That's a good point and another "my gut says something's missing" indicator: you can pick a wide number of skills and perks which are completely viable through the first half of the game then become complete deadweight in the second half.
The developers obviously knew what they were doing. They just stopped doing it for the second half when everything goes pure hack and slash, leading one to think: "This couldn't have been intentional... we're missing the second half of the game, aren't we?"

Remember when for first time spent 2 hours or something farming all these super duper end-game items in sewers for my party before finale and then never had opportunity to use them. That was disappointing.

Reminds me of Wizardry Gaiden 4. At the start, there are 3 huge towers to explore, with puzzles (sometimes with multiple solutions) and NPCs to interact with. Once you clear the 3 towers, however, all the NPCs die and there are none for the rest of the game; just a small number of puzzles (one big one having only 1 solution), and the enemy strength *finally* increases. Then the final dungeon is easier combat-wise from the previous dungeon, so you don't get to experience enough high level gameplay before the bonus dungeon, where there's both a huge jump in enemy strength and a lack of bigger enemy groups.

Or there's Ultima 6, which has the best combat in the series, but no endgame combat challenges to actually take advantage of that.

(I could also note that Ultima 3 has the biggest and most balanced class system in the series.)

You've played that too? I think the whole ending is evidence of it being rushed. The two empty desert levels with nothing but scorpions, the rain worshipping bird-men in one of them, the beached abandoned ship in the other all just seem to be the starting point of un-included quests.

Goblins become irrelevant after you kill the Khan even though things started to become interesting, the Lava Troll chamber and Unholy Oubilette in the sewers also just exist without much significance. The War Golem you find in France should've had a story too I think.

Looking back on it, it could've been a great game if only the devs had more time.

Ghost of Tsushima
I posted a good example of this in the "your choices don't matter" thread, regarding this. It's even more noticeable that things are missing having played Infamous and knowing they've done a choice/path system before.

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/worst_examples_of_your_choices_matter/post29

Final Fantasy X-2
I have no evidence (though it may exist), but FFX2 feels like this. While at its core, it was an engine/asset reuse, a lot of the game is pretty good. But the enemies you fight, they're just... nothing. They're just pile of hit points that never do anything interesting or special. It's like the in-combat bit was never playtested after the first couple dozen levels. Once you get there, the game is just "spam attack" or "spam darkness". It's like they shipped with placeholder enemies and never completed them or did a playtest + balance pass.

Reminds me of Final Fantasy 3. The player gets some interesting abilities, but within any given dungeon, the enemies are just dull. With one exception, if any enemy in a dungeon is undead, all of them are. Also, splitting enemies are confined to certain dungeons, and they dominate those dungeons; once you get past them, there are no more, so the effects of high end weapons (like Masamune) to prevent it don't matter. (There's also the fact that storing power feels like a wasted opportunity as far as those dungeons are concerned; in the original, storing power makes the character defenseless, making it way too risky, and in the remake, you don't get the job for that until *after* that section.) I could also point out that this is the first Final Fantasy game to make all bosses immune to all status ailments (and in the original, this even extends to the Drain spell); FF4 also has this issue, but fortunately, FF5 does not.

Zelda: Ocarina of Time suffers from a complete lack of water in any dungeon past the Water Temple; even the trials in Ganon's castle, which are meant to be a recap of the adult dungeons, has no water. Also, that castle didn't feel like a proper dungeon, a problem also found in Link's Awakening and Majora's Mask, so it feels like those games are missing final dungeons.

** Spoilers **

I'm playing Witcher 2 at the moment, I think most of the way through Chapter 2. I didn't like the way they handled Geralt finding the Sword artifact and spear head in Vergen at all. You fight your way through this spectral mist to get to the town, then to get the sword you send Zoltan to go off and butter up Saskia for you and she just gives it to you. Then, for the spear head, you just win it off of one of the dwarves playing dice poker!

To me, it seemed quite anticlimactic and smacks quite strongly of corners being cut. I mean, even Dandelion is going to struggle to spin that into something epic in his ballads!

Reminded me of another game ending, that of Might and Magic 5: Darkside of Xeen. (Spoilers follow)

The whole series so far has a main villain named Sheltem, and MM5 includes the final confrontation with him. You'd think there'd be a challenging and epic fight, right? Wrong! Instead of a fight, you just get a cutscene showing some powerful being fighting him; you don't even get to fight him yourself!

There's also The Dark Spire (spoilers):

The third ending of the game involves getting a special alignment, boosting the CH stat of your party up high enough, and getting through a special floor that requires character skills that are otherwise unused. Then you get to the end, start the ending, and all you get is some text that describes an epic battle; you don't actually get to fight the battle yourself. (Also, there's on Mage spell that can only be used with the special Balanced alignment, but it doesn't seem to do anything from a gameplay perspective.)

An even better example would be Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, which was basically released in a pre-alpha state of development. As in, in modern times this game would not have been ready for Early Access/In Dev, and would only be suitable for some early videos at some gaming conference (not even ready to have audience members try to play it), yet the game was, for some reason, released in that state. Very basic things, like collision and the ability to lose the race, are not implemented.

a dev team will only 'tidy up' if the backers are willing to pay them for their time to do so... in most cases a 'working' game is set to launch by X date by the backers and so shal it be!

small teams of 1-10 can work for free in order to polish but normally that is a job for modders [assuming you give them the base files aka Knights of the old republic] or the gold editions ... the gap between having a working game or a polished game can easily be 5 years and the bottom line is always $

Well. I will be honest, it is a mystery.

Well since you are still playing, I won't say much, but after chapter 3 finishes, the main story will get finished up very upruptly with a lengthy exposition dump. It feels like there should have been a chapter 4.

Ok, that's interesting. I have seen a few of the store page reviews saying Chapter 3 feels a bit rushed, so I'm not holding out much hope that it will redeem anything. I've been doing quite a bit of W2-bashing lately, but it seems to me the game suffers from 2 problems:

1) It's a typical example of a sequel to a successful PC game that has been 'consolized', with too much attention being paid to the graphics and presentation, rather than the content.

2) It is also a typical example of a 'first game on a new engine', where the devs had to focus so much time/energy on developing the engine that it resulted in cutting back on content.

So, the content has been hit by a double-whammy. I'll be hoping W3 is an improvement, given its reputation, but I won't get my hopes up too much. Although, W2 seems to be dropping some quite interesting breadcrumbs about the Wild Hunt and Geralt's returning memories.

The thing with W3 is, that there are two different games in one, that contradict each other in gameplay and feeling.
The one game is, where you ride into different towns and settlements and solve their mosnter related problems and in turn get to know some things about the inhabitants and their relations with each other.
And the other game is a very linear story about a very, very urgent quest. And every character tells you how close you missed Ciri and if you hurry up you might catch up to her. You can spent several ingame weeks, and tens of real life hours, doing other stuff, all while letting the NPCs wait between two chase sequences.
In my opinion they should have gone all in on the open world gameplay where you ride from village to village, being closest to a witcher on 'the path' and that would be the closest to the short story nature of the first book.