going on with some of the screwy behavior.
Ah, wait, I think I'm starting to remember now. At least for what I'd experienced with my setup.
I think something in my total mod setup did not carry over cleanly into save files made during a mission, so while technically the game wouldn't completely crash most of the time or have any glaringly obvious issues, there'd still be a lot of errors going on in the background leading to all kinds of strange delays and performance issues with rendering, AI decisions, animations, etc.
I certainly empathize though. I'd be so stoked for some of those bigger fights, but usually it's precisely those fights that led me to the previously described scenario because I had to save scum like crazy.
Its not like any of the Stalker games ran better without mods. You'd probably end up more stable regardless of how hefty it was simply because they'd have had to fix how broken the game was in the process of making the mod.
Oh I agree. The problems were just compounded by a lot of bigger mods like Misery that pushed the extremely low memory limit to the brink because of all the additional textures, meshes, and object references.
Also there was a strange unfixable vanilla bug with the gun-toting zombies iirc that would inevitably corrupt any saves made within a certain radius (only if there was just one alive when you made that save).
The hbs battletech game is the same sort of way with the big mods. The game wasn't ever the best optimized, and some mods (rogue tech) add so much to the game it can slow it way down.