5 Games That Made Huge Comebacks
Some games are great right away. Some are awful and never get better, but every once in awhile you get the cardiac cat of games. The comebacks kids. Way back when I was blogging on my own free-never-used-much website I wrote an article about the 5 biggest dissapointments in gaming. This is, in some ways, a follow up to that. These are the five games that made huge recovories after shaky starts.
5. Tom Clancy’s The Division
The division was advertised as a tactical, mmo-lite, third person shooter with intense squad based combat when it was first being shown and marketed. What we really got was game that was a mess. The loot system was bad, there were a hilarious number of bugs, the PVP was totally broken, and the game suffered, but the core systems were solid enough that it was able to maintain a solid player base none the less. Over time bugs were patched, the loot system was overhauled eventually adding gear sets and an even wider variety of guns, and the game improved with new content releases including a battle-royale lite survival mode. The Division went from a broken looter shooter to one of the better examples of that genre to have ever been made. The PVP balance issues never really did get completely sorted, but I personally went from regretting ever buying the game to putting in around a hundred hours and getting to the late game grind while having a great time clearing the streets of NYC with my friends.
4. Ark Survival Evolved
Ark is an interesting one. Much like other games you’ll see on this list it released feeling extremely buggy, and somewhat devoid of content. It also controversially was sold during it’s early access period at $25 and upon it’s full release jumped all the way up to $60. It also has a lot of content, maps, dinosaurs, weapons, buildings etc. that are paywalled behind DLC expansions and takes up a whopping 200 gigs of space with everything installed. All of that said… where else can you hunt Mammoths with a pack of sabretooth cats and also ride a T-Rex or playing on a totally different map use your Dragon to scout out an enemy tribes base before raiding them using a back of raptors? I mostly play this game single player because I just like taming dinosaurs and don’t want to deal with griefers, but it is so satisfying when you work as a team to take down a Spinosaurus. Ark always had that going for it, and has always had a high number of players but for a very long time it was rated as mixed on steam due to poor optimization and bugs. Fast forward five years from it’s early access debut, and it’s now rated at very positive over the last month at the time of writing, and 78% overall. It’s come a long way in five years.
3. The Star Wars Battlefront Series
Starwars Battlefront was a beloved series before EA got involved. Where else could you mow down rebel scum with your e-11 blaster while gloriously serving the empire, or play as Luke Skywalker and take on waves of storm troopers. EA managed to sully it’s reputation by not having a campaign (at first) and by introducing loot boxes to the franchise. Both games followed a similar trajectory having fun but shallow gameplay and feeling generally empty on launch, but both entries are now solid titles with fun gameplay and a distinct lack of loot boxes. EA would do well to learn from the community reaction they’ve had in this game by not putting loot boxes in what is likely an inevitable follow up. I’m not confident that in that though.
2. Destiny
Destiny didn’t follow the trend of live-service games releasing devoid of content and bland but with a solid enough core for people to cling on to. It practically invented it. On release destiny felt oddly quiet. The game had solid Halo-style gunplay thanks to being made by Bungie, but it didn’t really feel fully fleshed out. The AI were either just bullet sponges, or there were tons of them to account for the fact that they actual AI itself was very dumb (more like an artificial idiot! HA! Got eem!) and the loot system was not really exciting with reskinned and recolored guns without much variety. I could have easily just described a number of looter-shooters, but where Destiny separated itself was it had fun multiplayer modes and introduced a lot of content over time fixing the empty feeling with new weapons and armor as you played on. Thing is, it did so buy introducing all of the content it felt like they had cut out as paid DLC. It wasn’t really until The Taken King came out that Destiny truly lived up to it’s potential however. The expansion brought in new players, as well as brought back veterans as it had what was one of the series’ best story arcs and introduced a wide variety of new loot. This wasn’t without controversy though. The Taken King could be bought as a bundle with the base game and all DLC at $80. If you had paid the full sixty on release and bought each expansion individually you’d have paid $170. More than double the cost… yikes. Destiny 2 seems to have followed a similar path despite Bungie having shook free of Activision, so despite our hopes it seems maybe big daddy Activision wasn’t holding the series back as much as many had speculated.
No Man’s Sky
Oh, look. Tim’s writing an article and it talks about No Man’s Sky. Again. I sunk time into this game on release. I wrote articles about the game, and called it one of the biggest disappointments in gaming. I stand by those words. At the time No Man’s Sky had been a general let down. A procedurally generated universe filled with new places to explore, animals to discover, and alien’s to engage with and battle. Sounds great! And it was. And it wasn’t. See it did have alot of that in the game, but it was like a puddle the size of an ocean. Very broad, very shallow. Much of what had been promised in the lead up to the games release was lacking. Multi-player, large scale space battles, freighters, none of that was there and there were more features to boot. Sean Murray had built up our hopes and dashed them against the rocks… or had he?
At this point Murray and the Hello Games crew had three options. They could take the money and run, they could sell us the content that was missing, or they could put their heads down, stop talking about the game, and behind the scenes introduce features that were missing, and more. That last one is exactly what they did. The Foundations update brought in vehicles, Pathfinder brought in ground vehicles, Atlas Rises added around 30 hours of story content, and two years after Next added true multiplayer, bringing the game much more in line with what they had envisioned for the game. There are other updates that added even more features, and the game continues to grow. I only recently started getting back into the game despite some friends telling me I’ve needed to try it for almost literally two years. I’m so glad that I finally did, and I’m so excited to play the game that more closely resembles the trailer that left me in awe all the way back at E3 2014.
-Tim