Polish makes a bad game good

I have been wanting to write an article about polish being the most important part of game design, but after Capcom's release of Street Fighter x Mega Man yesterday, I feel like I really need to write it now. (By the way, the game is completely free, so go download it on Capcom-Unity's Mega Man website!)

Polish is a word that gets thrown around a lot in the games industry, but it's not often I hear people really trying to define it. Sometimes people try and don't end up saying much of anything. When I try to define it myself, I find it's pretty hard to describe exactly what makes a game polished, even though I feel like I could easily identify when one is and one isn't.

Polish is what makes a game "feel right." Think about how annoying it is when you're playing a platformer game, and you press the jump button, but there's a slight delay before your character actually jumps. This lag is frustrating, because even though the action was performed, there was something about it that didn't feel right. You didn't feel like you had proper control of the game.

But there are other things beside the controls that won't "feel right" unless they are implemented properly. There are a lot of issues I like to call "big polish" that developers and gamers talk about--things like making sure the controls work, the game doesn't lag a lot... essentially, making the game as free of error as possible. But there's also the "little things." Things that don't change the game whatsoever, that people don't notice until its gone.

Where did this come from?!

Let's look at a game like Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), a game that a lot of people complain about. When you walk into the loading zone for a new stage or select a mission from a character dialogue or whatever, a loading screen suddenly appears. There is no transition whatsoever. You're just walking along, exploring the city, looking for secLOADING SCREEN!! It's really disorienting and strange. Even if you know you're about to go into a new area, it feels so sudden.

But let's look at Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES. Nintendo games are known for their polish, and they've been doing it forever. When you move your character around the map, he makes little noises and moves smoothly from location to location. He doesn't just pop up. And when you are over a level you would like to enter, you can press a button to start that level. You will hear a confirmation sound, and there is a screen transition effect. You feel like you're moving from the map screen as you hear that sound and watch the screen get wiped away, ready to be replaced by the stage you wanted to play.

I can hear the sounds just looking at the screencaps...

That's polish. Even though they could have just suddenly dropped you in the level with no transition whatsoever, and the game would still work exactly the same, and the actual "fun" part of the game (running around levels, avoid obstacles, reaching the goal) would not be changed at all, the game experience would be lessened by these jarring transitions.

And what if the game was full of uncomfortable transitions and things that looked and felt odd? Even if the core game was the same, the levels were laid out exactly the same, the game controlled just as well... imagine if you just appeared in the next level with no introduction at all, no music played until halfway through the stage, and Mario didn't animate when he ran (he just kind of scooted around in a standing position!) and stuff like that. The part of the game that is supposed to be "fun," the actual challenge and gameplay, would still be 100% in-tact. But the game would be a lot less fun. It would constantly feel awkward and frustrating, even though we're doing the exact same thing.

A lack of polish can make a great game into a bad game. I plan to write a series of articles about unpolished games that I think are excellent, such as Mega Man X7(which had, in my opinion, better stage and weapon designs and gameplay concepts than all the other second-half Mega Man X games, but is largely regarded as the worst) or UNLIMITED:Saga (A genius, beautiful role-playing game that's very rough around the edges, scoring miserable reviews around the map). But today I want to talk about another topic.

I believe that you can have a bad or mediocre game, and throw enough polish onto it that it becomes a "good" game.

Just like hearing a noise and watching a screen transition "feels right" in Super Mario Bros. 3, like I mentioned, polish overall just feels good. We like the sound of entering a level. When we use a potion in Final Fantasy, we hear a joyful chime and watch those pretty green numbers pop up, as our hit points rise up quickly to their new total like a slot machine. All of these things combined--the sound effects, the color effects, the spinning numbers, the fact that we "recovered," watching a number change to a higher number--they all release endorphins into our brain and make us happy. It just feels good. It doesn't even have to be something that we accomplished in the game--the polish makes us happy.

Flying numbers and letters everywhere! Feels great!!

When a game is full of these kinds of things, we're going to be happy all the time while we're playing it. And even if there's nothing spectacular about the game's design--even if it's bad--you're going to feel happy and enjoy playing it.

Now let's look at Street Fighter X Mega Man, the latest entry in the Mega Man series which follows our blue hero as he goes through stages beating up the Street Fighter characters much like in his old adventures against the baddie robots. A lot of people are complaining about the game right off the bat. Of course, people always complain about the most recent stuff, but this time, I think there are a lot of legitimate complaints floating around. This game has a lot of unpolished edges.

One of Mega Man's most iconic enemy character designs is the Mettaur, often called Met for short. It's a little hard had lying on the ground. It can lift the corner of its hat up, revealing eyeballs underneath, and shoot some bullets out. The added feet to them shortly so they could walk a little after shooting. Over time, they've made tons of styles, but we always have our basic Met.

Now, if you've played a Mega Man game, you know that Mets have a certain pattern to the way they work. They'll stay under their little helmet until you approach them. Once you get within a certain (exact, by the way) distance, they will pop up and shoot at you. If you shoot at them when the helmet is down, your bullet bounces off of them with a little "clink!" sound, the helmet rattles a little, and they will stay hiding.

Now, when you're playing the game, other than the basic pattern, you don't think too much about this. But all of those little things make you happy because they make a lot of sense. If a bullet hits it, it would clink, and the helmet would shake. And the little guy would probably keep hiding. All of those things just feel right.


See? It's cute.

But in Street Fighter x Mega Man, the Mets don't work exactly this way. When the bullets hit them, they still clink, but the helmet doesn't rattle. They also don't have their old A.I. They just kinda pop open and closed on an interval. We've been playing Mega Man for 25 years, and suddenly they change this? In Mega Man 10, you had to get closer to a Met than normal before it would pop open. But it was only the distance that changed--the mechanics still functioned like they were supposed to. Why would they take a step backward and make the most basic enemy less interesting? This lack of polish, not even bothering to relate the experience to the previous 10 major games. It's almost like putting a big stamp on the front of the game that reads "We didn't even try this time!"

But the Mets are a more minor example. There are plenty of series mainstays and things that were just left out. When you select a stage, instead of seeing the boss enemy make a pose, they just stand there and repeat a default standing animation. When you press start at the beginning of the game, you're not prompted to choose a new game, password entry, difficulty setting, whatever. The options menu is reduced to a marquee that blinks the different options at the bottom of the screen on the pause menu (Press F4 for display options!) If you want to know what each option is, you have to sit and wait and stare at it, hoping the option you want appears.

Polish works because we expect it. We've been trained to. When we click on menu options, we expect sound effects. When we land on the ground, we expect to hear a thud. When we use a potion, we expect sparkles. Stuff like that.

Mega Man is am even more critical case because the series has been building for 25 years. We've come to expect a lot from the series, especially with the most recent installments. We expect things to work a certain way, and when they do, that contributes to those endorphins that help us enjoy the game.

When the game doesn't do those things we're expecting, we suddenly feel off. We're distracted from the experience that we're supposed to be having. We're not thinking about how fun it is to jump and shoot and clear stages and fight bosses. We're thinking about why the Met opened before we expected, why half the enemies in this stage are a fire demon, why Rush controls so awkwardly (and only in a forced-scrolling segment), why pressing escape just kills the game and there's no other way to exit, and why the shutter felt weird when we opened it.


Exactly how many fire guys will they cram in this stage?

And it's not just things that are missing from previous games--enemies in general seem "stupid." When they move, you can almost see the route that was drawn for them. They don't feel like a bad robot trying to attack us, they feel like a sprite on a path that was programmed to be in the way so we could play the game. You can feel the way the game was built, and that's a product of a lack of polish.

When things like this distract us from the game experience, we miss out on those endorphins, and we're no longer enjoying the game. Even if the stage design, difficulty, or whatever is more clever than previous titles, even if the actual challenge is technically more fun, we can't help but feel disappointed when we're not getting that polished experience.

Of course, I'm not trying to say Street Fighter X Mega Man is better than previous titles. But I don't think it's any worse than half of the NES titles that are all well-loved by fans. But playing it, it feels a lot worse to play, because it's missing so many things we expect from the experience, and there are a lot of distracting elements in the game.

But what if it had all of those things? What if the game was polished up, released as Mega Man 11, with nothing changed but the way it made us "feel good," and sold for ten bucks on XBLA? People would be all over it, praising it to no end. Even if the game had mediocre stage/enemy/whatever design like it does now. Plenty of games do nothing special or unique, but people love them because they have a high level of polish. Super Mario 3D Land did nothing better than the games previous. In fact, it cut a lot of corners in the core gameplay and level design. But the game felt good to play--the 3D effects were nice, and all of the expected Nintendo polish was there. If it had been an unpolished game without the Super Mario brand on it? It would have been destroyed by reviewers and mostly disliked. But because it was polished up, it had an overall favorable reception. Branding plays into this, too, but plenty of times a popular brand "goes bad" with an unpolished game. Harvest Moon DS and Mega Man X7 are perfect examples of this.

And I'm not saying the fans are ignorant or unappreciative. It's the responsibility of the developer to polish their games so that we enjoy them. Polish is a big part of the gaming experience, and without it, the game is simply a lot less fun. It takes a lot more work to get past the rough edges of an unpolished game, and players don't want to work to enjoy their games. They want to enjoy them from the start. Leaving out important polish in a game is a serious flaw, and the developer is completely at fault.

I do think that some games deserve more attention even though they were not polished, and I'll write more about that in the future. But for now, I just want to leave with the point that you can build an amazing game and it will be received more poorly without polish, and you can build a crappy game and it will be received more favorably with a lot of polish. There are plenty of other issues that factor into the reception of the game, but polish is a big one. In the end, I think polish really makes the game.