Game glitches that are actually useful thread.

[UglyDuckling]

Only 1 game comes into mind, well series, Tomb Raider 1-5 on PS1 and PC.

These games had numerous bugs, but one of the best and most useful ones was being able to jump to places that are impossible without it.

Here is a video of the glitch in action.

And this video has an assorted lot of glitches for those games.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

The Skyrim 'jump up mountains' is probably a bug and very useful for travel/reaching new areas purposes. I can think of about a billion bugs that are useful though, like garbage AI not fully entering cover so exposing a foot/tail/eyeball to shoot at until dead, plenty of poor level/zone designs resulting in reaching areas that NPCs can't get to you at, basically anything utilized by speedrunners...

 

[OCNewbie]

It seems like I recall double-jumping, and strafe-running/jumping/bunny hopping wasn't intended in Quake 2. Maybe I'm remembering incorrectly, but if it's not by design, that is a near-constant usage of a 'glitch' to vastly improve movement in-game.

 

[Red Storm]

When I was a kid playing Age of Empires against the AI, I would always abuse their logic/pathing by walling off everything except for one spot where I would leave a single tile space open, and focus all defense there. The not so smart AI would send all of its forces to that open spot, declining to break down any of the weak wooden palisade walls surrounding my base. It's the only way my friends and I could compete with the higher difficulty AI back then.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Well, one of my favorites is the original Legend of Zelda screen scroll glitch which allows you to appear on the wrong side of the screen when traversing between two screens (letting you get to areas that are otherwise not accessible from your current location/itemset), as well as the block clipping glitch (mostly useful in dungeons).

On the PC, well, in the initial releases of Skyrim, I enjoyed using an fortity alchemy enchantment to then craft a more powerful enchanting bonus potion, to craft a more powerful bonus alchemy enchantment items, to craft more potions... to then craft armor/weapon crafting bonus potions and enchanting bonus potions, to craft weapons that damage overflowed the signed integer into negative numbers... Not sure if they ever really fixed that or not. I eventually made a helmet that had so much life regen that it was impossible to die, and a obsidian bow that had soul trap on it which was a 1-3 hit kill on just about anything (eventually the helm and the bow became a only use if I have to item that I had on quick swap). Also was always useful to sell a weapon crafted like that to make some gold if needed.

 

[Borealis7]

i remember exploiting a bug in DUNE II, where i could destroy an entire enemy base with 1 quad buggy!
all you had to do is stand around the corner of a building and let the enemy tank shoot at you and it would hit it's own building and destroy it, and you move to the next building.
haha jokes on you AI written for a 286

 

[Borealis7]

oh and, of course, duplicating in Diablo. every game starts with 10 minutes of duping a health potion for some cash.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

oh and, of course, duplicating in Diablo. every game starts with 10 minutes of duping a health potion for some cash.

Cash was never a problem in Diablo, you quickly wound up with more than you could carry thanks to the idiotic inventory system. I used to dupe spell books and the elixirs that raised stats, those were really useful.

Divine Divinity, a game similar to, but superior to Diablo 2 had a bug that allowed the building of super-characters. Items could be enchanted with charms that raised base stats and resistances. Some items couldn't be charmed at all, others could have from 1 to 5 charms added. A bug allowed you to slot something like 35 charms into a single item before the game crashed, so pump 35 Strength +10 charms into a single ring, get 350 strength bonus.

 

[cytg111]

PUBG : if done correctly you can move through glass windows and get to vantage points where you can essentially see through walls, not shoot though, excellent for running obs.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

There was a bug in EQ (among others) back in the day that permitted you to equip items in incorrect slots while, temporarily, duplicating the object you placed. So for instance you could take one weapon you had, duplicate it into both weapon slots, and upon 'removing' it from the incorrect slot, your other weapon would reappear (so you couldn't actually lose anything). This led to some interesting things like people equipping their best gear item (chest, or whatever) to all slots, artificially increasing their power. Best though was with Monks. As this timeframe was toward the later end of Planes of Power, there was an item you could get near end-game, it was an inventory clicker that summoned these throwing stars. The stars themselves were very good stats in general (as was everything else from the end-game zone) but they had a unique trait in that they were VERY high damage:time ratio. They were throwing items so it really didn't matter, but with this bug you could equip them in your primary/secondary weapon slots. With two equipped you could do about as much DPS as another 10 or so DPS classes with zero effort. Lasted about 5 hours so not many got to exploit it.

There was another, also in EQ, where for a day or so Rangers (mixed melee/ranged bow-users/dual wielders) were bugged, as they often were, and their ranged attacks had zero delay. Normally there was a button to press for each 'bow shot' but something got screwy and the button would never truly depress. That led to people building macros that just spammed it 100x on one press. Lotta bosses dropped from solo Rangers that day.

 

[Rebel_L]

Warcraft 2 had a few ways to cheap out the AI either via pathing problems or by going after their peons at the gold mines

The original railroad tycoon let you run up a big enough debt before you started that your cash got so far negative that it would go positive giving you basically unlimited money to build railroad.

Lords of the Realm 2, once you had enough counties you could ramp the tax rate up in all of them and the negative happiness penalty could also be tripped through the max negative into the positive giving you tons of money and happiness.

Those are probably the most memorable for me, but there was usually something in most games that could be abused in a way not intended.

 

[GoodRevrnd]

The pinnacle of the useful glitch was skiing in Tribes.

 

[zinfamous]

Col what'shisname's Treasure room at the end of that Borderlands 1 DLC, where you can crouch and fall through a hole in the floor, that allows you to loot the entire place of 60 or however many chests, without the ~3 minute timer. Add that to the BL1 version of Gibbed that can give you infinite pack space, you can loot for days.

Borderlands has a lot of funky tricks. I think it is only in the TPS? where you can clone functions of one previous equipped gun onto your currently equipped one, through some tricky weapon swapping maneuvering. This was one easy way to break the game.

Also, when Digistruct Peak/OP levels were first released for BL2, you could glitch through the entire map from the starter area, by grenade jumping your way over a vending machine, through the wall, and to the last door before the final boss fight. Great way to max your OP levels if you tend to play solo, because that map can be extremely hard on the higher OP levels, but the final boss really isn't. No shame in glitching my way to OP 8 that way I want the best loot, always. (I think I managed to solo my way through OP 4 or maybe 3, though)

 

[thejunglegod]

I used the dragon tail glitch to get an OP sword in Dark Souls. Wasn't enough though. Uninstalled during Kapra demon.

 

[mikeymikec]

I don't know if this counts as a bug per se, but I wrote into an Amiga magazine once with a tactic I discovered for the game 'Populous 2': One of the godly powers that you could sometimes use was to make trees grow, the intended consequence being that you put them in your own followers' land and you would gain power through doing positive things to your followers. However, a likely unintended consequence of this was that if you put trees in the enemy's land densely enough, then use either the most basic fire powers of 'column of fire' or 'rain of fire', then if the trees were close enough together, one would catch fire and the rest would go up like you flooded the entire area with petrol, and it happens too fast to react to, and short of the enemy lighting the trees himself or getting rid of the land, there's no counter-tactic.

 

[Oyeve]

I recall playing Duke Nukem 3D via dial-up with my buddy and hitting control-K or something and it would allow you to view the world through your opponents eyes or something like that, thereby knowing his exact location and being able to sneak up behind and obliterate.

 

[zinfamous]

I don't know if this counts as a bug per se, but I wrote into an Amiga magazine once with a tactic I discovered for the game 'Populous 2': One of the godly powers that you could sometimes use was to make trees grow, the intended consequence being that you put them in your own followers' land and you would gain power through doing positive things to your followers. However, a likely unintended consequence of this was that if you put trees in the enemy's land densely enough, then use either the most basic fire powers of 'column of fire' or 'rain of fire', then if the trees were close enough together, one would catch fire and the rest would go up like you flooded the entire area with petrol, and it happens too fast to react to, and short of the enemy lighting the trees himself or getting rid of the land, there's no counter-tactic.

Oh Lord of Light, for the Night is Dark, and full of Terrors.