From an upcoming interview with Valve‘s Chet Faliszek by That VideoGame Blog:
“We’ve thrown out entire games,” Faliszek said. “You think something’s gonna work and… [developers] talk about this giant design document and it’s just like we’re so much more iterative. We have these ideas we want to express [and] the easiest way to test those is get them in the game as soon as you can and then have someone not on the team play it. All through the Left 4 Dead process, all through the Left 4 Dead 2 process we’ve had outside players come in and play the game and give us feedback.”
That’s exactly why we’ve spent so much effort on bringing people in to play Quarrel since day one, and on taking the game out to ProtoPlay and the BMSC. While we clearly haven’t thrown out the entire game (in this case), we have taken out a number of features that just weren’t working for whatever reason and tightened up the entire experience. We think Quarrel is all the better for it.
Looking forward to reading the full interview!