[ceremony]

Originally posted by aldin:
Warcraft III's 'polish' seems primarily to be in it's simplicity.

I don't think simplicity is the same as polish. Polish means getting the little things right, and in interface terms means anticipating what a player might want to do, and giving him a way to do it that's as straightforward and as easy to use as possible. I love Dom2 to death, but the game definitely isn't "polished." There are a ton of things that could be cleaned up. These things range from the completely inconsequential - like typos, and the text in some windows exceeding the window space - to the mildly annoying - like the lack of a mouse map scroll - to the truly aggravating - like the inability to scroll the army setup screen except by clicking on the scroll bar. Dom2's interface isn't as bad as some people say it is - I feel that, as you say, it lets you do most things you want to do - but it certainly could be much better, and isn't "polished" in any way. There are lots of places for improvement: the message screen, the army setup screen, the way information is presented about what is in an enemy province, etc. There should be a command to just cycle through (or reveal) your own scouts, since these are the commanders most often "lost" in a game since you can't see them on the main map if you don't have their province selected. Yes, you can cycle through all idle commanders using [N]ext idle commander, but I almost never want to do this - I just want to find my scouts. In the late stages of PBEM games, where I might not have seen my map for a few days, this is the first thing I forget, and want to be able to do. But I can't. Lack of polish.

A good example of polish in a fairly complex real-time strategy game is Rise of Nations. The designers there anticipated almost everything a player might want to do in a game, and gave him or her a simple way to do it (not in terms of strategy, but simply interface mechanics). In Dom2, you can also do most of what you want to do, but it's a much bigger pain.

I think Dom2 is the best strategy game I've ever played. However, I do understand when people complain about its lack of polish. I think that the game is so rewarding that this lack of polish is forgivable. I disagree with those who claim the game should cost less because the lack of polish doesn't justify a $50 price - I think that's crazy when you consider how many hundreds of hours of total enjoyment you'll probably get out of the game. But as to the simple claim that the game is unpolished, I have to agree.