These 2025 Games Changed Everything – For the Better

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Introduction

Games that start off a certain way develop a reputation, and if it’s not necessarily something somebody wants to play, they’re not necessarily going to go back to it. But sometimes, these games get updates and change in a way to feel real and alive again, pretty significantly. And that’s what we’re going to talk about. Hi folks, it’s Khizar, and today on Game Ranks, the 10 most improved games of 2025 that play completely different. Starting off with number 10 is the Palworld 0.6.0 Tides of Terraria update. Palworld was a surprisingly fleshed-out game for being early access when it originally released. January 19th, um, 2024 was when it came out. There was still plenty of room for improvement. Of course, most of the updates in 2024 and 2025 have been minor, but the most recent patch, Tides of Terraria, adds some pretty significant changes to how players experience Palworld. This is the biggest expansion the game has seen so far, um, bringing an entirely new dungeon based on Terraria with crossover weapons and enemies and even a new raid boss. Um, it’s quite the extensive crossover. It feels a little out of place, but you can’t deny the amount of content it adds. And if you’re actually a fan of Terraria, it’s fun seeing some of those enemies appear in 3D. That’s only part of what they’ve added to the game, though. There’s another large amount of media additions for the core game, like fishing, for instance. You can actually fish now and explore new islands and take on new quests. There’s a Pal Trust mechanic where your bond with your Pals gets stronger the more time you spend with them, which increases their stats. Enemies now build their own bases, and you get new faction-specific blueprints from raiding their bases. There’s new buildings, new weapons, changes to settlements. The whole game has gotten a once-over, and it’s much better for it. It’s just an all-around more polished experience with more stuff to do.

Number nine

Avowed, uh, the patch from 1.4 to 1.5. This Obsidian spin-off game set in the Pillars of Eternity universe came out earlier this year, but they’ve already made some pretty big changes in the economy, companions, uh, all the way to entire skill trees. Back when Avowed first launched, it had some annoying issues, but these recent patches have gone a really long way in making the game an overall better experience. Um, the biggest game-changers come from the 1.5 patch, which adds multiple new skills and passives to both the Fighter and Ranger skill trees. They’re not minor changes. They’re significant new abilities. Um, Rangers get stuff like the Shadow Step that allows them to teleport behind enemies or throw a wave of daggers or drop a smoke bomb. This stuff wasn’t in the game before. It’s big additions that make Ranger skills sound a lot more fun to play around with. Warriors get a nice boost too. You get a proper Mighty Boot to give this game a little bit of a Dark Messiah of Might and Magic energy, as well as some useful powers like being able to quickly restore stamina or revive allies without having to actually find them. Those powers would be more than enough to get Avowed on this list, but they’ve also made a lot of little changes that make the game just more satisfying to play in general. For one thing, they’ve eased off the stinginess of resources. So, you can experiment with weapons a lot more. Crafting and buying and selling stuff in Avowed was one of the biggest problems with the game at launch. It was just way too stingy with the resources. These changes make the economy a lot less punishing and make the game feel like less of a slog to get through. They’ve also added more weapons to the starting areas so different character builds aren’t missing out. And they changed how dispelling illusions works, so you can do it with an item. You no longer have to rely on a single party member to do it for you. The base game had you pretty much forced to bring a party member with you for the last two major areas of the game. It was annoying, but now that’s fixed. Overall, Avowed is a much better game than when it first launched, and it’s only been about 6 months, but the improvements—they’re significant.

Number eight

when the Ubisoft Avatar game came out in the tail end of 2023, it didn’t leave much of an impression. Sort of like the movies, but those at least make a ton of money as roller coaster rides, I guess. But a roller coaster is passive, and a video game is not. Frontiers of Pandora ended up being a pretty big disappointment sales-wise. You’d think they’d just give up on a game like that, though. But the developers at Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft Toronto haven’t. There’s still some major updates coming, like one that gives players an entirely new perspective to play the game. Not just a half-baked new camera mode—they put in a ton of new animations to really make third-person movement work. And while it is technically a cosmetic change, it does look like it’s going to breathe new life into the world of Pandora. The controls have been reworked as well, so it’s not just playing first-person from a zoomed-out camera. It actually plays differently from the different perspective. Having third-person always kind of made sense for the game. You do make your own custom character, and the movement of the Na’vi seems custom-built for third-person. But the game was originally built for first-person—essentially a sci-fi Far Cry. So, adding a fully functional third-person mode is a big change for this game. In general, the game has already seen some major improvements across the board too. Uh, the addition of New Game Plus and some noteworthy changes to how combat works makes the game feel better to play. Uh, there haven’t been that many updates to the game in the two years since it launched, but the ones that we have gotten are fairly significant and improve the game overall. Not a complete turnaround or anything, but the new third-person update coming December 5th should hopefully make the game feel a bit more fresh.

Number seven

the promised Mascot Agency—the Prepare to Grind update. The new game from the Paradise Killer developer somehow is even weirder than anyone could have imagined, in the best possible way. You’re next Yakuza running a mascot agency where you collect and manage various mascot characters. So, there’s a whole lot of driving around for whatever reason. It’s a bizarre game, but it’s great and has only gotten better with the Prepare to Grind update, which adds—and I’m not kidding—the power to grind your truck on rails and train tracks. This is a thing you can do in the game. It’s ridiculous and glorious at the same time. Uh, it’s not the only thing this game changes in the update. They’ve added time trials, new difficulty modes, new collectibles, and a new store that can be accessed, uh, and a bunch of general improvements and bug fixes. It’s just a better game from top to bottom. Still, the real reason we’re here is the rail grinding. It’s both completely unnecessary and yet revolutionizes the game somehow. Um, it’s impossible to imagine the game without it now, that is to say.

Number Six

Elden Ring: Night Re – The Duo Expeditions. Yet another 2025 released game, but this one’s been getting a lot of significant updates that have improved the game a lot from its launch only a few months ago. The improved solo experience is nice for when you just want to complete quests without waiting for a team. The new Everdark Sovereigns are a real challenge, even for Souls veterans. And the most recent addition of a Duos game mode really brings the last major missing piece from the original launch into fruition. Um, one of the most requested features—the ability to play with just two people instead of solo or in teams of three—was implemented in patch 1.02, July 31st. Um, you can finally play it with your buddy without having to worry about some tagalong ruining your game. Now you’re free to ruin it yourself. The game isn’t exactly built for duos. It’s pretty obvious it was designed for three players, but if you do have a friend willing to play with you, it’s a hell of a lot better than rolling the dice with a random queue. I have to give it to the guys, uh, behind this one. While they didn’t plan for two, they at least listened to fan feedback, and they got the feature out relatively quick.

Number Five

Capcom Fighting Collection 2, the title update. This is one update I don’t think anybody in the fighting game community saw coming. Most of the time with these compilation collections, the best you get is a few bug patches and that’s it. Or you might get nothing at all. These types of games are generally just left as is. And even when fans have specific requests or complain about missing features, it’s kind of, “Eh, whatever.” So, when the Capcom Fighting Collection 2 launched, it was lauded for its solid ports of some arcade classics like the mostly forgotten Plasma Sword, the popular Dreamcast Power Stone games. But the real star of the show was a new port of Street Fighter 3 Alpha Upper, the last arcade iteration of the legendary fighting game. [Applause] It’s a great game that’s well represented here, but it was missing four characters added to the handheld ports.

So, it wasn’t technically the most feature-complete version of the game, but inexplicably, during EVO 2025, Capcom revealed they managed to bring the last four missing fighters into the game, completing the roster. These characters don’t perfectly mesh with the original roster, with them all coming from games that came after Street Fighter Alpha 3, but their inclusion does complete it, and it’s just a better product all around for having them. I mean, it was kind of odd that they’re bringing Ingret back as a DLC character for Street Fighter 6, but got left out of the most recent collection. So, this update fixes that little snafu. Not a total game-changer, but knowing how Capcom normally treats these collections, it’s extremely unexpected in a great way. Fly. Shoot fly. You. Oh yeah. Hey, you win.

Number Four

Stalker patch 1.5. The devs at GSC Game World have been consistently updating Stalker 2 since it was originally released to do things like improve performance and fix the game’s many, many bugs. The recent 1.5 patch, released on June 25th, is the most important update released so far. This patch finally addresses many of the complaints directed at the game when it first launched, with NPCs and enemies only spawning within a certain vicinity. The highly touted A-Life system was beginning to feel a little empty, and the frustration of fighting mutant enemies that gave you nothing as a reward was real. All of that changed with the latest patch. The A-Life changes, which are basically global AI stuff, make it so there are stalkers in the world who go around and do their own thing. It’s far from having the depth of some popular fan mods of the original game, but in general, the world does have a lot more life to it, with more people around, more wilderness that adds some unpredictability to things. It also helps to have more people around to unload loot, ’cause being over-encumbered was a constant problem in the release version. NPCs don’t spawn out of nowhere as much anymore either, which has the effect of making enemy encounters a lot more interesting. They don’t just appear right next to you and start shouting in a big clump. You can actually use some strategy now when dealing with non-static enemies. There are new guns, new anomalies, and one huge change is that the mutants actually drop loot now, so you get something for killing them. It’s not a total waste of time anymore. All this, along with the many quality-of-life updates they’ve made since launch, makes this game way less tedious. Grenade. Enemy.

Number Three

The Talos Principle: Reawakened. The original was fantastic, of course—one of the best puzzle games of the last few years. So, it’s easy to look at the remastered version that released in 2025 and think it’s unnecessary. Yeah, the price is a little steep, but Croteam didn’t just sleepwalk through this one. They’ve made some really smart changes to the gameplay systems as well. There’s a new chapter too, which is pretty cool. And the graphics are pretty stunning. But the real game-changer is how they changed the most frustrating puzzles from the original. I’m talking about the recorder puzzles—the ones where you have to record your movement, then play it back in order to solve complex puzzles that involve moving in tandem with your recorded copy. These are creative and well-designed puzzles, but a lot of the time you were forced to just stand around and wait in order to give yourself enough time when playing back the recording in order to get things in position. It was awkward and fiddly and made some—I mean, just made it kind of suck. In the remaster, they made it so you can set pause points while recording, so you don’t need to stand on a button or something. You just pause the recording, then advance it when you actually want to progress. It’s an elegant solution that makes Reawakened a lot more fun to play. This single change alone makes the remake superior to the original by a lot.

NumberTwo

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet—Nintendo Switch’s Switch 2 upgrade patch specifically. A lot of Switch 1 games were improved when they were brought to the Switch 2, but this game in particular got a massive blow-up. The original version of Scarlet and Violet was a technical disaster. It ran like crap. The visuals were muddy. The draw distance was abysmal. It just did not look good. Did not feel good. And the Switch 2 upgrade patch feels about a thousand times better. I mean, you go from a sub-30 FPS to a pretty consistent 60. That is a freaking game-changer. And it makes Scarlet and Violet so much better. It’s almost hard to describe how much better. The original game felt like trudging through mud. The updated version feels like a big weight has been lifted from you. It’s an undeniable improvement that takes a performance from borderline unplayable to downright acceptable. It’s—I mean, still not amazing. It drops below 60 in some dense locations, leading me to believe it’s not necessarily because they optimized the code as much as it possibly could be. They’re probably just taking advantage of the fact that the hardware is a lot better. But hey, the FPS is significantly better most of the time. That’s kind of what matters. The environment’s still kind of ugly and bland a bit of the time, but, uh, for whatever reason, that was way too much for the original game, and it’s not on the Switch 2. It’s kind of a day-and-night type improvement. It’s way better.

Number One

Heretic and Hexen’s Night Dive remaster. Night Dive’s remaster of Heretic and Hexen just came out. They’re free to anybody who already owns the games on Steam or GOG, and they take these two games that are best described as flawed and make a lot of major and minor improvements to both of them. Thing is, with something like Doom or Doom 2, you don’t need to make a lot of changes to make those games palatable to a modern audience. They still hold up. Heretic and Hexen, though—different story. For various reasons, these games had a lot more problems. They’re really cool games, but modern remasters had their work cut out for them. And honestly, Night Dive did more than they even needed to. Thankfully, I’m not just talking about adding a remixed soundtrack or sprucing up some of the old levels with new textures. They completely changed the way weapons work, and the new mechanics to some of the classes in Hexen just—I mean, it’s better. They also reworked large chunks of the level design to make things less confusing and cryptic. Generally, enemies are less bullet-spongy in Heretic. The levels are less confusing in Hexen, and that makes both games just a lot less tedious and a lot more fun to play. What’s great is a lot of these changes can be adjusted in the settings too. So, if there are certain things you prefer about the originals, you can change them back. Like, most of it’s not set in stone. All that. There’s a new episode for both games, which features enemies that were cut from original versions. Just an all-around stellar remaster that transforms these flawed gems into legitimate classics that they were always on the verge of being.And that’s all for today. Leave us