Readers of Pride & Prejudice understand all too well that first impressions can be misleading. Developers, of course, should never count on making a bad first impression and do everything they can to release a polished, fun, and smooth experience right off the bat.
Still, gamers should be ready to forgive and forget. Not for the sake of the developers, but for their own. Some games are deserving of a player's time despite the glitches, mistakes, and poor launch day issues. If you're the kind of person to give a game another chance, here are the titles most worthy of another look.
10 Dragon Age: Inquisition
The secrets of the Tevinter Imperium were almost a secret forever. On consoles, the game would start for a few minutes at a time and then crash, which was somehow better than the PC version which, on launch day, never booted up at all. Add to this the bugs and uncollectible collectibles after years of delays and the game looked dead on arrival.
Thankfully, patches were installed quickly to fix the various issues in Dragon Age: Inquisition and this game that looked to be one of the year's biggest disappointments would go on to win Game of the Year awards from several reputable organizations.
9 Final Fantasy XIV
It's not often that a developer will call for a do-over but Square Enix did just that with Final Fantasy XIV. To call it a disaster on launch day would be charitable. The poor graphic quality and horribly written events were only noticeable when the servers weren't crashing.
The game shut down entirely and relaunched a few years later and has been nominated and/or won MMO of the year in every event since the relaunch. It's even had several successful expansions that are difficult to rank because of their significant contributions.
8 Fallout: New Vegas
Sometimes history is so kind to a game that people will forgive a sloppy origin. Fallout: New Vegas was met with mixed and negative critical scores for problems that persisted through to launch day. Even on high-end hardware, the game would crash an average of every ten minutes for most gamers.
Fast forward for a few weeks and this game is consistently ranked as the best in the entire Fallout series. Players still discover unforgettable quotes from the game to this day. It turns out a few patches and some more server space made all the difference.
7 Halo: The Master Chief Collection
People will play a few hours of Halo for the story and the graphics. But the reason gamers dedicate their lives to the series is for the multiplayer combat. Somebody forgot to tell the developers the Halo: The Master Chief Collection this fact as the game stripped away almost every fan-favorite map and what few PvP modes were left were flooded and prone to long periods of downtime.
It took a lot of work, but the game is finally playable online and has embraced most of the modes that brought so much acclaim to the franchise. It's a great collection and satisfies fans nicely as they wait for details about Halo Infinite to leak.
6 Middle Earth: Shadow Of War
Several games are persuaded to make the same mistake of Middle Earth: Shadow of War did. They have a good idea and then plague players with microtransactions every step of the way until only the wealthiest of gamers feel welcome in the late-game content.
Thankfully, the developers have since wised up and ditched the microtransactions, so if you've been eyeballing one of the awesome legendary sets, you should be able to grab it without going broke in the process.
5 Dead Island
Players are still taking to the forums trying to fix one of the most bizarre launch day mishaps in video game history. Incredibly, the game somehow launched an older, incomplete version of the title which, understandably, was nowhere close to playable.
The mistake is humorous in retrospect, Dead Island is even meme-worthy now, but while the fix was not as simple as an easy update, those who got the completed version adore the unique character building and gameplay. This created a market demand for spin-offs, expansions, and a sequel in the works.
4 Batman: Arkham Knight
Batman: Arkham Knight had a very unique problem. While crashes and bugs are begrudgingly accepted among gamers, this game had a 30 FPS cap and resolution detail that rivaled Minecraft during intense scenes.
After the fix, a cult following turned into a mainstream following as gamers started to flock back. Now, comic book fans are happily finding references in the game and review scores look a lot more positive than they did in those opening weeks thanks to improved graphical quality.
3 Diablo 3
When your game inspired a meme for crashing, you know you have a problem on your hands. Even aside from the Error 37 crash report that almost every player got on launch day, the few who could break through were treated to a bare-bones experience and an exploitative auction house.
The turnaround has been well-documented and has been the subject of how to rescue a game despite overwhelming odds. Now, Diablo 3 has seasonal replayability and its DLCs and expansion have solidified its name as the premier dungeon-crawler of the era.
2 The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
The game known for taking an arrow to the knee almost took an arrow to the chest. Skyrim was one of the buggiest and glitchy games to ever be released. It embodied the stereotypical lack of polish, from disappearing enemies to broken questlines to environmental pop-in.
Bethesda's saving grace was their community full of passionate fans that were coding machines. Fans largely helped each other rewrite problematic scripting and official patches would borrow their work to fix the game across the entire network.
1 No Man's Sky
The biggest problem for No Man's Sky was not glitches or bugs or server crashes, though those were all present on launch day. The biggest problem was that the team explicitly lied to fans about what you'd be able to do in the game.
It's understandable for fans to never trust them again. But those who stuck with it eventually got what was promised and even more. The game has won numerous awards for its effort to make good on old promises. We all wish the overhyping never occurred, but we can all also wish other games that similarly failed customer expectations would have made the same effort to rectify the situation.