You sure that's not Bugthesda and their broken engine you are thinking about? Tyranny and the Pillars of Eternity series were pretty alright from what I remember. One of the reviews I read/watched mentioned maybe one bug in 30-40 hours of play, with the rest uncovering none of them.
In the case of Alpha Protocol, though, the SEGA funds freezed up mid development and they weren't allowed to work on the game until more funding came along. Even though they offered to pay out of their own pockets.
I’ve been thinking about picking up pillars 2 for about a year and replaying 1. You have any recommendation on a class to play after doing wizard like 3 years ago?
Still works at Hello Games on No Man's Sky. All things considered, he did turn that game around, far better than 76 ever will.
A bit more than that, they lost a good amount of data in the office flood during development didn't they?
You can't lose what doesn't exist. According to this Polygon article, at the time they were flooded they had barely anything started on NMS past some press previews since they were still three years out from release, and they were able to recover it along with the source code for their Joe Danger games either from Sony or their own off-site backups relatively quickly. In the meantime they worked in a temporary office on what they had, and that was only for two months so even the relocation didn't really delay development. It was just good old fashioned mismanagement that made No Man's Sky the mess it was.
Even if for the sake of the argument they were idiotic on the level of not having any backups off-site, which everyone does, all stories of suddenly losing progress on development because of "an act of god" should be subject to scrutiny. Even if it were a legitimate case where you lost a year of progress, most of that progress is conceptual and remaking it wouldn't take more than a month or two. The road to the end product in game development is much longer than someone making the end product after it already exists.
