Let's just start by defining what 'quality' means here. I think the the word "effort" makes a pretty good mental image of what it means to make a quality work. You see it on small things. So small it almost feels subconscious. Color codes in item names, different modifications in items, different ways to get a task done. When you're holding a big hammer it "feels" like you're holding a big hammer.
Let's take an first-person shooter (FPS) game for example. Poor quality FPS makes no distinction of hit location. Either you hit or you don't. This causes vicious circle that leads to character having exactly one death animation, exactly one way to get damage, which depends on weapon damage. That's a sign of poor quality. I'd also like to make it clear that I'm not talking about quantity, ie. the number of different weapons and maps. The two concepts are easily mixed and it's not always clear if different character models for instance really add to quality or quantity sector of the game. Quality is small incremental additions on top of "meat" of the game. Some developers may think that bothering with small things - adding couple of extra animations and variations is inconsequential, but it has huge subconscious effect on players' minds.
Staying on the FPS example, good quality game takes care of the small things. There is distinction in hit location and the game code also places semantic importance of certain locations on body. For example getting hit on leg might reduce movement speed and result in tilt on camera balance, whereas getting hit on hand might result to unability to use weapon for a short moment. First part of making quality is thus making distinction.
Let's start with Guild Wars' quality. The game is very adjusted to PvP balance, namely nothing is behind long hours of work and all item modifications are close in balance. However, this seems more like necessity for a good PvP game (analogy of players having accessible weapons in FPS game). The actual quality of the game is rather poor. You have hundreds of skills (quantity) with a single purpose they can be used (quality). A Monk might cast Protective Spirit, but it's just the similar Protective Spirit as the one cast by Necromancer. There's short animation, but after that it ends up as white circulating cloud to signify that the character is enchanted with something. There are 19 different ways to do damage with a sword, but the method is always skillname - cost - recharge - damage - additional modifiers.
So why am I claiming that large number of skills is not quality? Let me express this clearly: what makes skills quantity is the fact that while you may have 200 of them to choose from, you can only choose 8 and when you pick 8 whatever skills the only thing that counts and contributes to interesting game experience is the quality of those skills. The skills (and areas) are competing with each other, so adding more will not improve the quality of the game. Nearly every skill's purpose is to do one of two things: red bars up or red bars down. The only purpose of the game is to get enemy red bars down so whichever skill does it the fastest is the winner.
There's myriad of other examples of poor quality:
- Characters move at same speed, have same dialogue and other modifiers
- Many areas of the game have monsters with same 3d-model.
- Quest structure is "go there, get/kill this, come back" always.
- There is little interraction with other players, emotes should be more usable.
- Only thing to do in general is to kill monsters or other players.
- PvP necessities extend to spoil the entire PvE portion of the game. I'm not talking about balance, but skills catered for PvE should do things that make sense in PvE world. They don't, because of the promise that everything doable in PvE should be doable in PvP and vice versa.
This all results to what we see here on Guild Wars Guru forums all day. Whining because there's little to do and what there is to do is not fun. I certainly hope that instead of getting new games and expansions with thirty new recursively similar areas we would get actual innovations in gameplay and enchantments that stack on top of existing game. It's much more than just changing variable values here and there on the code.
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