As a former game developer, I can completely empathize. Some teams want to push the medium forward. Look at Doom, Mario 64. Half Life 2 is one of those titles.

As a former game developer, I can completely empathize. Some teams want to push the medium forward. Look at Doom, Mario 64. Half Life 2 is one of those titles. The problem is that the Episode 2 ending did tease the story going somewhere. It's not like the game was a mindless shooter consisting only of groundbreaking mechanics. It spent three games building these characters. People were invested in the story, and they were let down. However. People remember Half Life 2 for its physics. For the way it pushed graphics. For how it did environment based storytelling. For its AI entities you could control. For the amazing architecture. Very little of what made HL2 is the story. I think they made the right decision not to ship something they couldn't be proud of. That takes a lot of bravery, in my opinion. I wish they had been more open about it. In the recent years, I was impressed with how Nintendo came out publicly and said they were somewhat stuck and unhappy with Metroid Prime 4's development, apologized, and decided to start over. Metroid fans know about waiting for great games. It'll be worth it.