Larian Studios Forums General Chat Games that do not work and / or bugged

==Rant==
As a PC gamer and experienced IT engineer I sometimes purchase a game that is bugged or won't launch but I have always been able to get it to work. I know what I'm doing with computers so I tend to fiddle and find workarounds. It does not happen very often and developers are (usually) quick to patch any known bugs.

I bought Max Payne 3 on Steam and played about 6 hours worth and when I went back the game had not saved my progress. As there is no manual save option, only autosave I thought this was strange. This was a known bug and was fixed with the patch. OK, so I play again and get to a rock hard part in which I die in 5 seconds. This game is hard as balls btw.

So, I leave it a few weeks then try again. This time it won't start; just get an error stating my files are corrupt. OK, so reverify found two corrupt files which it re-downloaded. Try to run again, gets part way through first time setup and crashes saying file not found.

To cut a long story short, I uninstalled and re-downloaded and installed the 35GB game and got exactly the same result. Check of google reveals I'm not the only one. Tried all fixes and spent 8 hours F******g about to no avail. Seems it's a very buggy game, there's lots of angry PS3 and xbox users complaining of various game breaking bugs.

I can't get a refund for it as its 'used' and per Steams T&C's so I'm a bit annoyed. Now I just put a big scratch on my laminate flooring from my chair wheel. OK not really the game's fault but I want to smash something now. It's been a few years since I put my fist into an LCD monitor and smashed up a keyboard (I can control my PC rage better now) but this is trying my patience. ==End Rant==

Glad Larian has good support and community and does not use DRM. Something other developers need to take note of. Only solution it seems to my problem is to download a cracked version off pirate bay but I don't really want to do that. I have already paid for the game and can't run it (seemingly due to DRM or recent update / patch) so I guess this is okay?

Anyone else own Max Payne 3 on any format or have similar experiences?

i dont own MP3 as apparently its more like a movie than a game with its extensive cutscene use

Bethesda's bugs are fairly legendary. I remember Oblivion was incredibly annoying in terms of its frequent crashing, partly due to some bizarre decisions with its scripting language and lack of sanity checking, as well as very poor memory management that often caused corruption and crashing (a few people looked at the latter in detail and discovered it was really quite a serious mess). Some of the problems could be worked around, but it was frustrating.

My least favourite of their bugs is Fallout 3's "dead cell" bug which has been quite widely reported: a cell will at some point contain an invalid object that puts it off limits for the rest of the game unless you want an immediate CTD. It is fixable, usually caused by one of those "spaghettified" corpses whose coordinates end up out of range, so disabling the offending ID will fix the problem, but it can be a laborious task to find it and there's nothing to stop another one causing the same problem. It gets progressively worse with longer playing times, so it's probably tied in with a similar memory bug to Oblivion's, if not the same one. Of course being an identifiable and repeatable problem with a specific solution never stopped the usual culprits claiming "its your PC lol". <_<

And then there's bug-ridden DRM, which is the most annoying of all since it adds no value to the player. Steam's "preparing to launch" hang is quite annoying, but I'm really looking at Origin here, with assorted configuration problems, nasty EULAs and so on: in fact my experiences playing the latest DKS and then trying to get Kingdoms of Amalur to launch couldn't be more different in that DKS just did what it was supposed to whereas I had quite a fight on my hands to get KoA to start up. Why can't other games companies be like Larian?

Max Payne goes a step further and requires you to join Rockstar's social club even just for single player. Kind of double DRM which is irritating to say the least. I don't mind DRM if it works properly but when it causes players who have actually bought the game to go through all this faffing about and yet there are still hacked versions around this irritates me. I'm not surprised so many people just download a copy from torrent sites.

I might give it another try when my bandwidth allowance is reset as at 35Gb a time it uses up over half my allowance. Until then I think I have wasted my money - it's punishingly difficult on Medium difficulty anyway.

Venix - yes, I found those unskippable cutscenes very annoying especially when I got to the part where I died in 3 seconds. Had to watch the cutscene over and over again. It was like as soon as the cutscene ended it was bang, bang, dive for cover, bang. Dead. I played the previous two games and enjoyed them, I liked the movie style script etc. Also they were not as difficult as MP3 - I tend to play on Medium first and adjust accordingly if I find a game too easy or hard on this setting.

I bought an ATI graphics card a few days ago - instantly had an awful texture thing in Drakensang 2 !

The beggar's beard now hangs in the middle of his face !

I never had this with my former NVidia-based cards.

Plus, my favourite Star Wars Battlefront I map (it's the only shooter I play) now has black grounds instead of grass textures ...

I have an ATI card at the moment (HD4870) which is rather old but I haven`t had any major problems. A programmer who I know in Poland who is working on updating Drakan to work on modern systems and add extra DX9 features had a load of problems with ATI cards. He said it is due to the card's internal rendering processes which are significantly different to Nvidia and managed to find a solution. Could be something similar with Drakensang. I played the first game on the card and it worked fine but not tried Drakensang 2.

Does sound like a driver issue or setting. ATI / AMD are known for buggy drivers on newly released video cards though and it tends takes a bit for them to make stable drivers. Not had this myself though.

What card have you got?