10 Video Games That Got Really Good When You Stopped Playing

It's not rare for a game to get off to a slow start, but sometimes one gets off to a REALLY slow start - like hours and hours of introduction before it finally takes off the training wheels and lets you play it with some agency.

Other times - as is becoming frustratingly more and more common - a game simply releases in a state that is arguably, or even literally, unfinished. This results in many players setting it aside, promising to return to it after a few months of patches and updates.

But be honest, how many times do you really follow through on that promise? More often than not it gets lost in the river of shinier, newer, more polished games being released regularly and ends up on your backlog for years - maybe forever.

And rarely is the case where a game is cursed by its own popularity, forcing the developers to devote all of their time to simply keeping it running because they don't have the time or resources to devote to updates and expansion.

Whatever the case, like with convincing someone to watch a show that only gets good after an entire season, convincing someone to stick with a game through hours of boring or broken content is a big ask. That said, here are ten such games that only got really good after you stopped playing that are worth a second look.

Dice and EA's Battlefield 2042 was a circus of disaster when it launched in 2021. The series, known as much for its loyal and passionate fanbase as its massive multiplayer battles, had certainly fallen short with previous games, but never quite so bad as Battlefield 2042.

If unstable servers and an absolute horde of bugs weren't enough, DICE still miscalculated by reinventing many of the series' core elements. In other words, they put in a lot of effort to fix what wasn't broken and broke everything in the process.

DICE quickly set to correcting their errors after the game's launch, but the extent of the changes and updates needed meant that players were in for a long wait. The game essentially needed an extra two years of development time. And in an era where gamers are already fed up with games releasing in unfinished states, they can hardly be blamed for jumping ship.

Patient fans, however, were rewarded with what many now consider to be one of the better games in the series. By adding content in the form of weapons, maps, and new modes - plus the return of the series' class-based customization - DICE finally delivered the game they promised.