I've worked on some mediocre games, some well-received games, and some crap ones. A lot of the jobs I've had have hired me on well into the game's dev cycle, (sometimes after a year of productive development, sometimes after a year of what was apparently a lot of wheel spinning), so I wasn't there in preproduction or even at the start of production most of the time.
One of the well-received games was a complete nightmare to work on. The working conditions weren't terrible, but the engine and tools were unbelievably bad and the shortcuts the dev team had made (it was supposedly a realistic game, but the simulation systems were laughably inaccurate) were embarrassing. But the team powered through in content creation -- the simulated systems remained terrible -- and it got good reviews. Nearly no one outside the company even mentioned the problems our team saw with it. Go figure.
Another of the good ones was better architected, but the working conditions were terrible. We kinda knew that game had potential, but the dev process was a nightmare.
As for the bad games I've worked on, one started as a portable game, then became a console/portable game midway through, then the portable port was foisted off to an external studio while we just focused on making a great console title. But truth be told, it was a very technically unambitious title even back originally when it was for the portable console. That one, I kinda knew it wasn't going to be one of the better titles on my resume from the start, but it was a job.
One of the other bad games, I had a bad feeling about because it was a sports game with a few key design choices that seemed like terrible ideas from the outset. Also, it was a sports title trying to compete head-on with established juggernauts in that market, and it was clearly being developed on the cheap: headcount much, much lower than its competitors, licensing was subpar, feature set was conspicuously not up to par. And the design documents clearly showed some fuzzy and subpar thinking, IMO. Worst of all, the soul of the game - what we all should have been working to build - was described in emphatic but vague terms. So everyone could be fired up to make it more 'X', but 'X' was ill-defined and we never really tried to nail down "OK, how specifically are we going to produce something with the qualities of 'X'?"
But again, that was a job, and as with all jobs where I've been hired on late in the project, I figured the plan was to get this one out the door and make the next one great.
(Come to think of it, though, that one had a completely shite postmortem process, which I now realize is yet another red flag. Basically, management essentially said "yeah, that project sucked, we've fired some people, let's not look back any more." And as it turned out, we didn't end up learning anything! Shocker.)
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