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I noticed that MW3 2011 got 200+ positive reviews after MW3 2023 got poor reviews. I think a similar thing happened to TF2 after Overwatch 2 released on Steam. Super Paper Mario probably had many grievances forgiven after everyone saw the sequels.

Can anyone pitch in a trend for other games when this has happened? After Steam decided to hide reviews based on if they were "on or off topic" to counter "review bombing", I felt like this was a worthwhile discussion. It seems to me that people's appreciation for older games and movies seem to improve when a arguably bad product releases.

The starwars prequels, the third one especially.

The only one that was actually a "underated masterpiece" was the third one revenge of the sith, the scene between Obiwan and Anakin and that scene where Anakin kills a bunch of children and her wife Padme has to watch what Anakin has become go so hard.

Attack of the clones and Phantom Menace actually are as bad as people first thought though only the third one deserves imo the cult following it got from memes and people looking at the prequels more favorably because of the tv shows and the starwarssequels being bad.

One of my highest rated reviews on steam was when I gave a very positive review to a Men of War title shortly after the initial shitty release of Company of Heroes 3. I think the very "USSR bad" story of that upset a lot of players, mostly Russians, and caused this phenomena you're describing to happen to a lot of east bloc ww2 games around that same time. The microtransactions and multiplayer was terrible too but I recall most of the complaints being around the exaggerated "Enemy at the gates"-level writing of the story being what folks latched onto more.

I bet something similar happened to 40k strategy games after Dawn of War III was released but I can't say for certain.

BFV was was marred with several historical controversies and pr fiascos which saw it underperform both commercially & critically. It was only redeemed in the eyes of fans when Dice made a much worse sequel, BF2042, which made it shine in comparison. For all of BFV's faults, the game had a solid foundation and carried on the tight-knit class based warfare the franchise is known for. The same could not be said about BF2042 and resulted in a massive player exodus back to BFV or older titles in the franchise.

To their credit, Dice did turn around BF2042 to a marginal success story, but BFV still retains a higher player count and far more positive reception.

I think the most recent examples I saw of this are with Payday 2 and all the Saints Row games released before the reboot. Payday 3 had a really bad launch where barely anyone could play it due to the servers being busted, and I think they're still really unstable. Despite fans initially being happy that the decade long wait for a new Payday was coming to an end, the launch has been such a mess that, as of right now at least, fans still prefer the old Payday 2, even with its outdated engine.

Opinions on Saints Row started getting divisive following the release of SR3 as the series began to drop the mostly grounded nature of the first two games in favor of more wackiness. Said wackiness of SR3 and 4 absolutely have a lot of fans, but when rumors of a reboot that would attempt to be closer to the more grounded nature of the first two began circulating the old fans got excited. Come the reboot which dropped all the beloved classic characters in favor of new ones that feel like they were made in a bad attempt to pander to gen Z, plus gameplay and an open world that's just absolutely dull, and both sides of the SR fanbase came together to agree "whether you prefer a more grounded game or a wacky one, we can all agree the reboot flat out sucks." Even with the reboot sucking I still hate that Volition was shut down a year later as I felt they could still redeem themselves if they made something like a really good new Red Faction, but now that just won't happen.