Alright folks. Across the board it appears that the majority of people who have played this game thinks it is a bad game.

The game has been in development for 14 years and is fucking atrocious from word of mouth.

Alan Wake has been in development from anywhere from 5-6 years and the feelings on it tend to be mixed from terrible to great. (i'm in the middle)

Prey has been around for for 11 years and was kinda bad and clunky, not many people liked it.

Is it at all possible to release a game that has been worked on for 5+ years and not lead it to be a disappointment, were these games ever going to be fantastic, important or even great if it was finished earlier? Most devs have a 18 month to 2 years dev cycle and some of them are able to churn out some decent products so what went wrong?

Wasnt Red Dead Redemption in development for years as well? 

LA Noire was in development for a really long time and that seems to have turned out okay.  There was a large amount of time between Half-life 1 and 2 and Starcraft 1 and 2, though I don't know if they were necessarily working on the games all that time. 
 
Games generally turn out kinda bad if they're stuck in limbo for a long time, but there are exceptions.

Oh Spore, where did you go wrong? I had such high hopes for you.

No game takes that long to develop without behind the scenes stuff going horribly wrong.

You can't really think of it as something like 'it took 14 years to put this 100 piece puzzle together.' Just from the trailers, you can tell the game was completely redone multiple times. The story changed several times, the engine changed, the models changed, a lot of shit changed without someone intervening a long time ago when they should have. It's bad oversight and management. That's why you see more companies scrapping games even very late in the development process. Those were probably good decisions in the end. Instead of that 100 piece puzzle, Duke Nukem Forever ended up being a 1,000 piece, double-sided puzzle missing a bunch of pieces so it borrowed pieces from other puzzles that didn't really fit. The puzzle was thus finished, but it came out wrong and not very pleasant overall.

Well Gran Turismo 5 wasn't a complete failure. It kept its fans and made lots and lots of money. 

Rockstar intentionally have long development cycles. It is how they produce such high quality games. The problem is when a game takes far longer to complete than was originally intended.

No game takes that long to develop without behind the scenes stuff going horribly wrong.

Team Fortress 2 was in development since 1998 and that turned out fine. In fact they won't stop adding shit to the game.

No one game should take all that time (to be developed).

@Dalai said:

Team Fortress 2 was in development since 1998 and that turned out fine. In fact they won't stop adding shit to the game.

In this case and cases like it, it makes it more likely to succeed. 1998's TF2: Brotherhood of Arms was a very different game from the one that eventually came out. If a game is delayed that much because it gets restarted at some point, that's usually a good sign.