Interestingly enough, in the following 12 month period, Microsoft and Xbox released the exact same number of first-party exclusives as they did in November and December of 2013. Although it would be unfair to say that the quality didn’t rise, if only a little bit.

The fan favorite of Dance Central released a new entry that was generally well received. D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die was a unique graphical adventure game that may be niche, but is worth looking into. Forza: Horizon 2 upped the ante over Forza Motorsport 5, proving that people apparently enjoyed arcade style racers a bit more. Project Spark was Microsoft’s answer to content creation games like LittleBigPlanet that sadly didn’t take off as well as they had hoped. Though it did provide for some fantastic player generated content – we were sad to see it shut down so quickly.

Then, Microsoft had their first big game, and arguably one of the first must-own games on the platform. Funny enough, it was made by a former Sony exclusive studio. I’m talking about Sunset Overdrive. It showed charm, it was incredibly immersive, it was fun, and people loved it. Sadly, it didn’t sell nearly enough and Microsoft never ordered a sequel despite the fact that Insomniac Games had repeatedly told people to ask Microsoft about a sequel. The game did launch on PC just the other week, and for only $20, so if you haven’t played it, go have a look.

Lastly, Microsoft released the much-anticipated Halo: The Master Chief Collection. This package had the original 4 games in one bundle that would allow you to dynamically swap between the first two games’ original graphics and what it would have looked like on current generation hardware. Sadly, the game was riddled with massive game breaking issues that persisted for quite a long time. In fact, they hung around for so long they only just released a massive patch to fix many of its problems.

With 2014 down, what about 2015? With the launch woes mostly worked out, how did Microsoft and Xbox start alleviating their game deficiency? Or did it only start to begin in 2016?