"It became very clear that we were missing the large final location that was going to tie the story together," says former lead quest designer Will Shen.
In the few years I've been making games for shits and giggles, the best rule I've developed is Always Be Shipping. You can tweak like crazy in the last hours of a project. You can build whole concepts only to throw them out. So long as you have A Game to push out the door, day-of, you are free to do whatever the hell you want.
Doing your first level first or your last level last is absolute rookie shit.
I don't quite understand what you're saying. Could you elaborate what you mean with "Doing your first level first or your last level last is absolute rookie shit."?
This also goes for many things in general, not just gamedev. I used to be a teaching assistant at the University that I was studying at, and this was the main thing people seemed to get wrong in their projects. Instead of going for the basics and building from there, they just went for all the fancy cool features, or the most optimal algorithm. Then, when the deadline inevitably came around, they would have basically nothing working correctly. Sometimes I even warned them, and yet it still went wrong.