I think Rob Pardo should be quoted for this (when thinking about EQ2), instead:
Quote:
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Control is king. Game control is taken for granted a lot of times. I remember on Warcraft 3 I could feel a little bit of lag on the mouse cursor, and I kept saying it to the programmer, but he kept saying he couldn’t see anything wrong. Finally he coded in a hardware cursor so we could run both cursors at the same time, and lo and behold there were three frames of lag. And that matters, it’s important. People will leave over that, but you’ll never know that is the reason.
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And this:
Quote:
The Blizzard polish. Polish is the word associated with us in reviews. There’s this big assumption that polish is something you do in the end. That we’re successful because we spend 6-12 months at the end polishing. We do get more time, but we do the polish right from the beginning. It’s a constant effort. You have to have a culture of polish. Everyone has to be bought into it and you have to constantly preach it. if you leave it to the end, it’ll be mor difficult.
You’ll get a lot of “why does it matter that this feature is polished? it’s so small.” But people notice 1000s of polished features, not the single polished feature.
Polish starts in the design process.
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It's not true that a mmorpg is done if it had an horrible launch. See Eve-Online as a very good example.
There are many, many reasons why EQ2 still isn't so great as it could. As for WoW's success it's not just one element, but a number of important points all tied together (but EQ2's bloat may be a good main candidate against WoW's accessibility).
Polish, consistent art style, seamless world, low hardware requirements, streamlined design, better accessibility, better quests flow and direction, more responsive controls, fluid animations, uniqueness of each race, clean (and not sluggy) UI, great combat system design, unique classes... Should I continue?
