DNF's development timeline could go down as one of the most convoluted as the devs repeatedly can't agree on what to focus on most - gameplay or graphics. what it was most successful in was the transformation from a game in the making to an urban legend, a trailer/teaser can be found here and there.
on the other hand, Valve's HL2 dev team even survived an hacker attack, who then posted the source-code on the web.. not a like-for-like comparison, just to show that all would undergo some kind of problems during development stage.