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Original post by intrest86 If the point of your game is us[e]r created content, and users cannot actually create content, then does it really make sense to call it "polished" anymore?

I tend to agree. In my mind polished isn't simply the act of using high quality assets, but of using the right assets and making sure they all fit together smoothly. A game with only stick figures or coloured blocks can still be very polished in spite of the excellent graphics.

So in the case of your examples I think you could consider the game to be more polished if they either a) provided simpler (but still good quality) graphics that thier community would more easily be able to replicate, or b) provided better tools to more easily allow thier community to create graphics which matched the style and quality of those that already existed.

I also agree: my inuition of polish implies that it cannot harm the game by definition. If a change you make in the name of polish damages the game, then you are not polishing, you are tarnishing.

The "Duke Nukem Forever" quip actually indicates what I consider the main (and as far as I can see only) case of polish being harmful; when further improvements to the game do not warrant spending the resources (time and/or money) to do so.

The last 2 games I worked on have been released in Poland so they tend to have a lot of Polish if you choose that as the in-game language!

I think that there is a point when you have to say that what you have is enough. From the experience that i have studying games design at university, i feel that i could carry on working on the levels that i have created forever. Even after the hand in dates for assignments i will continue to work on the levels to get looking what i feel is better. I suppose it is something that has to be learnt over time.

Halo is over polished... Everything in that game is shiny @_@. I do think games can be over done though. Games are like food you dont want to burn it!

Does anybody else hate when a game has no good glitches or content unintentially left behind waiting to be unlocked??

I can think of a few games off the top of my head that were more fun with glitches: Zelda, Pokemon, FF7 and I'm sure there are more. Sometimes finding the content/features/glitches developers forgot to exclude is just as fun as the main game.

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Original post by skittleo Does anybody else hate when a game has no good glitches or content unintentially left behind waiting to be unlocked?? I can think of a few games off the top of my head that were more fun with glitches: Zelda, Pokemon, FF7 and I'm sure there are more. Sometimes finding the content/features/glitches developers forgot to exclude is just as fun as the main game.

Would anyone like some Hot Coffee? [grin]

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Original post by Alpha_ProgDes Quote: Original post by skittleo Does anybody else hate when a game has no good glitches or content unintentially left behind waiting to be unlocked?? I can think of a few games off the top of my head that were more fun with glitches: Zelda, Pokemon, FF7 and I'm sure there are more. Sometimes finding the content/features/glitches developers forgot to exclude is just as fun as the main game. Would anyone like some Hot Coffee? [grin]

He said unintentionally left behind. Merely claiming it was unintentional doesn't count. [smile]

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Original post by swordfish I think the success of EV was largely in part due to it's graphics (high-end for the era, if you ask me). The art is beautiful, but the gameplay just plain sucks; so I guess they kind of evened eachother out.

I for one really loved EV's gameplay. I spent a happy semester in high school reproducing parts of it. Taught me a lot about game programming.

I think a game can be polished enough that it loses the quirkiness that makes the game interesting to begin with. Something like Noctis wouldn't be as endearing without the quirks, such as its use of DOS graphics and its impossible-to-figure-out-on-your-own UI. The problem in my mind is that polish and quirkiness are often at opposite ends of a continuum.

I haven't played it, but from what I hear Guild Wars suffers from over-polish. In this case, over balancing. There isn't any strategy when levelling up because all strategies have been balanced against each other.