[News] 2023 was a great year for games, but an even better year for the comeback

[PRODEXOR]

You may be tired of hearing about how stacked 2023 was for videogames. It's hard to argue with a year that gave us a long-awaited Diablo sequel, a pretty great Star Wars game, surprise hits in Dave The Diver and Dredge, and critical darlings in Alan Wake 2 and friggin' Armored Core 6. Oh, not to mention an RPG so good we gave it our highest review score in 16 years. Well I didn't play most of those games. While my peers were gushing about a funky musical number in Alan Wake 2 and starting third playthroughs of Baldur's Gate 3, I was pouring over patch notes and installing updates for shooters people stopped talking about a long time ago. It was a great year for new games, but a fantastic year for the comeback. They just kept coming up in 2023. For as much as we've seen the live service model produce troubled, unfinished shooters at launch, it's worth acknowledging when studios are allowed to put in the work and turn things around based on feedback. The year's FPS comeback stories ran the gamut: we had a slow burn of updates that finally culminated into something special, monumental patches that transformed good games into great ones overnight, and one comeback that's just getting started, but looking bright. Let's talk about the year in comebacks, what went wrong with these shooters at launch, and how far they've come.We had a good time with Battlefield 2042 at launch, but it was clear DICE's vision for a Battlefield with bigger maps and hero-like "Specialist" abilities hadn't quite hit the mark. The maps were huge and pretty, but sometimes empty and boring. DICE evolved the class system by essentially throwing it out and letting any character use any gadget, which killed any semblance of teamwork. The consensus was that Battlefield 2042 was OK for what it was, but didn't really feel like classic Battlefield. Over the next year and a half, DICE would change that. The studio started by chipping away at the little things—in 2022 a proper scoreboard arrived, along with voice chat and the option to text chat with the enemy team. Then it tackled maps: several of 2042's sprawling battlefields were reined in to minimize downtime and pieces of cover were added to expanses of nothing to give infantry players a fighting chance. A classic variant of Conquest with a 64-player cap was another welcome addition. But for my money, Battlefield 2042 didn't fully click until this year, when DICE reworked the class system into a surprisingly effective merger of classic class-exclusive abilities and individual Specialist gadgets. Seasons 4 and 5 were a big turnaround for the punching bag FPS of 2021, and things are going so well that a Season 6 is coming.

https://www.pcgamer.com/2023-was-a-great-year-for-games-but-an-even-better-year-for-the-comeback/