9 Greatest Comebacks In Video Game History
Sea of Thieves became a GOAT while you weren't looking.
The games on this list planted themselves firmly in the Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man’s Sky school of proving you can stumble out the gate and still score yourself a respectable placement, if not absolutely blow the haters out of the water with a, um podium finish.
While that sports metaphor well and truly fell apart, these video games managed to put themselves back together due to the tireless dedication of their developers and publishers.
While lesser studios may have abandoned their problem children as soon as the audience turned on them en masse, that wasn’t the case with these games and given what they became, that’s very fortunate for us.
9. Battlefield 4
Kicking off with a game that really should have done better, Battlefield and Call of Duty have been battling for supremacy in the shooter realm for some time now, but Battlefield 4 really handed the win over to Call of Duty when it launched in 2013 because even saying that this game ‘launched’ feels like an oversell.
More accurately, it did whatever the video game equivalent is of that clip of the cat who goes for a jump, second guesses it at the last minute and tumbles off their starting block.
To say that Battlefield 4 launched pretty buggy doesn’t quite hit the mark, the amount of game-breaking bugs and hilarious unintentional clipping, and wild interactions with the environment, mechanics, and other players was nothing short of legendary.
Developer DICE went as far as to halt work on all of their other projects so they could get all hands on deck to fix Battlefield 4. The irate player base and criticism of the game’s clearly unfinished shipped product went as far as to kick off multiple lawsuits investigating whether investors were intentionally misled by EA in their marketing of the game.
The, and I think we can use these words, "catastrophic disaster" of a launch, took an entire year and the development of a community testing environment to turn around. Once DICE and EA were able to get a handle on it, though, the core of the excellent gameplay loop and engaging, refined mechanics, compelling game modes, and phenomenal multiplayer were able to properly shine.
Ultimately, Battlefield 4 proved to massively outperform Call of Duty: Ghosts, and plenty of other solid FPS entries, taking its rightful place as one of the best FPS games in recent years.