7 More Hated Video Games That Are AWESOME Now

"It's not how you launch, it's what it becomes"

These are the musings of one Todd Howard, long-time Bethesda mouthpiece and even longer-time snake oil salesman. It's a sad state of affairs that this mindset became the companies justification for how utterly borked the launch of Fallout 76 was, that they would effectively fix it in post, however, such is the gaming industry at large in this current timeline.

More than ever-loyal fans and early backers are rewarded for their support by having broken, half-finished titles slopped into their lap with enough bugs to resemble a maggot riddled corpse, and are then told to "calm down and wait" until the devs have got a spare minute to fix the bloody thing.

Yet, sometimes the wait is more than worth it, and while I hate to give Todd's words actual weight within the wider conversation, the games on this list started out so rocky it looked like Sly Stallone had caved their faces in, but went on to be the best around, with nobody able to take them down.

We covered this topic before and now we're back with seven more, so let's take a look at these almost anime-level redemption arcs in gaming.

While it's almost impossible to envision anyone truly hating the GTA experience (outside of the recent Definitive Trilogy) catching enough rounds to make it sink in a lake through sheer weight of lead, there was actually a time when even the monolithic GTA V was being raked over the coals.

In an example of, let's just call it "sheer, blatant lies" Rockstars monstrous back peddling when it came to the Online component of the game, won it no favours with the fanbase, who were promised, back when the game launched on the bloody PS3 and Xbox 360 that the multiplayer mode would be shipped with it and in a ready to run state.

What followed was a cavalcade of issues all of which ruined the online experience so much that many players swore off it entirely. Connection issues, crashes, and massive server downtime meant that online fun was cut short or never even started in many cases.

Worse still, the much-touted, and some would say "over-marketed" Heists feature was nowhere to be seen, mysteriously being held back until the launch of the next generation of hardware (almost like it was being used as a selling point to buy the title again on a different console).

All in all, this left many fans seething at what should have been the games defining feature, yet fret not because in the years that followed Rockstar has pumped out so much content and support for the mode that it's genuinely overwhelming. Almost to the point where you worry about where GTA VI can even take things!