Video games that were bad upon release but were then greatly improved?

[-Sentinel-]

I've been thinking about all the highly-anticipated video games that ended up disappointing thousands of gamers. Perhaps they were buggy, perhaps they did not have as much content as people expected, perhaps their production was rushed, etc. But here's the thing: although many such games later got patched or received additional content in response to criticism, the first impression will always be a dark stain on their reputation.

What are the video games that are worth a reassessment? Games that were bad when they were released, but were eventually patched into something decent while people weren't looking?

[Floogal]

Not sure how "highly-anticipated" it was, but Kirby Star Allies was quite mediocre upon release. Compared to past titles, it was more hollow & lacking in content, and easier too. A year later, after several completely-free DLC updates, the game now has more challenging content & is a nostalgia paradise for fans of the series.

[Giggling Ghast]

Did Fallout 76 actually get "greatly improved"? From what I've heard, it went from godawful to just barely tolerable.

[-Sentinel-]

Did Fallout 76 actually get "greatly improved"? From what I've heard, it went from godawful to just barely tolerable.

I'm just naming it as an example of a game that did not live up to the hype; sorry if that was unclear. I haven't actually played any of those games, so I wouldn't know how bad they really were and whether they got improved.

I think I'll just remove the examples from my post.

[Thomas Cardew]

Diablo 3 was a general mess on release even beyond it's vast under estimation of required server. I don't play it any more and I wouldn't say when I stopped it was in an amazing place... But it was definitely greatly improved from launch. The excision of Jay Wilson and a lot of the 'creative' elements he insisted on solved a lot of the problems. I can't say I'd recommend any Blizzard game, mostly due to how the company behaves, and in genre my preferences lie more towards the POE style but it's a better game now. Maybe even something decent to damn it with faint praise.

[Wraith]

No Man's Sky is probably the best example of the last generation, if not the last several generations.

The Internet Historian has done a pretty comprehensive list of what went wrong with the game, why, and how it has subsequently been vastly improved, and I highly recommend watching the video just for the entertainment value as well as the lore.

Warframe was a little bit like this - released in 2013 with some quite janky physics and graphics, limited character classes and repetitive locations, it wasn't bad per say but it didn't compare to the other MMO giants about at the time. Nowadays it's hugely improved in every way and regularly gets held up as an exemplar of free-to-play gaming.

[Giggling Ghast]

While I don't play it, Star Wars Battlefront II has apparently gone from mediocre cash grab that generated massive controversy to a pretty good game. Pay-to-win mechanics were largely stripped out and a lot of free content was released.

The story mode apparently still sucks, though.

https://www.slashgear.com/star-wars-...mess-21604002/

[Hunter Noventa]

Final Fantasy XIV is pretty much a textbook example of this, the 1.0 release was bad in innumerable ways,but not only did they make good on promises to fix it, they salvaged it into a much better game that turned into the best Final Fantasy in decades.

[warty goblin]

Battlefront 2's campaign isn't so much bad as it is supremely mediocre. There are decent moments, but it's super easy and the AI is completely uninteresting to fight.

I haven't played it in years, but aggressive mediocrity holds for the MP as well, or at least it did. A big kicker was that the main game mode was built around these hyper-scripted maps, where the attackers had to complete exactly the same objectives in exactly the same order every time. One of the usual strengths of multiplayer is that because of players trying new stuff and generally being unpredictable, playing a ton of games on the same map can still feel fresh. Here the objective design was so set in stone there was none of that, just the same fights in the same places over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Just the words Naboo Palace are enough to make me twitch.

And the fights were mostly grenade spam (again, Naboo. Oh god, Naboo). When not being exploded by xxx_VaPeKiLLeR420_xxx, you had available a wide range of not interesting guns. Being a modern FPS, there had to be a bunch of statistically almost identical guns you could unlock, all of merged into an indistinct grey morass of "the automatic ones" or "a machine gun thing."

But wait, there's also special abilities and vehicles and heroes! Special abilities generally just meant you got to use a different, marginally less boring gun briefly, beforeit went back on cooldown. But of course there were a ton of very slightly different special ability guns, which merged back into the great grey morass. Vehicles were actually pretty decent, nothing stellar, but solid. Heroes just meant that xxx_VaPeKiLLeR420_xxx could take a break from regular genading you, so he could grenade you as Boba Fett for a while, something I'm sure every fanboy and girl has dreamed of.

And the other thing is it wasn't even all that Star Wars. Like the screen shots look mega Star Wars, but the actual game is dudes running around with deflector shields on their HMGs, and about 10 grenades exploding every second and for some reason everybody has a jetpack.

[Zevox]

Going off secondhand knowledge here, but Rome 2: Total War is the first that comes to mind for me. I've been told repeatedly, both here and by an IRL friend, that when that game launched, it was in pretty bad shape. But when I picked it up a couple of years ago, it was really solid, a worthy successor to the original I'd say, and by all accounts that's because of a lot of fixing that went on in between.

Similarly, Street Fighter 5 is one that I know a lot of fighting game fans cite there. I can definitely attest that it had a rough as hell launch, with a fairly small roster and very few offline modes. No arcade mode (the traditional main single-player mode of the genre), a sad excuse for a "story mode" that included only brief snippets (that often didn't amount to an actual story) for each individual character, and a survival mode that mostly just a frustrating thing they expected you to do to unlock each character's alternate colors (you only started with two color schemes each by default). To top it off, the online was bad, widely cited as the worst implementation of rollback netcode ever. Over time, they added in both arcade mode and an actual story mode for free, greatly expanded the roster (and with the release of Champion Edition you can even get all of the DLC characters and most of the costumes for a legitimately reasonable price, either as a new purchase or an upgrade), and... well, improved the online, even if most would still call it a bad implementation of rollback and consider it more comparable to good delay-based netcode online than other rollback games. There's also discussions about the game's balance that factor into this, though I can't speak from much experience there, as it is not one of the fighting games I've logged a lot of time with personally.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Final Fantasy XIV is pretty much a textbook example of this, the 1.0 release was bad in innumerable ways,but not only did they make good on promises to fix it, they salvaged it into a much better game that turned into the best Final Fantasy in decades.

Yeah.

They also had the audacity to literally blow up the world as part of their reboot. I mean their trailer for 2.0 was "the world as you know has ended (rather epically), and no one remembers who you were."

And even then, post 1.0, they've gone a long way. 2.0 was kinda meh (even though light-years better than 1.0), 3.0 was pretty good, 4.0 was ok (not as good as the highs of 3.0), and then 5.x has been amazing.

[BaronOfHell]

Heroes of Might and Magic V

[Resileaf]

Going off secondhand knowledge here, but Rome 2: Total War is the first that comes to mind for me. I've been told repeatedly, both here and by an IRL friend, that when that game launched, it was in pretty bad shape. But when I picked it up a couple of years ago, it was really solid, a worthy successor to the original I'd say, and by all accounts that's because of a lot of fixing that went on in between.

Yup, specifically the release of the Emperor Edition was the moment the game was widely considered to be good.

[Gnoman]

An older but famous example is the harcore flight simulator Falcon 4.0. When it released in 1998, it was the hotly anticipated release - the latest in a line of games that dated back to 1984 with the MSX and original IBM PC. The previous game, Falcon 3.0 was a juggernaut of the genre (close to a million units sold, an astounding sum for such a niche market in 1995) that set new standards in flight fidelity and dynamic campaigns.


Falcon 4.0 was one of the buggiest pieces of software ever offered for commercial sale. Reviews were great when the reviewers could get it to work, but more often than not you'd be unable to complete a single mission -let alone the highly-detailed and much-vaunted dynamic campaign- without a crash to desktop. Sales were abysmal, and effectively killed the series.


In 2000, a source code leak led to massive fan patches, which were eventually bundled into an officially licensed sequel, Falcon 4.0: Allied Force in 2005 - still not considered perfect (mostly due to the change in theater), but massively more stable than the original. Simultaneously, fan recreation of the engine proceeded and eventually produced a multiply-forked set of derivatives that are in active development to this day and quite well regarded by those of us who care about such things.

[The Glyphstone]

If we're letting fan patches count, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines was the first thing that jumped into my head on seeing the thread title.

[veti]

Windows Vista.

... I'll see myself out.

[factotum]

If we're talking games that were bug-ridden messes on release that were eventually patched, I nominate Frontier: First Encounters, the sequel to Frontier: Elite 2. The publisher in that case (Gametek) weren't happy with the progress being made on the game, so they went ahead and released an unfinished version Frontier Developments sent them so they could get it out the door. Needless to say, this version was not great, and since we're talking 1995 here, it wasn't like you could easily jump online and download a patch--I got one sent to me, via post, on a floppy disk when I complained, but even then there were issues; the one that stopped me playing the game was a story segment where you go to visit the Thargoid race, and they take away your weapons and shields. Unfortunately the code that was supposed to give those *back* failed, so I was left with a 400 light year journey to make in a crippled ship...

I understand they later ironed out all those issues, but since I'd finished playing at that point I never bothered to get another patch.

[Gnoman]

I had the DOS CD version - which was actually worse. Still put hours and hours of hours and hours into it, but the bugs were bad.

[NeoVid]

I refer to the concept of patching a game so hard that it's basically replaced by another game that's actually fun as the "Diablo 3/Final Fantasy 14 Method." For more recent examples, the big ones I know of are No Man's Sky and Fallout 76. I haven't personally played NMS, but FO76's two years of updates made it a better Fallout game that FO4 in most respects... which isn't that high a bar, but compared to how it started, it's a massive improvement.

[zlefin]

Counting the fan patch, Master of Orion 3; at least from what I've heard it was a horrible mess on release and for a long time thereafter. It wasn't until multiple fan patches that it turned into something decent (not to everyone tastes still, but at least ok); I've played the fan patched version and enjoyed it.

[Taevyr]

Imperator: Rome seems to be going in this direction from what I heard: upon release,it was generally seen as a shallow map-painter that had skin-deep mechanics from practically every other Paradox title which never quite went anywhere, and lacked the flavour many people had expected from a Grand Strategy set during the Hellenistic Period. It was basically a worse EU: Rome, in my opinion, as at least EU had a focus rather than "let's throw all the best mechanics on a heap without proper implementation and it'll work".

Since then, it's gotten a new development team, greater focus on flavor and specific mechanics that aren't just bland cut-and-pastes from other Paradox titles, and from what I've heard its looking quite decent these days. Won't be unrefunding it any time soon, but I might eventually if the improvements keep coming.

[danzibr]

Oh yeah, FFXV. It didn't become truly great imo, but the extra content and being able to switch characters did greatly improve the game.

[sihnfahl]

Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor.

When they patched it, I think it was fun.

Initial release was such a buggy mess that included the bomb of trying to uninstall meant you risked destroying your OS. (Something they, ah, had to release a custom uninstaller to fix)


Or how about the Island issue in the original Black and White, where, when triggered, meant your creature would never regain its lost size and power, making it permanently useless ... and therefore, the game unwinnable?

[GentlemanVoodoo]

Skyrim fits this. More issues were noted on home console versions from what I remember but there were several PC related bugs as well. Over time several patch releases were done by Bethesda but didn't fix all the problems. Luckily there was the massive mod community that fixed a lot of the issues and also expanded the game in so many ways.

[sihnfahl]

Skyrim fits this. More issues were noted on home console versions from what I remember but there were several PC related bugs as well. Over time several patch releases were done by Bethesda but didn't fix all the problems. Luckily there was the massive mod community that fixed a lot of the issues and also expanded the game in so many ways.

Given Bethesda's behavior, their Fallout and Elder Scrolls releases inevitably had bugs that were game-stopping or just plain amusing (like the giant's initial launch effect being off by enough to cause you to attain orbit). It really has been a lot of the mod community to save their bacon.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Given Bethesda's behavior, their Fallout and Elder Scrolls releases inevitably had bugs that were game-stopping or just plain amusing (like the giant's initial launch effect being off by enough to cause you to attain orbit). It really has been a lot of the mod community to save their bacon.

Thus it has been since the first games. I never played Daggerscroll or Arena, but Morrowind had huge bugs and flaws that got patched by the community better and sooner than officially (if at all). So did Oblivion.

The only thing that really keeps those games strong is their ease of modding and releasing the Construction Kits IMO. The stories and gameplay have always been repetitive and kinda bland (Morrowind was the best for story and world, but the gameplay sucked). At least IMO.

[factotum]

Skyrim fits this.

I'm not sure it does, because even on release and with all the bugs, Skyrim was still a good game.

[Wraith]

I'm going to suggest Fallout 3, and I'm ready to accept that I may be overruled.

When it first came out, it was sensationalised as THE NEW FALLOUT GAME, the first one in nearly 15 years; long-standing fans were dying to get back into the universe, and new players were attracted to the interestingly quirky first-person shooter. Although commercially successful, it never really pleased anyone - the graphics and physics were janky, the story was linear, it was yet another buggy Bethesda game, and I probably don't need to go into detail about the uproar from the ending.

A couple of years later however, the Game of the Year edition was released with a bunch of bug-fixes, two DLCs and an alternative ending that directly addressed some criticisms of the fanbase. While Fallout 3 was divisive, I don't think I have since heard anyone complain about the 'fixed' version - except that it hasn't aged well on modern computers, which isn't bad for a 12 year old game.

I *liked* the original ending - while many people complained, an unhappy end to the story is how Fallout had always gone before then and I appreciated the echo in F3. Then again, I'm old and jaded and I appreciate that others thought it was a deal-breaker.

In a similar category, I will not accept Mass Effect 3! Despite being victim to the same controversy, it was never a bad game before that - everything except the last 10 minutes of the plot has been repeatedly celebrated, even after it was fixed in a DLC, which just goes to show how important landing the ending is for big games and how much can be forgiven if you get it right!

[Clertar]

Kingdom Come: Deliverance was apparently pretty bad on release because of both game-breaking and just annoying bugs. Worse on console than on PC, or so I hear.

[Gnoman]

I *liked* the original ending - while many people complained, an unhappy end to the story is how Fallout had always gone before then and I appreciated the echo in F3. Then again, I'm old and jaded and I appreciate that others thought it was a deal-breaker.

Fallout 1 had a bittersweet ending where you weren't allowed to go home, but you got to decide how your character took it - you could agree with the Overseer, rage against him, or even summarily execute him.


Meahwhile, Fallout 2 doesn't have a bad ending. Either the Chosen One becomes Elder almost immediately, or does so after the Elder lives for several more years and dies peacefully. In either case, you turn your village into a paradise that will eventually become a great city.

Fallout Tactics had some similarities in ending to Fallout 3, but you had multiple choices in how you went about it.


Fallout 3's original ending had no choice. You couldn't sacrifice a companion, or have a companion who was completely immune to radiation take care of the problem with nobody being harmed. You had to either commit suicide-by-radiation or die when the thingy exploded. It wasn't in keeping with the older games in any way shape or form. Allegedly, not being like the other games was the entire point - one of the leads didn't think Fallout 2 was nihlistic and 'YOU ARE ALL DOOMED! THERE IS NO HOPE. DESPAIR!" enough.