From nothing to everything: Games that rose from the ashes

Halo: The Master Chief Collection
It was me, my cousin and some old Gamereactor colleagues such as Steinholtz who were waiting to play Halo: The Master Chief Collection, which contained the Halo suite (Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3 and Halo 4 - all updated and collected in a single, neat package for Xbox One) and a complete remaster of the superb part two. But... then the game launched. It launched in a sorry state to say the least The multiplayer mode was so broken that we barely even managed to get a match. Everything was buggy, at its best it was really bad, and even the campaign was affected. Everyone was furious, of course, and my cousin sold his Xbox in anger. But instead of abandoning the project, 343 and Microsoft chose to actually plough the necessary resources into bringing the collection to life.

And so it was. In small steps over the course of several years, patch after patch was released that slowly led to the game starting to reach its full potential. And the failure made 343 Industries more receptive to feedback, spoiling their community with both Halo: Reach and Halo 3: ODST for free. The rest is history, to this day the collection continues to be optimised and instead of a death knell for Master Chief, Halo: The Master Chief Collection is the best Halo product on the market. Persistence and humility can turn a failure into a triumph, and a better proof is hard to find.

No Man's Sky
When No Man's Sky was announced in 2013, the genre was in a slump. There weren't that many space simulators being released and the concept at the time was fantastic. Being able to move around full-sized planets, fly into space and visit billions of worlds in a galaxy with different biomes, fauna and flora. It sounded too good to be true. A bit like when Star Citizen was announced in 2012. It seemed that there was an audience for this type of game that wanted new experiences. No Man's Sky was launched in 2016 after delays due to a troubled development. Criticism was unforgiving because the title had gone from having a dedicated and narrow interest behind it, to becoming a game almost everyone was talking about. It had technical problems, the planets didn't look very good at all, and the wildlife looked woeful. Several of the features and trailers that Sean Murray had promised the community never saw the light of day. Many also criticised the lack of things to do in the game.

Then something happened that shocked the gaming world. Hello Games fell silent and continued to develop the game in secret. Every year they released new content in both large and small packages. Expansions that traditionally cost money with other developers were given away for free and a new business model emerged. Although the launch was a disaster, the game sold well with over ten million copies. Sean and the Hello Games team also started communicating again, but not about the game's flaws or its launch, but about all the new things they kept adding. The community's opinion of the title also began to swing from negative to positive. Especially as more and more new content came to the game for free. The more new elements the developers added, the more positive opinions about the title. That's what I would argue is the beauty of the story behind No Man's Sky. It went from a disliked game, to getting a rare and nice vindication. Today, No Man's Sky is a great example of a game getting its due. It is particularly relevant in our time, where many other titles are left broken to their fate.

Destiny
Expectations were sky-high. Destiny - Bungie's first project after leaving the Halo series behind, was marketed as an epic adventure with revolutionary gameplay that combined classic online role-playing elements with a first-person shooter and would take place in a rich world that would grow over the years. The hype was huge to say the least. But, we all remember the huge disappointment around the world when Destiny turned out to be both content-poor and downright boring. Instead of an epic sci-fi adventure, we got a script that a seven-year-old could have written better, characters that had less personality than a potted plant and where not even a star name like Peter Dinklage could deliver anything other than a monotonous and rubbish experience. With everything from frustrating loot systems, repetitive missions and pointless grinding, the future didn't look bright for Bungie's big gamble.

But unlike other companies who would have rather pulled the plug, Bungie chose to take a step back and listen to the criticism. After several updates, two mediocre DLCs and the replacement of Dinklage in favour of the much more experienced Nolan North - Bungie managed to turn the ship around when they released the game's third DLC, The Taken King. With it, they were ultimately able to deliver the experience that Destiny should have been from the start.

Assassin's Creed: Unity
When the first Assassin's Creed saw the light of day in 2007 (having started its development as Prince of Persia: Assassin), one of Ubisoft's goals was to develop a new series that would truly harness the power of the then-new seventh generation of consoles, delivering a title with unprecedented graphics. While the game had a lot of flaws and lessons to learn along the way as the series grew, there's no denying the huge impact it made, and in many ways changed the future direction of Ubisoft that we still see traces of today. As the years went by and the series started to lose steam a little after many annual releases, Ubisoft wanted to give Assassin's Creed new life and do a bit of a soft reboot in the form of Assassin's Creed: Unity when it was released in 2014. The series had seen the return of its mother Jade Raymond, and as with the first game in the series, they wanted to deliver a game for the then new eighth console generation, which once again harnessed all the power of the hardware with a title that would be graphically unrivalled.

Ubisoft undoubtedly delivered just that, as Assassin's Creed: Unity still looks very good today and could be released in 2025 and definitely hold its own. But alongside the huge graphical boost, Ubisoft also wanted to pack the streets of the game full of people as far as the eye could see (as Assassin's Creed: Unity is set during the French Revolution) and also have a 60 frames per second frame rate as icing on the cake. Despite over four years of development, however, the game was far from fully optimised, as it proved difficult for the developers to push the consoles so much graphically and at the same time aim for a stable 60 frames per second, especially when the game's huge crowds were visible on the streets. However, there was no way for the developers to get Ubisoft management to delay Assassin's Creed: Unity and the only outcome of this was complete chaos when the game was released on 13 November 2014.

The only reasonable question to ask yourself, especially if you were there on day one, was whether anything was working properly at all? The crashes were constant, characters in the cutscenes weren't there except for their two eyeballs floating around like two ping pong balls, the big crowds in the streets disappeared and came back out of nowhere, save files became corrupted, the in-game music could suddenly echo empty, and everything felt like one long fever dream to witness and all you wanted to do was wake up. This was also the same month that Halo: The Master Chief Collection was released, and both of these games would go down in history as two of the most broken games ever at launch. Fortunately, as you can probably guess from the article title, there is a light at the end of the tunnel even if it took a long time to get there. Ubisoft, of course, had no choice but to apologise for the hell it had unleashed and promised to fix the game with future updates and patches. They also offered the underrated expansion Dead Kings for free and did their best to repair the damage they had caused without really succeeding for years.

On the one hand, it took years before Assassin's Creed: Unity actually reached a playable state (but even today it is still buggy in places) but on the other hand, unfortunately, the series' mother Jade Raymond was lost for the second time in the middle of this mess. One way to fix many of the problems in the game was to greatly reduce the crowds on the streets of Paris and to slow down the image update to only 30 frames per second on console. However, it is now possible to enjoy 60 frames per second again via FPS boost if you own an Xbox Series S|X. Ubisoft also did a lot of tinkering under the graphics engine hood of its Unity engine and this resulted in Assassin's Creed: Unity finally getting much closer to the state it would have been in at the premiere. Despite this, much of the damage had already been done and when Assassin's Creed: Syndicate was released the year after Unity with low sales as a result, Ubisoft was forced to pull the handbrake and review the entire strategy for the series, which until then had been their only guaranteed cash cow.

The broken state of Unity and the low sales of Syndicate meant that for the first time a new annual main game was not released in 2016 ('only' the film Assassin's Creed and the Ezio Collection and Chronicles trilogy were released then) and it gave Ubisoft time to chalk out a new path for the series that was more role-playing based. Because while support studios under Ubisoft were fixing Assassin's Creed: Unity, the main studio developing it (Ubisoft Montreal) was looking ahead and chose to once again do a bit of a soft reboot of the series in the form of Assassin's Creed: Origins.

Looking back on Assassin's Creed: Unity a decade later, it's undoubtedly a troubled middle child in the series. Despite being mostly fixed, it took too long to get there, and by the time it did, Assassin's Creed: Origins had already become the new fan favourite, causing Unity to be forgotten about for a few years. Nowadays, however, the tune is slightly different since Ubisoft has once again taken a little more time to develop the series' latest game Assassin's Creed: Shadows. Unity is often mentioned as being underrated and there is a growing number of fans who want to see a return of the parkour that the game had. You didn't get that in Shadows, but give it some time and a million annual releases, and I think if you pray long enough, it will happen. However, Assassin's Creed: Unity has been through a long journey this decade, going from being the fans' most hated to being a bit of a forgotten favourite. It's definitely had its revenge in many ways, but time will simply tell if it will be considered even more underrated as the years go by, or if it will once again fall away into the eternal oblivion of the gaming world.

Battlefield 2042
This is a slightly controversial point. Far from everyone is happy with how Battlefield 2042 works today, but it's undeniable that it's gone from being an utterly abominable broken bug-fest to at least having a relatively stable player base that finds it good enough to return day after day. But let's rewind the tape a little - to the beginning of Battlefield 2042's infancy. What was it that actually went wrong? Apart from being a bug-fest deluxe, the idea of the new specialists wasn't immediately welcomed. The new 'modern' elements went a different way and deviated from the traditional Battlefield ingredients, throwing in grapple hooks and 'cool' skins. There was also a lack of content, the maps were not considered up to scratch and the game received a lukewarm reception from the gaming press. We gave the game a five in our review, which is considerably lower than what you would hope for a game of Battlefield's calibre. With these factors in mind, the game flopped and no one, or at least very few, played it.

Fast forward the tape a few years. After diligent patching and love from Dice, Battlefield 2042 is actually a decent game. Far better than what it was when it was released. Instead of abandoning their product, they chose to listen to their audience and fix some of the flaws. That said, it's not perfect today either - but it's a game that would definitely have been rewarded with a higher rating than a five if it had been released in its current state. It also has such a cheap price tag these days that many Battlefield-hungry gamers choose to jump into it and get hooked when they realise it's a good game. You should try it too, if you haven't. It's no Battlefield 4 but it's definitely worth your precious time.

Diablo 3
Even before Diablo 3 was released, we all knew what was coming. When the third, demon-slaying iteration was first shown off, many players realised, with a tear in their eye, that it wasn't so much a sequel to the then twelve-year-old, beloved Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction. No, this was the 'World of Warcraft Diablo edition'. Compared to its style-setting, gothically terrifying predecessor, the design was awful. Utterly deplorable. The childish neon colours and bright environments were a complete eye sore. So even before release, Diablo 3 didn't have the wind in its sails. And then it was released. If you were lucky on launch day, 12 May 2012, you got to play, but yours truly, sitting on a bench with a bunch of friends, was met with the same ominous error message as the rest of the internet. The servers are busy at this time. Please try again later (Error 37). Unlike previous games, the then relatively new invention of always-online for Diablo 3 applied whether you were playing alone or on a LAN, and Blizzard hadn't prepared at all for the massive onslaught of players on their fragile servers, and it would be all that summer before the connection stabilised anyway.

The lucky players who eventually got in were greeted by a game whose (non-existent) endgame was not much different from its predecessor, and mostly consisted of playing the adventure over and over again in search of better items - which, to top it all, could be bought for a pittance in the auction house. Because of the inflation of good items, prices were pushed down, and unique items could be bought for pennies. In short, there was not much to stay for. However, with the Reaper of Souls expansion, and later the Rise of the Necromancer add-on, everything changed. The new, fifth act was the darkest yet, and the Crusader and Necromancer characters brought back the best of the Paladin and Necromancer classes in the second act. The auction house was removed in 2014 and a crafting system, where you get the opportunity to break down useless loot, was introduced. A solid, seasonal endgame loop with Grifts, where you compete to complete harder and harder challenges for the chance to get on leaderboards, gave players a carrot to keep going long, long after the adventure ended. A real sunshine story for a title that, as recently as last autumn, had as many active players as its sequel Diablo IV.

Fallout 76
Of course, a game shouldn't need fifty-something updates before it becomes interesting. Interesting was what Bethesda hoped their multiplayer game in the Fallout world could be, for everyone who loved this game series. It might seem ironic to accuse a game that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world of feeling too desolate. But Fallout 76 felt extremely empty and not very interesting at all. People moaned about most things that could be moaned about but everything felt justified. Fallout 76 may have been marketed as something different from the rather heavy story-driven adventures in the series that came before - but that didn't mean people liked it. Criticisms ranged from technical problems, the lack of a clear goal, and the total lack of computer-controlled characters in the world. Appalachia, where it was set, was simply too empty for its own good.

It took just over a year and a half. Then Bethesda added what many had wanted from the start. The third major update, called Wastelanders, introduced computer-controlled characters that you could meet in the world, and now things started to sound a little different. Suddenly there was a sense of doing something more than just running around with your friends and creating your own little stories. Years after the game's release, the developers also started to give the game the love that it had needed before it was released. They polished a lot of technical aspects and issues. But above all, they released a lot of new content.

In fact, if you look at the release of all the new major updates, they have been generous and very efficient with them. For example, Steel Dawn, update number six, came seven months after Wastelanders. Now there were plenty of stories to follow, characters to meet, and up until now in 2025, the game has received twenty-two major updates. In other words, stepping into Fallout 76 now is a completely different thing than it was at release. But the fact is that you could have stepped into the game a few years ago and it would have felt like a complete game in many ways. For those who had a group of friends and played exclusively online with them, Fallout 76 has pretty much always had something to offer. If that's what you were looking for; exploring and running around Appalachia with a bunch of other players. For me, who played solo, it was basically enough with that third major update where I could finally encounter computer-controlled characters to make the game a little interesting. Today, it has become something that works just as well for a group of players as it does for someone who prefers to wander through the wilderness alone.

Automobilista 2
When it was first rolled out, South American indie studio Reiza's much-hyped sequel was very quickly laughed off for its hopelessly weird shock absorber physics and flat simulation of a racing tyre's most basic characteristics. Throughout 2020 and 2021, Automobilista 2 was proof that British Slightly Mad Studios' rebranded physics engine Madness was not the technical beast it had been described as. Fans were disappointed. A disappointment that lasted. Slowly but surely, however, the 24-strong mini-team that developed Automobilista 2 began to churn out small fragments of the brilliance that the game offers today and slowly but surely gamers began to realise that, initially, it was all about a rushed release and lots of untapped potential. Today, after 100s of updates and nearly 15 DLC packs containing cars, motorsport disciplines, car classes, game modes and tracks - Reiza's second is a blisteringly good racing game that offers brilliant driving with realistic tyre physics, superb graphics and a very good amount of content.

Cyberpunk 2077
There are very few games and very few occasions that can match the level of nonchalance and carelessness that Cyberpunk 2077 showed when it was released in December 2020. 60% of all the features in the game that were promised beforehand were missing and the remaining 40% were drowned and re-drowned in game-breaking bugs. It even went so far that Sony removed the game from the Playstation Store and refunded the money to those who had already bought The Witcher team's bizarre product. CD Projekt weren't the ones to give up on their ultra-ambitious action role-playing game though, instead they apologised to gamers, bit the bullet and started working on one update after another. Slowly but surely, they built the game that was first intended for release, and along with the Phantom Liberty DLC pack (which was absolutely brilliant), it would turn out that Cyberpunk 2077 rose like a phoenix from the ashes.