It’s not too late for Anthem: 10 other games that massively improved after launch

Where does Anthem go after a pretty badly botched launch? Here are 10 other games who managed to pull out of freefall and into something people actually wanted to play.

After numerous delays and stories of troubled development, Bioware’s big sci-fi multiplayer gamble, Anthem, is out and the initial results are… well, mixed to be kind. There are the expected problems such as crashes and technical glitches, but beyond that, there are more serious bugs (like literally turning off your PlayStation 4 after a crash), agonizingly long load times as well as a lot of baffling game design decisions.

So surely Anthem is just doomed. Electronic Arts and BioWare should just close the books on it and probably move on to their next Star Wars game or something, right? Well, actually one of the great things of the digital age of constant updates is that a company can turn something mediocre or even completely disastrous into a highly acclaimed and popular game if real time and effort is put into it. It’s not an easy road, to be sure, but here are 10 games that have massively changed since their initial launch to be much better:

#10. Final Fantasy XV

Let’s get one thing out of the way first, I really liked Final Fantasy XV, it’s actually quickly become one of my top five Final Fantasy games. The combat is stellar, I love the characters and while the story is definitely macho bromance with just the four guys in the party, it’s a touching one of true friendship between these four dudes.

However, it launched in 2016 in an incomplete state would be an understatement. There was a prologue that you pretty much had to watch for a lot of the story to make sense was released as a separate product.  Characters would disappear from the story with little to no explanation only to re-appear later and the dreaded “Chapter 13”, a section near the end of the game, was so ridiculously frustrating that some people quit before finishing it.

Fast forward to 2019, and Final Fantasy XV is almost an entirely different game. Some significant patches were quickly introduced, such as making Chapter 13 far more manageable; but, there was also loads of extra content, including crossovers with other franchises such as Assasin’s Creed, a multiplayer mode and a ton of DLC to flesh out the characters and story.

The DLC plans for Final Fantasy XV may have been a bit too ambitious as they canceled several planned ones and are just doing one final one titled “Episode Ardyn,” coming out later this year. Still, it’s a game that has added a ton since launch and if you only played the initial vanilla version you might do well to check it out again, especially the “Royal Edition” which just includes all the most current DLC.