Anthem and State of Decay 2 are two games that have recently announced their intentions to ‘overhaul’ themselves.

No Man’s Sky was a high-profile game that last year saw a miraculous recovery after a shoddy release period.

This new trend could end up becoming an industry-standard if more companies jump on the bandwagon.

Lots of games come out with bugs. Sometimes games even come out and are nowhere near ‘finished’. Anthem is a great example of this. It came out and felt like it was barely a game at all.

Occasionally a game can come back from this. If the developer really cares about their game and their players, then a game can be overhauled. No Man’s Sky was probably the most impressive overhaul in gaming history.

Now it seems like everyone is overhauling their poorly received games.

Why Make A Good Game When You Can Just Fix It Later

No Man’s Sky set a great example for overhauling a game. There were a lot of reasons behind the poor release of the game. Then Hello Games did the right thing and spent their time really working on the game.

Anthem, had a similarly bad release. It got pretty mediocre reviews from most critics. Not to mention it hemorrhaged players at an alarming rate. Now BioWare has announced that they plan on injecting life back into the project with a massive overhaul.

Now, Undead Labs have announced a similar undertaking for State of Decay 2. So if all these games can just be made better later, you don’t need to worry about making a good game in the first place. Right?

Anthem Doesn’t Need Fixing, It Needs a Bullet

On the one hand, these overhauls are a pretty good idea. For ideas with promise, like No Man’s Sky or State of Decay, it’s a good chance to stop them from wasting potential. For run-of-the-mill garbage like Anthem, it’s basically a holding pattern.

It’s almost certainly a part of the trend towards live-service gaming. It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Development is expensive. If you make a game and it doesn’t do that great, it’s a lot cheaper to work on your busted game than it is to start from scratch.

If this means we get fewer terrible games on the market then I am all for it. At the very least we can be sure that Bethesda won’t join in. They seem content at leaving Fallout 76 the smouldering pile of hate and turmoil that it is already.