If a game is announced, takes many many years to come out, and it feels shallow/rushed/unpolished/bad nevertheless, and you're asking yourself "what did they spend all this time doing," the answer is almost always rebooting production multiple times
I once joined a project in June that was supposed to come out by the end of that year, and it was in a pre-alpha state. It had already been in development for four years at that point. A month later, studio management decided to change game engines. When the project inevitably failed to meet the end-of-year deadline, it was canceled, and the team breathed a collective sigh of relief. Only to be told by upper management six weeks later that the project was _un_canceled, and to "continue as before." So, we completely overhauled the game's design, we upgraded the tech to actually make the game possible to make, and then the company slowly bled to death over eighteen months.
Vidya Gaems™