It can be all over the place, really. For every Duke Nukem Forever, there's a Team Fortress 2. For every Last Guardian, there's a Daikatana. But I'd say the difference is that most of the time, when a game gets delayed for that long, it means it was being shelved and when they got back to it, they started from scratch. Compare those late-90s screenshots of TF2 to the final game – when they finally made TF2, they hadn't been doing it piecemeal in fits and starts for almost a decade; they just sat down, cracked their knuckles, and created one of the best shooters in history on a pretty normal development schedule.

Meanwhile, games like Duke Nukem Forever and Too Human really were developed over years, and they actually showed it. Where a game like Half-Life 2 felt cutting-edge on release, those two felt like they'd been made several years ago – because sections of them indeed had been. A severely delayed bad game is what it is because it carries the baggage of a thousand half-built and half-baked concepts, all stapled to the back of the only one lucky enough to see the game to release, and by the end, the control scheme doesnt work and the only black guy in the game is named Superfly.