| (Image property of Bethesda Softworks, Hello Games, Gearbox Software and Sega, CD Projekt, Microsoft) However, what separates the men from the boys is what happens next. While some games are happy to languish at the bottom of the Steam review charts for the rest of time, others try to pick themselves up, brush themselves off and turn their bitter lemons into lemonade. Here are five of my top picks for the gaming disasters that managed to un-disaster themselves in the end. Fallout 76 Everyone loves Fallout right now. In the wake of the Fallout tv show, people have flocked back to old titles and Todd Howard has been able to bathe in Scrooge McDuck gold coin baths every day for the past month. However, while it's easy to forget, Fallout wasn't sitting quite so pretty as a franchise a few weeks ago.  | | (Image property of Bethesda Softworks) That is, in part, because the last game in the series, Fallout 76, crashed like a lead-lined Hindenburg when it released back in 2018. In the run-up to its release, Fallout 76 was promised to be all things to all people. Melding the single-player narrative focus of previous titles with the ever-present popularity of online multiplayer, Fallout 76 looked set to please everyone from all walks of life and, by extension, make Bethesda an absolute killing in pre-order sales. However, sure enough, like all products designed to please everyone, Fallout 76 pleased precisely no-one. The story was too bland and indistinct for veteran fans and the game was too buggy and unstable for continuous online cooperation. It was a tease and denial experience all round. What's more, some of those oh-so lucrative pre-orders resulted in some major backlash as fans named and shamed Bethesda for their misleading advertising and the cheap materials used in the premium Power Armor Edition.  | | (Image property of Bethesda Softworks) Thankfully, the intervening six years have been kind to Fallout 76 as Bethesda set about improving the stability and content of the game in order to make things up to fans, or to avoid having to work on The Elder Scrolls VI, who could say? The result now is a much improved experience with a meatier story, actual NPC characters to interact with, stronger performance and numerous expansions to give players more to do in the nuclear wasteland of West Virginia. Nowadays, while Fallout 76 may still be the runt of the litter for Fallout games thanks to its reputation, it can at least sit around the Thanksgiving table without the same prolonged, awkward silences.  | | (Image property of Bethesda Softworks) Cyberpunk 2077 Cyberpunk 2077 was set to be a generation-defining game. Hot off the heels of The Witcher 3 and its beloved expansion, Blood and Wine, CD Projekt Red planned to deliver an enormous, expansive RPG set in a world run by sinister, profit-obsessed corporations that sought only to benefit themselves at the expense of the planet and all of its inhabitants. In light of that, you can probably understand why people were more than a little annoyed when the game came out and it was a broken, hacked-out piece of over-marketed garbage.  | | (Image property of CD Projekt) The troubled development of Cyberpunk has been well-documented by people far more competent than me but, to cut a long story short, the game was nowhere near finished upon release. While it had been announced many years prior, CDPR had actually only started full development on the project a couple years earlier, once they had finished tying up The Witcher 3. Under pressure from shareholders and even death threats from fans after numerous delays, CD Projekt forced the game out onto store shelves despite it boasting a whole range of performance issues and being a near-sight unplayable on older hardware. As a result, the game that should've dominated our free-time during the height of the pandemic became a laughing stock and one of the most bitter falls from grace ever weathered by a major studio.  | | (Image property of CD Projekt) Four years later, a lot has changed. Cyberpunk has been updated out the wazoo since its release at an almost aggressive pace in an attempt to claw back all of the lost goodwill from the game's release. The changes are too many to list here but some of the highlights include; much improved stability and performance, a totally revamped skill tree, a retooled police system, redesigned driving and an entirely new and functioning metro system for Night City. That's just in the base-game as well. Outside of the basic experience, there is also the stellar Phantom Liberty expansion and the supplementary Netflix series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners that serve to expand and flesh-out the world in interesting ways. Nowadays, if you ask me, Cyberpunk is one of the most immersive experiences available in all of gaming. While it isn't quite the endlessly deep or life-changing story that many hoped for upon release, it is now at the very least a worthy successor to CDPR's legendary work on The Witcher 3.  | | (Image property of CD Projekt) Aliens: Colonial Marines Bit of a wildcard this one but I promise I haven't been drinking so stay with me now. Aliens: Colonial Marines is one of the most notoriously awful games of the last two decades. More putrid and acidic than the blood of the game's xenomorphs, it lived up to the legacy of Aliens the same way that a chicken salad lives up to the legacy of Julius Caesar.  | | (Image property of Gearbox Software and Sega) To make matters worse, the game was also never properly fixed with its ugly appearance, boring gameplay and infamously dodgy AI remaining throughout the game's shelf-life. So, if it was a piece of garbage on release and the developers never managed to fix it, how come it's on this list? Well, interestingly enough, the redemption of Aliens: Colonial Marines came down to the hard work of its online community, rather than its creators. Back in 2017, a mod was posted on ModDb by one jamesdickinson963 that claimed to fix the enemy AI. One of the most notorious problems with the game, the messy xenomorph AI caused them to awkwardly lumber around and walk straight at you while you riddled them with bullets rather than diving into cover and swarming you in hordes like in the films.  | | (Image property of Gearbox Software and Sega) According to the modder, this was entirely unintentional on the part of the developers. The modder claimed that this was all down to a typo in one line of code that governed xenomorph AI that caused it to break completely. Upon downloading the mod, many players found that they were, in fact, correct and by simply fixing the typo, the aliens suddenly behaved far more like they did in the original marketing footage for the game. As such, in 2024, while the game is still an enormous downgrade from what was promised by the marketing, the game is actually far more playable than it was upon release. Who knows, if that one pesky typo had been caught by the developers back in 2013, maybe the reception wouldn't have been quite so brutal? I wouldn't bet on it though...  | | (Image property of Gearbox Software and Sega) Xbox One Taking a brief departure from video games themselves for a moment, let's talk about hardware. Going into the 2013 contest with the PlayStation 4, Microsoft had plenty to lose with the Xbox One. The Xbox 360 was immensely popular and while it was outsold by the PS3 eventually, its years-long dominance during the 7th generation of consoles made its successor a hot contender.  | | (Image property of Microsoft) That was, until it was revealed. Requiring a constant online connection, not allowing second-hand games and having the burden of carrying around the Kinect like its racist Siamese twin, the Xbox one took an entire magazine of shots to the foot right from the get-go. Unfortunately, while Microsoft did backtrack on many of these stances like a conservative politician at a drag show, the damage was already done and the Xbox One not only failed to compete with the PS4, it couldn't even top the Xbox 360, falling short by almost 20 million units. However, don't let sales figures alone fool you lest we end up in the cyberpunk future I was rambling about earlier. In practice, after its rocky launch, the Xbox One was able to make huge strides in a variety of impressive ways. While the PS4 never had any kind of backwards compatibility with PS3 discs, the Xbox One was able to accommodate a huge library of Xbox 360 games after some software updates. This was such a big step forward that it could arguably be said to have forced Sony into making the PS5 compatible with PS4 discs to make sure that it remained competitive.  | | (Image property of Microsoft) What's more, with its various redesigns and with the bundling-in of new titles, the Xbox One became highly affordable as its life went on. Even today, the Xbox One is arguably the best console to purchase second hand if you're looking to play up-to-date games on a budget thanks to it being fairly powerful, in low demand and sharing all of the big third-party titles that the PS4 had. While I'm sure it will forever remain a black mark on Microsoft's track-record like photos from their edgy phase in high school, the Xbox One, in many ways, did well to redeem itself. Had it not been for the false start of its initial reveals, who knows what the modern console landscape could look like? With the effort he put into fixing the Xbox One, Phil Spencer could probably be president by now.  | | (Image property of Microsoft) No Man's Sky I knew it was on here, you knew it was on here, even typo-crippled xenomorphs from Colonial Marines could figure out it was going to be on here. Since its famously botched launch back in 2016, No Man's Sky has become the poster child for post-release turnarounds, and for good reason.  | | (Image property of Hello Games) Stop me if you've heard this one before. Pre-release, No Man's Sky was promised to be an infinite expanse of procedurally-generated space where players could go anywhere and do anything that they wanted to. Unfortunately, once it was in the hands of the public, this entire second galaxy in your living room didn't do much to live up to the hype. You see, when players tried to do the whole 'go anywhere' thing, what they found was a bunch of very similar planets with some very dull and occasionally janky-looking fauna. As for the whole 'do anything' bit of the sales pitch, players were able to do whatever they wanted to as long as all they wanted to do was break rocks and upgrade their ships so that they could go to another planet to break more rocks. It was the all rock-breaking economy, meaning the game had more in common with prison labour than with Star Trek.  | | (Image property of Hello Games) However, while developer Hello Games had their work cut out for them, they rose to the challenge. Through the last eight years of Herculean labours, Hello Games has dragged No Man's Sky out of the gutter and raised it into one of the most popular and successful space sims on the market. Nowadays, the game fills a comfortable niche for players looking to enjoy some rollicking space adventures without needing the time-investment of Elite Dangerous or the spreadsheets of Eve Online. The game now has a more accessible narrative, online cooperation, crossplay, VR support, space combat and base-building. All of this serves to not only show the massive strides that Hello Games has taken to improve the game but also goes to show why so many people still play and enjoy the game all of these years after that botched release.  | | (Image property of Hello Games) Conclusion So, those were my picks for some of the biggest gaming turnarounds in recent memory. What games have stood out to you for their improvements over time or are there any that you think still require fixing? Let me know via my Instagram 'the_cartridge_thief_blog' and have a wonderful rest of your day. All images and property names belong to their respective rights holders and are used here for the purposes of criticism and review.
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