But this is also fine! It's also unexplored territory. In the words of Mr. Miyamoto: "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad."
Releasing it when it is ready rather than releasing it to release it is probably better in this case. Especially if the creator ever plans on other 4D game projects, since he has his own game engine to create them now. Better to not have someone's first experience with a 4D game be "This was garbage." in that case.
Duke Nukem Forever would beg to differ. The risk with delaying is that you may not be prioritizing the important things. Because you just bought yourself more time, it's easier to do the part you enjoy, instead of the part that's needed.
DNF was fine, it just wasn't the amazing masterpiece people expected. Miyamoto's quote can be true, but it can also be true that while delays can get you to 'good', that doesn't mean they can get you to 'great', and 'great' might sometimes only be achievable through aggressive cutting to the core experience. Not necessarily rushed, but not without deadlines and hard choices either.
For games pushing a new gimmick this seems even more true, and especially the idea of iterating on things that maybe aren't even quite "good" in order to learn more and eventually understand how to make something great even if a lot of the time greatness seems accidental. Two examples come to mind... Doom was made in a year, but was a culmination of even shorter projects successively refining what FPS meant. Portal was done in a little over 2 years, but was also built on the experience of Digipen students' project game that introduced the gimmick mechanic along with others at Valve with experience making FPSes (along with some writers who knew what they were doing).
Duke Nukem Forever was far from fine. They'd spent over a decade switching engines, rearranging progression and changing scenarios until they had no more money and nothing even close to a finished project.
Then Gearbox stepped in, wrapped it up in near passable form and shipped it. But the final product is very clearly not a good game. Level design is bad, graphics are terribly inconsistent, ranging from looking modern for its time to looking ten years dated. Gameplay is poorly balanced and the pacing is just not there.
I loved Duke Nukem 3D and was very much looking forward to Forever when it was announced. By the time it launched I had no expectations on it and bought it as a fun thing. It's amusing that they wrapped it up and published it, but it's not a finished game.
What it is, however, is fodder for some great conversation at work when we're discussing project management.
DNF had nothing to do with what made D3D actually good: amazing level design, creative weapons and enemies, fantastic music, tons of secrets, and a variety of weird environments. D3D took all the joys of shareware, episodic DOS gaming and brought them to 3D. DNF took all the juvenile bits and wrapped them in a half-baked CoD shell.
If only the game was as good as the 2001 E3 trailer.
It really depends on the game. The issue with DNF is that by the time it came out, the whole game felt very dated. This is definitely an issue for 3D games. Another post from the same author talks about Reset [0], which in 2012 looked absolutely gorgeous, but if it came out today it would look like a normal game.
For a puzzle game, I would say that there's less risk for that, although I do recall other games copying the 4D mechanic since.
This quote gets thrown quite often in the gaming community but I'm pretty sure it's taken out of context (In fact I can't find the source for it). But I'm sure Miyamoto context was 1 to 2 years max and not 10 years. I say this because Nintendo has a history of brutal work to meet deadlines. See the history of Mr Satoru Iwata and why be became the CEO of Nintendo.
It matters for the same reason first impressions matter. It's a lot harder to succeed in a relationship with someone if you start off on the wrong foot.
I know many others, and myself, who won't be playing Fallout:76 or No Man's Sky because both games were colossal train wrecks on launch that over-promised (or over-hyped) and under-delivered. It doesn't matter much if these issues are eventually fixed, most of the player base will have already moved on. Some many go back and try it out when they hear "it's better now" but many won't.
The games will be remembered poorly by most people, even if they eventually do become good and that is what the quote means.
On this note, even when the game "is better now" to a new-comer the game almost always still possesses the characteristic flaws that it always did, albeit muted in the new release. At least this has been my experience in such matters.
Delayed game > rushed game > game that never ships at all.
One of the key challenges is that it is so hard to distinguish the first case from the last. In practice, there are many more games that never get finished than those that do.
Releasing it when it is ready rather than releasing it to release it is probably better in this case. Especially if the creator ever plans on other 4D game projects, since he has his own game engine to create them now. Better to not have someone's first experience with a 4D game be "This was garbage." in that case.