6 Glitches That Turn Video Games Infinitely Weirder

6 Assassin's Creed Valhalla Accidentally Frames Nudist Colonies As Inescapable Cults

Assassin's Creed Valhalla is the first in the series to portray a nudist colony, which means it's the series' most progressive entry to date. Or is it?

On one of their days as a very discrete pillage-happy assassin, players might come across Winchell, a nudist in need of help. Winchell has players pick up a bunch of clothes without telling them why. Surprisingly, Winchell isn't trying to weird anyone out with his nude mysteries; it's the mission itself that's cursed (by XXI century's standards, at least). Various players naturally presumed they just had to get rid of the clothes, so they tossed them into a river. Slight problem: that's not actually what they were supposed to do, and doing so makes the clothes impossible to retrieve.

While taking a break from the confines of clothes is a mighty tempting offer, players should really repress any possibly awakened desires to pursue the nudist lifestyle and meeting up with nudists themselves. Not for prudish reasons, but getting into the nudist colony will trigger a cutscene where our Viking will start dancing in a way that'll overwrite autosaves non-stop until players reload to an earlier save -- if they have one.

5 Call Of Duty Unintentionally Became an Adaptation of the MCU

The Call of Duty franchise won big in the Battle Royale scene with Call Of Duty: Warzone, but exploiters quickly made the game go from its already tolerated over-the-topness to full-on superhero levels. Warzone features a drop called juggernaut, which is the best armor in the game. Juggernauts are absurdly strong, so players are only supposed to get one per team -- if they're lucky.

However, Gamers decided they're all about sharing and thus found an exploit that allows them to make everyone on the team turn into goddamn Iron Man and mow down dozens of enemy players in a David versus Godzilla type scenario.

But wait, it gets worse. Check out this exploiter getting a kill so sneaky that even the KillCam fails to see him.

The exploit renders players not just invisible but also impervious to bullets.

And while this looks like a sure-win situation in a shooter, there's a hilarious silver lining to it. The exploit is not that hard to perform, meaning games will likely end with various invisible idiots completely incapable of finding -- let alone killing -- the remaining exploiters while gas kills all but one of them and makes them poop in their equipment.

4 Ultima Online's Christmas Unmiracle

The famed old-timey MMO Ultima Online takes place in Britannia, a fantasy world different from our own in every single way except for how its inhabitants somehow also celebrate Christmas.

That apparently came as a surprise not just to players but also for the game's insanely resourceful developers who came up with a rushed move to introduce Christmas trees in the game. As they didn't have actual Christmas tree art, one dev just made regular pine trees spawn little gemstones that twinkled because of a script constantly making them appear and go away.

They were then kind enough to gift trees to naughty and nice players alike, which meant they were now dealing with thousands of trees, each sending the server twenty callbacks every second. That's not much for a server nowadays (hopefully), but it was quite a lot for '98 Internet when data packets were still carried on the backs of tiny spiders via world wide webs. The quick-and-easy trees crashed the entire service, effectively ruining the Christmas of so many people actively trying to avoid Christmas.

3 A FIFA 21 Exploit Makes It Look Like Soccer Has Been Taken Over By Dumb Doping

FIFA 2021 is great because it allows US audiences to enter an alternate fantasy universe that features a weird re-imagining of football where the game is actually played with balls and feet. It's bonkers, but it's not perfect. Just like in the real thing, it looks like some players are getting into drugs to push themselves to peak performance.

In reality, though, it's just a coding oversight. The weird part is that instead of making characters ultra-fast or capable of shooting fireballs that push the goalies through the net, like our Call of Duty-fied brains made us expect, super attackers are just dominating with an ultra dumb move called the "chip shot." The super move is a simple slow-but-high ball that goes over the keeper's head and seemingly stuns him for a short while because he fails to catch it 100% of the time. 

This programming blind spot has resulted in some goals so hilariously easy to prevent they would probably end successful careers in real life.

2 Dragon Age's Silent Pandemic

For nearly a decade, BioWare has been known for releasing disappointing games following the coincidental release of its main developers. A long time ago, in this very galaxy, however, BioWare games were known for their great plots and well-written characters. Dragon Age: Inquisition was one such case -- unless your playthrough were to get bit by the "banter bug," that is. That's not an enemy insect that players have to fight at great narrative cost, but a glitch that causes the game's otherwise happy-go-bantery characters to go on an apparent vow of silence. 

Though the story cutscenes retain their lines, a big part of the game's heart comes from quips during gameplay, which the "Banter bug" simply cuts. Ever so hellbent on killing the fun, the bug sometimes even kills the game's music.

Fans quickly identified the bug because Inquisition came out at a time when BioWare was held in such high regard that instead of blasting the company on Steam's review page, fans just messaged the game's help page feeling like the company wouldn't release a game without immersive character interactions.

Identifying the bug was naturally the first step to solve the problem, but it came at a cost: Banter paranoia. That's not another bug, but an actual real-life problem that left players worriedly wondering whether they'd caught the bug whenever they spent a few minutes without hearing from the characters.

1 Takemura Solves Cyberpunk 2077's Problems by Not Letting You Play

Cyberpunk 2077 had a launch troubled by seemingly all of the glitches. Luckily, they quickly came up with the release of patch 1.1, which fixed the old glitches ... and added a few more. One of the new glitches is Takemura's odd call, in which the character Takemura calls players during the main quest and stays in dreadful silence. Forever.

(Relevant clip is 2:20 through forever.)

Takemura has the reputation of being a badass, which must mean something in a world already so tough that even its paraplegics can walk. Calling players just to dismissively listen to their despair doesn't seem too out of character, but that's not it. The never-ending nature of the call prevents players from advancing in the campaign or from even enjoying the other bugs the game has to offer. There are only two known solutions: 

1) is quitting, reloading the save, and hoping he doesn't do it again.

2) Is quitting, loading the game into a dumpster, and playing anything else.

Top Image: Ubisoft, CD Projekt Red