From nothing to everything: games that rose from the ashes –

Halo: The Collection of the Master Chief
It was me, my cousin and some old Gamereactor colleagues like Steinholtz who were waiting to play Halo: The Master Chief Collection, which included 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 fantastic part two. But… Then the game launched. It launched in a pitiful state, to say the least: the multiplayer mode was so broken that we barely managed to get a match in. Everything was baby carriage, at best it was really bad, and even the campaign was affected. Everyone was furious, of course, and my cousin sold his Xbox out of anger. But instead of abandoning the project, 343 and Microsoft chose to put the necessary resources into bringing the collection to life.

And so it was. In small increments over the course of several years, patch after patch was released that slowly led to the game beginning to reach its full potential. And the failure made 343 Industries more receptive to feedback, spoiling their community for free with both Halo: Reach and Halo 3: ODST. The rest is history, to this day the collection is optimized and instead of being a death knell for Master Chief, Halo: The Master Chief Collection is the best Halo product on the market. Perseverance and humility can turn failure into triumph, and 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. Not that many space simulators were 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 there was an audience for this kind of game that wanted new experiences. No Man’s Sky launched in 2016 after delays due to difficult development. The criticism was relentless as the title had turned from a dedicated and limited interest into a game that almost everyone was talking about. It had technical problems, the planets didn’t look very good at all and the wildlife looked sad. Several of the features and trailers Sean Murray had promised the community never saw the light of day. Many also criticized the lack of things to do in the game.

Then something happened that shocked the gaming world. Hello Games fell silent and continued developing the game in secret. Every year they released new content in both large and small packages. Expansions that traditionally cost money from 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 began communicating again, but not about the flaws of the game or the launch, but about all the new things they kept adding. The community’s opinion of the title also began to fluctuate from negative to positive. Especially as more and more new content kept coming to the game for free. The more new elements the developers added, the more positive opinions about the title. That’s what I would say is the beauty of the story behind No Man’s Sky. It went from being an unpleasant game to getting a rare and beautiful justification. Today, No Man’s Sky is a good example of a game getting its due. It is especially relevant in our time, when many other titles are left to their own devices.

Destination
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 be set in a rich world that would grow over the years. The hype was enormous, 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 even a star name like Peter Dinklage could deliver nothing but a monotonous and worthless experience. With everything from frustrating loot systems, repetitive missions and pointless grinding, the future did not look bright for Bungie’s big gamble.

But unlike other companies that would have preferred to pull the plug, Bungie chose to step back and listen to the criticism. After several updates, two mediocre DLCs and the replacement of Dinklage in favor 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 this, they were finally able to deliver the experience that Destiny should have been from the beginning.

Assassin’s Creed: Unity
When the first Assassin’s Creed saw the light of day in 2007 (having begun 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 consoles and deliver a title with unprecedented graphics. Although the game had many flaws and lessons to learn as the series grew, there is no denying that it had a huge impact and in many ways changed the future direction of Ubisoft that we still see traces of today. As the years passed and the series began to lose a bit of steam after many annual releases, Ubisoft wanted to revive Assassin’s Creed 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 that once again harnessed all the power of the hardware with a title that would be graphically unparalleled.

Ubisoft undoubtedly delivered exactly that, as Assassin’s Creed: Unity still looks very good today and could be released in 2025 and certainly hold its own. But in addition to the massive graphics boost, Ubisoft also wanted the game’s streets to be packed with people as far as the eye could see (since Assassin’s Creed: Unity is set during the French Revolution) and also a frame rate of 60 frames per second as icing on the cake. Despite more than four years of development, however, the game was far from fully optimized, as it proved difficult for the developers to push the consoles so much graphically while aiming for a stable 60 frames per second, especially when the game’s massive 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 result was complete chaos when the game was released on Nov. 13, 2014.

The only reasonable question to ask yourself, especially if you were there on day one, was whether anything worked at all? The crashes were constant, characters in the interludes weren’t there except for their two eyeballs floating around like two ping-pong balls, the large crowds in the streets disappeared and came back out of nowhere, storage files got corrupted, the in-game music could suddenly echo empty, and everything felt like one long fever dream to watch 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 games would go down in history as two of the most broken games ever at launch. Fortunately, as you can probably guess from the title of the article, there is 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 apologize 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 done without really succeeding for years.

On one hand, it took years for Assassin’s Creed: Unity to actually reach a playable state (but even today, it’s still baby carriage here and there), but on the other hand, the mother of the series, Jade Raymond, unfortunately got lost in the middle of this mess for the second time. One way to fix many of the game’s problems was to significantly reduce the crowded Paris streets and slow the image update to only 30 frames per second on the 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 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 its premiere. Nevertheless, much of the damage had already been done and when Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate was released the year after Unity resulting in low sales, Ubisoft was forced to pull on the handbrake and rethink 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 in 2016, no new annual main game was released (‘only’ the Assassin’s Creed movie and the Ezio Collection and Chronicles trilogy were released then) and it gave Ubisoft time to chart a new path for the series that was based more on role-playing games. Because while supporting studios under Ubisoft were fixing Assassin’s Creed: Unity, the main studio that developed it (Ubisoft Montreal) looked ahead and chose to do another 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 is undoubtedly a troubled middle child in the series. Despite being largely resolved, it took too long to get there, and by the time it did, Assassin’s Creed: Origins had already become the new fan favorite, causing Unity to be forgotten for a few years. These days, however, the tune is slightly different, as Ubisoft has once again taken some more time to develop the latest game in the series, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. Unity is often cited as 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 had a long journey this decade, from the most hated by fans to a bit of a forgotten favorite. It has certainly had its revenge in many ways, but time will just tell if it will be considered even more underrated over the years, or if it will once again fall away into the eternal oblivion of the gaming world.

Battlefield 2042
This is a somewhat controversial point. By no means everyone is happy with how Battlefield 2042 works today, but there is no denying that it has gone from being an utterly hideous broken bug fest to at least a relatively stable player base that likes it well enough to return day after day. But let’s rewind the tape a bit – to the beginning of Battlefield 2042’s infancy. What actually went wrong? Besides being bug-fest deluxe, the idea of the new specialists was not immediately welcome. The new “modern” elements went in a different direction and deviated from the traditional Battlefield ingredients, with grappling hooks and “cool” skins. There was also a lack of content, the maps were not considered up-to-scratch and the game was lukewarmly received by 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 caliber. 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. Much better than what it was when it was released. Instead of abandoning their product, they chose to listen to their audience and fix some flaws. That said, it’s not perfect today either, but it’s a game that certainly would have been rewarded with a higher rating than a five had it been released in its current state. It also has such a cheap price tag these days that many Battlefield-hungry gamers choose to jump in and get hooked when they realize it’s a good game. You should try it, too, if you haven’t already. It’s no Battlefield 4, but it’s definitely worth spending your precious time on.

Diablo 3
Even before Diablo 3 was released, we all knew what was coming. When the third, demo-killing iteration was first shown, many players realized, with a tear in their eye, that it was not so much a sequel to the then 12-year-old, beloved Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction. No, this was the “World of Warcraft Diablo edition. Compared to its style-defining, gothically terrifying predecessor, the design was terrible. Utterly deplorable. The childish neon colors and bright environments were a complete eyesore. So even before its release, Diablo 3 did not have the wind in its sails. And then it was released. If you were lucky on launch day, May 12, 2012, you got to play, but yours truly, sitting on a bench with a bunch of friends, got the same ominous error message as the rest of the Internet. The servers are busy right now. Please try again later (error 37). Unlike previous games, the then relatively new invention of always-online applied to Diablo 3 whether you were playing alone or on a LAN, and Blizzard had not prepared at all for the massive onslaught of players on their fragile servers, and it would be all that summer before the connection stabilized anyway.

The lucky players who finally got in were greeted by a game whose (non-existent) endgame did not differ much from its predecessor, and mainly consisted of replaying the adventure over and over again in search of better items – which, to top it off, could be purchased for a pittance at the auction house. Because of the inflation of good items, prices were depressed and unique items could be bought for pennies. In short, there wasn’t much to stay ahead of. However, with the Reaper of Souls expansion and later the Rise of the Necromancer add-on, everything changed. The new, fifth company was the darkest yet, and the Crusader and Necromancer characters brought back the best of the Paladin and Necromancer classes in the second company. The auction house was removed in 2014 and a crafting system was introduced, giving you the chance to scrap useless loot. A solid, seasonal end game with Grifts, in which you compete to complete harder and more difficult challenges for a chance to move up the leaderboards, gave players a carrot to keep going long, long after the adventure had ended. A real sunshine story for a title that still had as many active players as its sequel Diablo IV last fall.

Fallout 76
Of course, a game shouldn’t need updates of fifty before it becomes interesting. Interesting was what Bethesda hoped their multiplayer game in the Fallout world could be, for anyone who loved this game series. It may seem ironic to accuse a game set in a post-apocalyptic world of being too desolate. But Fallout 76 felt extremely empty and not very interesting at all. People complained about most of the things you could complain 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 it – but that didn’t mean people liked it. Criticisms ranged from technical problems, the lack of a clear purpose and the total lack of computer-controlled characters in the world. Appalachia, where it was set, was just too empty for its own good.

It took a little more than a year and a half. Then Bethesda added what many had wanted from the beginning. The third major update, called Wastelanders, introduced computer-controlled characters 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 began to give the game the love it needed before it was released. They polished up many technical aspects and things. But most of 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 it. For example, Steel Dawn, update number six, came seven months after Wastelanders. Now there were plenty of stories to follow, characters to meet, and so far in 2025, the game has received twenty-two major updates. In other words, stepping into Fallout 76 now is something very different from when it was released. But the fact is, 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 pretty much 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, playing solo, it was actually 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 first rolled out, the much-hyped sequel from South American indie studio Reiza was quickly laughed off for its hopelessly weird shock absorber physics and flat simulation of the most basic characteristics of a racing tire. Throughout 2020 and 2021, Automobilista 2 was proof that British Slightly Mad Studios’ renamed physics engine Madness was not the technical beast it had been described as. Fans were disappointed. A disappointment that persisted. Slowly but surely, however, the 24-person mini team that developed Automobilista 2 began to produce small fragments of the genius the game offers today, and slowly but surely gamers began to realize that it was initially all about a rushed release and a lot of untapped potential. Today, after 100 updates and nearly 15 DLC packs with cars, motorsport disciplines, car classes, game modes and tracks, Reiza’s second is a blisteringly good racing game that offers brilliant driving with realistic tire physics, excellent graphics and a very good amount of content.

Cyberpunk 2077
Very few games and very few occasions can match the level of nonchalance and carelessness that Cyberpunk 2077 displayed when it was released in December 2020. 60% of all pre-promised features in the game 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 purchased The Witcher team’s bizarre product. CD Projekt were not the ones to abandon their ultra-ambitious action role-playing game, however, instead they apologized to gamers, bit the bullet and started working on one update after another. Slowly but surely they built the game 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.