There’s nothing worse than watching a game crash and burn on day one, only to realize its true potential as a fantastic title. It’s like seeing a beautiful car roll out of the showroom and immediately catch fire. They might be fantastic now, but their launches? Unforgivable.

Whether it was broken ports, server meltdowns, or just flat-out lies, these titles were supposed to be game-changers and system sellers — and they tripped at the starting line. Some recovered, others didn’t, but all of them had the same problem — a launch that nearly ruined everything they worked so hard to build.

5 Batman: Arkham Knight — The terrible PC port

It needed more time in the oven

Lately, terrible game launches have become a bit of a trend — something we’d love to see fade away. However, back in June 2015, Batman: Arkham Knight took the cake with its disastrous PC launch.

The framerate was locked to 30fps, and even GTX Titan owners at the time couldn’t run the game properly. It isn’t even as if 30fps was what most players got, since constant stuttering and frame drops were the biggest problem in the game at launch. Coming in strong at second place were low-resolution textures straight out of an early 2000’s game.

In fact, things were so terrible at launch that Rocksteady pulled the game from PC storefronts just a single day after the launch. The final part of one of the greatest trilogies ever, and it released to such negative reviews. It took months for them to make the game playable, and the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight came back for sale four months later in October 2015. After about March 2016, it was smooth sailing for the game, but its launch remains one of the worst in PC gaming history.

4 Driveclub — It could’ve been the face of the PS4

This one will always feel personal

I’m always going to be mad about this one. Driveclub was promised to be a launch title for the PlayStation 4, and promised cutting-edge visuals and an ambitious, seamless online-multiplayer experience. Sadly, it only delivered on the former, and the latter was the reason behind its downfall. Not only that, the game was delayed several times. There was even a PS Plus version promised for subscribers, but when the game finally launched in October 2014, Evolution, the studio behind the game, held back on the release of the PS Plus version. This led to further discontent among potential buyers. Add to that the fact that the servers simply couldn’t handle the multiplayer aspect of the game, and the whole club-based system the game relied on came crashing down.

The worst part is that Driveclub remains one of the best racing sim-cade games the medium has ever produced. From its visuals to its hyper-realistic sounds and presentation, this decade-old game remains fantastic. It’s just a terrible shame that its launch marred the game for years to come, resulting in an anticlimactic death and the shutdown of its studio.

3 Cyberpunk 2077 — The most disastrous launch possible

A rebirth like it had an engram in its head

Back in December 2020, I finally built a gaming PC after sticking to a PS4 Slim for the previous four years. Admittedly, it was one of the worst times to build a PC, but I really wanted to play Cyberpunk 2077. All my friends had pre-ordered it, and I wanted to join in on the fun, too. With an RTX 2070 Super and a Ryzen 5 3600X, I was prepared to play the game, at the very least, on medium-high settings. Oh boy was I in for a rude awakening.

Unlike Batman: Arkham Knight, CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 was a disaster on all platforms from day one. Bizarre bugs were the least of Cyberpunk’s problems. Terrible performance, broken AI and undoable quests, and horrific glitches — they all came together to make a truly appalling game launch.

This was a failed launch of such great scale that it led to CDPR losing its stock value significantly, until it promised a roadmap of betterment and delivered on it. Today, things couldn’t be more different, with Cyberpunk 2077 being one of the most fantastic single-player experiences across platforms. Even the Phantom Liberty DLC, which came with the game’s fully-realized 2.0 version, stands as one of the best expansions we’ve ever seen.

2 No Man's Sky — False hopes and broken promises

The greatest comeback story in gaming

Leading up to its launch in 2016, No Man’s Sky promised seamless co-op in a galaxy of unhindered space exploration. Unlimited planets to visit and explore, all teeming with their own wildlife in varied biomes as you landed on any planet you pleased and took off when you wanted, without any breaks at all. It was a proper laundry list of all the things the game promised its buyers, and almost none of them were true… at launch, at least.

You couldn’t interact with players even a few feet apart, the planets were all mostly just empty terrain, and there were no sand planets or water-based worlds that we had been waiting with bated breath for.

Thankfully, the devs stuck to their guns instead of just giving up like Fntastic did with The Day Before. Hello Games promised to reinvent the game and deliver on every single promise they made. They put their heads down and went to work, pushing out update after update and delivering true multiplayer, base-building, ship-customization, and many more QOL features. The best thing? These updates were all free. A soulless open-galaxy game on launch eventually turned into a living, breathing game that players loved coming back to. Of course, there will never be any telling how much more successful No Man’s Sky could’ve been had it just delivered on all of its promises from day one itself.

1 Assassin’s Creed Unity

We loved to hate it back in 2014

It’s no secret that Assassin’s Creed Unity was a disaster at launch. Missing textures, terrible frames, and a janky parkour system that just wouldn’t cooperate with the player. Add to that a bevy of glitches, and initial buyers were left terribly disappointed. What promised to be a truly next-gen Assassin’s Creed experience was anything but. A significant chunk of the player base discarded their playthroughs. However, Ubisoft put in the work required and polished the game with multiple updates, even giving away free DLC as an apology.

After that, players did return to the game and discovered a hidden gem under all the negative discourse that had engulfed the game at launch. Regardless, not everyone returned, leading to Unity becoming a rather underrated game that deserves praise today.

Diamonds in the rough that needed a lot of polishing

In today’s age of pre-orders, hype cycles, and day-one patches, a bad launch can doom even the best of games. Thankfully, some of these titles managed to claw their way back to greatness, earning back the goodwill they lost, one update at a time.

Others weren’t as lucky. You only get one shot to wow your audience — and if you blow it, they might never come back. Here’s hoping developers and publishers remember that the next time they rush something out the door just to meet a marketing date.