Midnight launches are a cornerstone in every die-hard gamers’ life. We want the game first. We want to be the first to experience what no one has yet. Especially when it comes to competitive games like Battlefield or Call of Duty, we want to have the highest rank and best weapons as fast as possible. So it is heartbreaking when we find out that once we get home and login to whatever game account we use, that we are greeted with system crashes, bugs, glitches, and unfinished products. This not only ruins customer satisfaction and buyer loyalty, but stands as an embarrassment to any company trying to build their brand.

Recently, the launch of Street Fighter V has been met with glitches, bugs, and server errors rendering online matches almost impossible. In light of that, I reached out to the AA team to see what our previous experiences have been with games that made us want to put our fist through our flat screen TV.

Jamie Briggs – Fallout New Vegas

When it comes to poor launches usually the online portion of the game is to blame, however, back in 2010 Fallout New Vegas provided one of the worst offline single player launch experiences I have ever seen.

I’m a huge fan of the Fallout series and after playing the life out of Fallout 3, my excitement for New Vegas was at a fever pitch. The problem was New Vegas refused to let me pass the opening missions, either due to certain items never appearing, or due certain building locking me in with no escape. I’m a gamer who is perfectly willing to endure constant deaths due to my own inferior skill, but when a game forces me to repeatedly replay missions due to technical issues, I find it hard to continue playing.

Unfortunately due to the many problems that plagued my opening of Fallout New Vegas, I have never got to experience what many claim to be the best entry in the franchise. I have never returned to Fallout New Vegasand it continues to lie in the depths of my Trophy library with a mere 1% – and I never know if I’ll find the heart to return.

Kosta Canatselis – Halo the Master Chief collection

It was advertised as the ultimate bundle, all four Halo games on one disc with an ultimate multiplayer mode to include maps from all of the games, it was so perfect… Or so we thought.

On release we all came to see what the result of a rushed release was. It was a really disappointing experience. Day one brought us a 6 or so gigabyte update and it still didn’t fix any problems. We couldn’t play online as it would take around 40 minutes of waiting before we could get into any sort of game.

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There were also a ton of glitches and issues when changing rounds in multiplayer, luckily single player was fairly smooth sailing but multiplayer alone was able to degrade my experience as it was about a month or two after release that I finally got to play multiplayer. Luckily we know Microsoft learn[ed] from their mistakes and launched Halo 5 with a robust MP.

Devon McCarty – Assassins Creed: Unity

I have played every Assassins Creed game they have made for a console. When they announced an opportunity to be an Assassin in a team retrospect, I got pumped. The marketing team told me everything I wanted to hear. That I could enter the front door and cause a distraction with a few others were focusing on the mission or causing distractions of their own.

The problem was, that is not at all how it went down. I went to the midnight launch, got home to install the game, and waited for hours before a string of glitches and bugs ruined my entire experience. I dove off buildings only to get trapped in hay carts. My stealth kills would crash the game. Most importantly, I would struggle to connect to an online server for hours, to no avail, which only made playing my missions more difficult. I liked that time period and really looked forward to building my own Musketeer style Assassin, and forming a small brotherhood of my own to play on a regular basis.

The game was so glitchy and unfinished that at the end of the week I brought the game back, and the store let me return it and exchange it for a different game. Something they had before never offered. AC: Unity made me second guess ever buying an Assassins Creed game again.

Eric Pepper – Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5
While attempting to breathe new life into a franchise that many gamers grew up playing, a broken experience was released to the masses. With an absolutely massive day one patch, there were still a significant number of issues to be found within the game, including a persistent bug which caused the game to crash after freezing at the Activision logo. To work around this problem, the player had to sign in as a guest on their console, load the game, and switch back to their primary profile at the main menu. Even after doing this, the game was not bug-free as physics were constantly questionable and achievements would not unlock.

There was a great skate park creation tool found within the game, and it was arguably one of the biggest strengths of the title, but considering you had to be able to get into the game to use it, the community support was obviously very lacking.

Activision stated that they were working diligently on creating a patch for the game in order to rectify the issues and provide gamers with the sort of experience they deserved. Unfortunately, while the patch has been released, the fatal bug causing the title to crash before even reaching the main menu is still at large. The end result is a patch which took several months of work to create and was roughly 7GB in size, and didn’t resolve the single largest issue the game encountered. Not only does Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 hold the dubious honor of being one of the worst releases in recent memory, it still has yet to be transformed into a consistently playable experience.

Nathan Manning – Grand Theft Auto Online

Apart from the single player portion of Grand Theft Auto 5, Grand Theft Auto Online was a much anticipated release in 2013 – especially since it was delayed for about a month and didn’t release with the single player content.

When GTA Online finally did launch, it was unplayable for 99% of the player base for about a week. An unexpected bug had occurred that wasn’t picked up in internal testing, meaning most players could not find other players to complete the compulsory introductory race in Grand Theft Auto Online.

It was frustrating, especially considering the online component was already delayed, now eager fans were going to have to wait even longer to explore Los Santos together.

Robert Key – Battlefield 4

There’s nothing like the launch of the next generation of gaming consoles. Whether you’re creating the games or playing them, it’s an exciting time for everyone in the industry. When I bought my Xbox One at launch, I couldn’t wait to dab myself in the waters of “next gen” goodness.

Unfortunately, it was incredibly hard for me to do so with Battlefield 4, and for much of the time following. With 22 games that launched with the Xbox One — seven of which were either sports or dancing titles — options were limited at the time, and with poor party chat on Xbox’s part and general, terrible connection problems from EA, I felt almost cheated with Battlefield 4 because it was hardly playable.

It took a year of updates to fix Battlefield 4’s problems, and I’m not sure if the game is still completely stable after literal gigabytes worth of updates. Adding insult to injury was perhaps the driest campaign I’ve ever played. I believe I lost interest within the first two chapters/levels.

These are just a small selection of terrible experiences we at AA have shared. But the conversation doesn’t end here. The struggle is real for all of us and we want to hear about yours too! Rarely is there a time when I will ask you to rant angrily but in this case, let the nerd rage flow through you here or on Facebook and Twitter!

Its latest title, Blast ‘Em Bunnies appears to be no exception to this, with the two man development team deciding to have a shot at the tower defense/ endless shooter genre. With the launch of Blast ‘Em Bunniesimminent, Analog Addiction had a chance to speak to one of the creative minds behind these games, Nnooo Creative Director and Founder Nic Watt.

“I first came up with an idea about looking around and shooting things and we wanted to include cute, colourful characters,” says Watt, speaking of how the premise for the game was formulated. “The first idea was a space defence shooter where you were some form of orbiting space station which could move in 360 degrees looking through its sights. I felt that shooting aliens in space might be a little too niche and alienating for some users so I tried to think of a character type that would appeal to all users.”

“This is where the ideas of bunnies came from. Once we had that, we started to think of all the cool things both the player could do in the form of crazy types of weapons (exploding, heat-seeking pepper bombs!), and enemies (burrowers, blockers, throatslitters for example)!”

My first experience with Blast ‘Em Bunnies was back in 2013, at the EB Games Expo in Sydney, Australia. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One had just been announced, and Blast ‘Em Bunnies was being used to showcase the gyroscope in the PlayStation 4 controller.

“At the EB Expo in 2013 we were showing an early build on PlayStation 4 and we actually hadn’t been approved for Xbox at that time,” reflected Watt. “We still had a lot to add in the form of different arenas, bunny skins and even weapon and enemy types. We also added refreshable missions which renew on completion and daily, as well as lots of medals to complete too.”

Blast ‘Em Bunnies will be a strictly single player experience. “There isn’t multiplayer as mainly it would have required online play. The game is designed to be a first person shooter and the gameplay we went for really suits single player,” comments Watt. “Multiplayer would be a very different mode and, on at least PSVita and Nintendo 3DS, would have had to support either local or online multiplayer. This was too big an undertaking and something we hadn’t done before so we decided to focus our efforts on making sure the single player was the best it could be.”

Nnooo has been focused on Blast ‘Em Bunnies for quite some time. It’s been a little over two years since I first saw Blast ‘Em Bunnies in action, and several factors have played a part in the long development time frame. Largely, Watt tells me, it was because of the number of platforms the game was being developed for.

“We were always planning on PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS and added PlayStation 4 when we received development approval. Xbox One we added when we got approval to develop. We mainly wanted to release on multiple devices to reach more people and make the game as successful as we can.”

“When we finally got Xbox One approval we decided we wanted to aim for a simultaneous release, so it took a fair bit of time adding all of the support for each platform’s idiosyncrasies.”

Not only is a simultaneous release on this many platforms something new for the small developer, it also made the quality assurance testing a much longer process. “Given that there are only 3 of us and we are supporting 4 platforms, it took a big chunk of time to get it all super polished and bug free. The EB Expo 2013 build had a lot of crashes and other issues we were quite skilled at hiding!”

Another challenge the team faced was utilising each platform’s unique features in the game. The PlayStation and 3DS versions of the game make use of each platform’s gyroscope as an alternative control method to move the gun turret, but the Xbox presented more of a challenge that could not be overcome.

“We would have loved to support Kinect but it is such a different user interface we were concerned about how well we could give the feeling of controlling a gun turret and how much code would be shared between [the different platforms].”

Having absolutely no knowledge of developing games for different platforms, I was intrigued as to which platform Watt preferred.

“I really enjoy making games full stop. I think Nintendo probably provide the most interesting hardware in terms of things you can do with it, but for me working on PSVita, PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo 3DS is super exciting. It has been challenging trying to get the game working on such different hardware, particularly from the power of the PS4 and Xbox One down to the relatively lesser power of the Nintendo 3DS. Nevertheless, I think the game shines and has been tailored to work well on them all.”

“In terms of development ease I wouldn’t say any are much easier than the others, other than (because they are more recent) that the PS4 and Xbox One have got more modern tools and systems. Each generation the hardware manufacturers learn from the things they liked and disliked the generation before and make adjustments accordingly. With PS4 and Xbox One being the newest they have a lot more prior learnings to draw on.”

If you hadn’t picked it up by now, Nnooo has a development team of just two people. “The benefits are we can make the games we want, how we want and to the quality we want,” says Watt. “The challenges are we can only work so many hours and because we like to really polish our games they can end up taking a lot longer than we expect. Balancing the time, budget and quality is always very hard.”

It’s no secret that the current Australian government has not been very supportive of local video game development, but Screen Australia’s limited funding went a long way in helping the development of Nnooo’s latest title. “To be honest Blast ‘Em Bunnies would not have been completed without their support,” reflects Watt. “Screen NSW have been amazing, particularly given the tough times they have faced with their budgets being cut. They have really supported everything we have done and we are really glad they can still help out developers!”

Blast ‘Em Bunnies, the latest game from Nnooo, is available digitally this week for $4.99 USD (or regional equivalent). The PlayStation 4 and Vita versions of the game are available on March 8 in North America (March 9 in Europe, Australia and New Zealand). The Nintendo 3DS version launches on March 10 in the Americas, Europe and Australia and New Zealand, and the Xbox One version will be available on March 11 in the Americas, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.