"This game clearly had so much work put into it"

Mafia III is just the latest example of this, but I've noticed that I have a tendency to go soft on something or even forgive some creative missteps if I feel that the object has had a lot of work put into it, and I'm wondering why that is. This is more common with games and especially ones with bigger budgets as they tend to involve teams of dozens, sometimes even hundres of people all working very long hours giving their blood, sweat, and tears to the project. Mafia III is a great example of this because it took people no time at all to see that certain aspects of the game had less time in the fire than others (cough cough mission designs cough) and I know enough about game development and corporate culture from my own experience to realize that sometimes you just don't have enough time to everything you want with a particular game, and that's the normal case. The best studios are the ones that can hide the crunch and stick the landing with a mostly complete, hassle-free experience - smile for the cameras, in other words. Their hard work clearly paid off, but what about the Mafia III's of the world? It's impossible to say for sure, but I doubt most of the people at Hangar 13 were just phoning it in and I find myself struggling to figure how to quantify that as I think about the game.

Take Shadow Warrior 2, for example. It released to mostly positive reviews (more positive than Mafia III), comes from a respected developer/publisher team, and is, as far as the ten or so hours I've got in it indicate, a pretty solid game. It's also far, far less ambitious or big as Mafia III or even something like Far Cry 4, so it's.. weird for me. The obvious conclusion is just that Mafia III  didn't utilize the man hours put into it as effectively as Shadow Warrior 2 did, but it does so in such a strung-out, running-on-fumes way that it's tough to tell what they thought were the strong points of the game (narrative, setting). Shadow Warrior 2 is a great little game, but it's undeniably little, hollow, like a carnival game - there's no distant anticipation of narrative payoff or using systems to illustrate a point about the real world. Mafia III is a very long ways from perfect and probably even a long ways from excellent even, but I can't help but feel in my gut that just trying to build something like that with such a commitment to fidelity and setting is admirable even in the failure-case. If Mafia III's storyline was some sort of zenith of the genre (No Country for Old Men) than all would be forgiven and I could put this all to rest. But the fact that all this work, time and money was sunk into telling such a dyed-in-the-wool revenge story makes me wonder if it was all worth it in the end. Does it even deserve respect as a suck cost? I think so. Even in the end, with all it's problems, there are enough small glimmers of real honesty and emotion buried inside that pushes the balance into the black. But damn if that margin isn't thin.