The school of mandatory polish

Since I work in the industry I have mostly work on what is called casual games. Most of the dedicated video game audience see this kind of game as crap and for some title they’re obviously right. In fact it’s not the fault of casual game but of the investors thinking "let’s sell some poor game to an ignorant audience, and let’s call that casual game as an excuse". Sadly it sometimes works; or mostly it worked until mass market clients was upset by the scandalous quality of these games.

Anyway good casual game design is a school I’m proud to be part of, and mostly for one reason.

Many game I play this days are targeted for core or hardcore gamer and a lot of them share the same default : a big layercake of indigest features. Ok, I’m a core gamer and I should like that, but when layers of features rhyme with bad polish, artifiacialy stretched lifetime and hidden weak features; I’m sad.

I will not discuss again the way items was designed in Mass Effect and Dragon Age; but that's what I'm talking about, some basic and essential design features are regularly overlooked in this kind of games.

So now here is the reason I’m proud to be working on casual game, not because I’m a fan of the genre, but because in casual game design you can’t have too much feature; unless you want to dread your players.
This way you are forced to polish your small design feautre until they are flawless, delicious and delightful.

That's a shame but a lot of big games fail to polish their main features at the same level as some of the best casual games do; like the ones by Pop Caps (Plants vs. Zombies, Bejeweled, Peggle) or some successful iPhone games.

As a conclusion I would say that even few features and simple game design mechanics are enough to make an incredibly good game for core gamer. For example take a look at Diablo 2 few features or recently at Mass Effect 2 killed or simplified features.

So please; exchange more features against more polish in my next favorite hardcore titles !