Lens on Too Much Polish

Note, that's "polish" as in "shine", not "Polish" as in "sausage".

Because there's no such thing as too much Polish sausage, although "sausage polishing" sounds vaguely smutty.

HOW MUCH POLISH?

Once upon a time, you didn't patch games.  Hard to believe, I know!  You kids today may find it impossible to believe, but it was 17 years ago (give or take) before you started to see URLs on TV commercials.  Before that, most people had never heard of the Internet, let alone actually used it.

So if (almost) nobody had Internet, how did you patch games?

Mostly you didn't.

With no easy way to distribute patches and fixes, that meant that programs had to work the first time.  And that meant a lot higher bar for when a program was "done".  You would especially see this in console games and embedded systems where the only practical fix for buggy code was replacement.

But as we entered the late 90's, the Internet grew in ubiquity not just in gaming, but in the public mindset as well.  As an example of both, smack dab in the middle between Ultima Online (1997) and EverQuest (1999) came "Sleepless In Seattle" (1998).  It's safe to say that once they've made a Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan rom-com about a subject (the Internet), everybody's heard of it.

Suddenly, fixing a recalcitrant program became a lot easier.  Whereas before such things as patches were the realm of people with USENET newsgroups and a knowledge of ftp (look 'em up, kiddies!), suddenly the Web made previously arcane knowledge easy to find and access.

And the good (Hey, they have a fix for that bug in my game!) was balanced with the bad (Hey, we can ship it with this bug and fix it later!).

I don't mean to imply that software/game companies suddenly started shipping clusterfuckware on the assumption that it could be fixed later, but certainly squishing every last bug (within reason) was no longer a show-stopper.  Sometimes good enough was good enough.  Especially when you are on a tight schedule.

And especially especially on an MMO.  Because after all, the players have to connect to you to use the thing, so patching problems becomes part of the process of playing every time you connect.

So we all got used to fixes getting patched in and games shipping in various degrees of complete.  The games could have a lot of rough edges, not just in their function, but the gameplay itself.  Getting the product out and providing revenue was a big deal, and often polish wasn't.

Then came World of Warcraft.

POLISH UNTIL YOU CAN SEE YOURSELF

Let me be clear...at launch, WoW had bugs and plenty of problems.  Overloaded servers, too few servers, stability problems, the "stuck mining" bug...it wasn't perfect by any means.  Hell, they even stopped selling the game for a period of time while they got their ducks in a row (I'm not sure why they had ducks or needed them lined up though).

But given the overwhelming response from the unexpectedly huge playerbase, WoW's launch was a smashing success.  Oh sure, we wanted things better (that's a given, we're MMO players!), but given the huge numbers and the performance of some of the recent competition at the time *cough*AnarchyOnline*cough* it was smooth as silk.

But more important than the polish of the launch (which wasn't bad), was the polish of the game.  I've said before that the biggest difference between WoW and EQ2 when they launched two weeks apart was simple:  EverQuest 2 was an MMO for MMO players and World of Warcraft was an MMO for game players.

That may not sound like a big distinction, but to my mind it's a huge one.  Game players usually play a wide variety of different games and are used to a wide variety of different game mechanics.  But since they don't come out of a (relatively) narrow game focus, they expect mechanics to be straightforward and easy to pick up.

MMO players had an established history with the genre and knew the standard mechanisms, the tropes of the game.  EQ2 expected the players to kind of already know "how to play the game".

It was very common for MMOs at that time to use the command line for many game functions.  Many games required them.

Quests often consisted of a line or two of bland text, perhaps with a high-lighted word or phrase you could ask the NPC about for more information, like an old-style text adventure game (look 'em up!).

The difference between the standards of MMOs pre-dating WoW and WoW itself was the difference between the tepid success of EQ2 and mind-boggling license-to-print-money success of WoW.

Game players who'd never played an MMO, who'd never played an online game of ANY kind, could pick up the game for sixty bucks, then "pick up the game" in sixty minutes.  That was where Blizzard and its reputation for polish made the difference.  Instead of shooting for a chunk of, maybe, 500K-1M hardcore MMO players, WoW was shooting for a chunk of, maybe, 5-25M hardcore gamers.

And boy howdy did they achieve their chunkiness.

The whole MMO genre had an almost instant sea change.  Game polish and ease of play become much more important.  Accessibility to a wider potential audience became important.  The rise of "casual" MMO players began, although I find it somewhat silly to call a WoW player "casual".  One can casually play Angry Birds or FarmVille.  One doesn't really "casually" drop a couple of months and scores of hours to "casually" reach level cap in WoW.  Casual in comparison to me?  Oh, obviously.  But casual in comparison to 99 cents on the App Store?  Give me a break.

The MMO genre has been struggling with the success of WoW.  On one hand, do we try to create a game for "the masses" and compete with WoW (good luck with that, btw)?  On the other hand, how do we sell investors on aiming smaller with the prospect of potential bajillions dancing in their heads?  Because regardless of what we do...players are going to expect something polished to a brilliant shine.

POLISHED UNTIL THE CHROME CAME OFF

So we come full circle to a question...can something, an MMO, say, be too polished?

A few years ago I probably would have poo-poo'd the notion (good luck washing that out, by the way...you can never get the notion clean again).  But not any longer.  Because the masters of polish, Blizzard, polished gameplay so much they took the fun out.

Let me explain...

WoW is an old game, at least in terms of MMOs.  While most of the competition has been trying to catch up and match up with them, they have been constantly tweaking their gamesystems.  A class revamp here.  A stat revamp there.  Talents, skills, itemization, it all gets tweaked.  With what objectives?  Balance and streamlining.

When WoW came out, it was a mystery.  Which stats did what, exactly?  Was this item better than that item for my character?  But over time, the endless energy, patience, and attention to detail of some of the more-on-the-savant-end-of-the-spectrum idiot-savant players led to the math behind pretty much every part of the game being made clear.  Once that was done, spreadsheet-warriors made figuring out "optimal" a hell of a lot easier.  If you've ever read one of the analyses from the guys at Elitist Jerks, you know the degree of hair-splitting that's been done to figure everything from rotations to best-in-slot gear to specs.

In short, they mystery was gone.  With that, the players and Blizzard could all see everything, from warts to wonders.  Over time, with the "support" of a very vocal fanbase, Blizzard tweaked pretty much everything.

Stats were removed from the game.  Skills were juggled around.  Talent trees got simplified and streamlined.  As a result, the game got more balanced and more transparent.

And less fun.  The player's choices became a lot easier.  Socketed items and item reforging let the player optimize his stats how he chose, instead of juggling gear to try to find the right fit.  Getting "the right item" didn't matter, because close was good enough.  You'd just reforge a couple of things to make it fit precisely.

For quite some time, as we've seen the itemization in the game balanced and simplified, I've joked that in the next expansion, every item will have a single stat, "Awesomeness", exactly equal to the itemlevel.  It would be both streamlined and balanced.  And boring.

But it's not just the itemization and character options that have become streamlined and balanced into generic bland boringness...it's the questing too.

WoW's questing was The Big Change, probably the single biggest factor in winning the huge audience.  It meant the player never lacked for "something to do".  Something that could be accomplished, usually in a relatively short time, that was usually wrapped in a little bit of quest color to raise it above the proverbial "kill ten rats".

Questing in WoW got polished over time too.  Quest locations became marked on the maps, there was less running around, less back and forth between locations, and in time, the quests simply flowed.

By the time Cataclysm shipped, Blizzard had utterly mastered streamlined, elegant, quest-flow.  In that expansion the character would move from quest hub to quest hub, usually getting 2 or 3 batches of quests from 2 or 3 NPC's before being sent along to the next hub to repeat the process, until the zone was complete.  And then?  You'd be sent along to the next zone.

This mechanic was very similar in Star Wars: The Old Republic, ultra-streamlined, hub-to-hub-to-hub, single-track.  It allow for very quick, very simple levelling.  It's entertaining, and engaging and over fast.  It does not, however, provide any long term value.  In both Cataclysm and TOR, players could fly through the content, level up in a big hurry, only to find they'd arrived at a dead end.

For WoW, this wasn't terribly bad because the players were used to the endgame that awaited them at cap in WoW (for better or worse).  In TOR it was lethal.  Having sped through 49 levels in record time, they found themselves with nothing worth doing at cap.  And because the entirety of the game was so single-track (with the exception of the storyline quests, which were a single-track that ran parallel), once was often enough.

A WoW player at level 80 who buys Cataclysm has a pretty good idea of what the game will be like when he hits 85, even if that arrives a lot faster than he expects.  A TOR player at level 1 will have no idea of what awaits him at 50 (or, more accurately, no idea of the nothing that awaits him at 50).

In both cases, my reactions were similar.  I flew through Cata's content a few times and killed my sub.  I flew through TOR content a few times and killed my sub.  Cata was disappointing.  TOR was disappointing.

The difference was that for Cata, Blizzard had polished up the first 60 levels of content too.  TOR simply didn't have enough content that flying through it was a sustainable business model.  Their questing paradigm was too polished, and much of the rest of the game not polished enough.

In both cases, the questing was so polished that it was like an appetizer.  Once consumed, the players were asking "Where's the rest?"

TOO MUCH?  NOT ENOUGH?  WHAT DO YOU WANT LENS!?

Well I am an MMO player, so I always want what I ain't got!

The more accurate answer is that I'm not sure.  The arrival of WoW changed the amount and type of polish we expect.  Allow me to compare a couple of recent/upcoming games.

The Secret World has launched to mixed reviews, but I personally feel it's a successful game.  I also feel that it shows a lack of polish in a number of areas, where other areas are beautifully done.  The ability wheel is a polished piece of design.  The environmentals are excellent.  The quests are, generally, original and very polished.  The UI is at best functional, but certainly not polished.  Combat feels slow and "old-school".  And the combat animations look clunky and unpolished, although Funcom says that that's an inevitable result of untethering the combat animation from the movement animation to allow moving in combat.

Many of the negative reviews of TSW have pointed to the perceived lack of polish in certain game components.  I don't necessarily agree with those criticisms, but they do match what I said about the amount of polish we've come to expect.

Guild Wars 2 will launch soon, and the early reviews are pretty much stellar.  I've played a bunch in beta weekends and stress tests, but haven't gotten all that far into the game.  So far it seems to be extremely polished, and that seems to be the overwhelming consensus.

But does GW2 and what seems like its certain success rely on that polish?  Or is it simply a side-effect of their overall approach to the game?  In other words, is the game design so elegant that it seems polished or has enormous effort gone into making it feel that way?

Is GW2 more polished than TSW?  Why does it seem so?  Is it intrinsic to the game design and systems, or is it simply that ArenaNet has done that much more work than Funcom?

How much of what we call polish derives from fundamental design principles and how much from shining the base metal that's there?

I would say that what made WoW great was the polish inherent in the design, and that what's made it less great is from shining the baser parts.

I hope that GW2's polish comes from intrinsic design work, so that more polish will make it better, not just shinier.

Because sometimes you can polish the shine right off.