EVE Online Upgrades Your Computer Into A Brick
This isn’t an installer bug, but an installation bug. Players that downloaded the Classic or Premium graphics content upgrade for EVE Online could delete the boot.ini for your Windows system.
What is boot.ini? That’s the file containing the boot options for your system BIOS — the thing that tell your computer to turn-on. Basically, deleting boot.ini bricks your copy of Windows. You have to completely reinstall and lose every file on your partition. It’s one of the worst possible scenarios, and it all happened because the developers were looking for a way to compress their graphics upgrade files as much as possible.
EVE Online is a massively popular game with a thriving community, so obviously this problem was fixed very, very quickly. Still, this is my personal nightmare scenario — imagine downloading the latest update for Final Fantasy 14 and bricking your PC?
Let’s give the developers some credit. They openly admitted their mistake and detailed why this happened in a lengthy blog post that you can read right here.
Skyrim, Fallout & The Mysterious Case Of The Deteriorating Engine
Bethesda’s track-record with bugs isn’t exactly great. To say their games have messy launches is an understatement. But we’re ignoring the endless pathing errors, quest bugs, game-breaking glitches and so on. Today we’re here to talk about something worse than all of those things combined… or if not worse, then far more insidious. And we’ve all experienced it. Multiple times.
For many, many reasons that I can’t fully explain here, Skyrim runs slower the longer you play. After playing for 20+ hours, the game’s performance notably gets far worse. And there’s more! Just playing in a single session can make that bad framerate even worse! Playing for 30+ minutes can lead to nauseatingly bad framerate drops in addition to the sluggishness those 20+ hours of game time are doing to your file. This same problem keeps happening. It didn’t stop with Skyrim.
Fallout 3 on Xbox 360 noticeably gets worse the longer you play. Even Fallout 4 experiences these problems — a presumably modern game! It takes so long for the game to run worse, you don’t even notice it until you try playing on a fresh save file. Restart the game and suddenly the game is working like it should. Why? How?
It’s all about memory, caches, and stuff like that. As you play an open-world Bethesda game, the more stuff the game has to keep track of. Every item on the ground, every pile of cheese you knocked over — all of it has to be saved somewhere. And the more that stuff piles up, the longer the loading times take. FPS drops by 50%. The only solution is to get a faster computer. Or Bethesda could try programming their games a little better? That’s not very likely.
These are the bugs that made us want to snap our CPUs in half. Check the next page for even more despair-inducing bugs in gaming.
