I was watching the trailer for an update to Ready Or Not today and thinking about how it started out in testing as a competitive 3v3 shooter iirc before wisely pivoting into a more SWATesque PvE shooter. 

What are some other successful pivots in gaming where a lackluster product was saved by a radical shift in design or focus? The later in development the better. 

Cheers. 

Apparently Resident Evil Requeim was at one point an open world multiplayer game, before pivoting to the superb linear single player game we got.

Banjo Kazooie began as an RPG with a boy fighting pirates before changing tracks to become the platformer masterpiece we played in 1998.

Halo was at one point going to be an RTS.

Leaving the obvious Fortnite aside, maybe Final Fantasy XIV?

Arc Raiders was a f2p Pve co-op shooter. It was supposed to release in 2022 like this, but it was not good. 

Fortnite was just a co-op pve game too, and then PUBG released and they made a trendchasing battle royale mode in like a few months and it was more popular than the actual game by a factor of millions.

The main lesson appears to be if your pve game is a bit rubbish then just find a way to let people kill each other. 

I believe Team Fortress 2 originally was going to have a realistic generic military look to it.
Reverse of that is early Hitman series pitches had a highly cartoonish artstyle.



Can I go hardware? Going from making an add on for a Nintendo console to making their own sure worked out for Sony.

Isn't that more of a comeback than a pivot though?

Are you ****ing serious?  Wow.  That is nuts.

I was going to say the same.  I would add Nintendo coming their portable and home divisions for a unified hardware solution as well.  

Not sure if there's much of a difference in this case.

Halo. It originally started as an RTS before becoming a third person shooter then into a first person shooter.