Ramble incoming
Since creating Video Games are pretty much a process, in which many games may define what is "polished and good" and what isn't as time goes by. Because of that, don't really understand what the point of discussing the quality of video games really means. First, it depends on the approach of the devs and the audience to accept something as polished. Second of all, depending on the approach, something that seems very polished might not be accepted by the audience as such. It really depends in how opinions are formed and how people see things.
I do blame video game rankings which lead people to believe that very old and unpolished games are actually better than newer ones, even though within the context of when they were made they were not considering that culture was different even just 20 years ago. You don't even have to dig deep into social sciences, just look at how people do divide demographics and give them names such as Baby Boomers, Generation Z, Millenials, that sort of thing. Its a very similar way of people dividing things that also leads to people seperating things into factors such as "crude and bad" and "good and polished", which is weird because of the cultural divide. What people in Russia, Poland or China call masterpieces might be considered bad in France, Turkey or the US. You never really know unless you look into the discussion boards on their respective fandoms (especially the ones in China are very interesting).
I personally believe that people should look at the state of Video Games as a sine wave with ebbs and flows in terms on how the industry progressed. Some polished games do actually progress the industry as a whole a little bit forward while others are just there so people can have fun, which might have lead a dev to create a now famous game. And as I wrote before, cultural context is also important, you can easily make the valid argument that Gothic 1 and 2 for instance are just as important as the Metal Gear franchise is, just for slightly different reasons since without Gothic, CDPR wouldn't have had the inspiration to make The Witcher 3 the way it is. Its just the most important argument I like to bring up often,
just because its absolutely true. One crude game could lead to games becoming masterpieces, you don't know what devs do see as "crude" and who doesn't, and what the audience thinks in the end. As an example, Dynasty Warriors 9 is a game that was pretty much hailed as the best DW game by the developers as showcased months before it came up. Yet once it was released, it was almost universally bashed for many reasons.
Don't get me wrong, there are evidently amazing games out there that can excel in a certain way and during a certain time in culture and some of these games did help as reference points to create a certain genre. However there might be other factors to even consider that certain people might see that even a game such as
Mario to not be so great. And besides, you know what they say. Ones trash is another ones treasure. This saying does apply to literally every human being when it comes to every object or perhaps even subject, as well. So the logical conclusion is that there might even consider Dynasty Warriors 9 as a great game. The opposite is also true, for instance I do say that Star Control 2 is the best game ever made and no other game can come close to it. The question here is however, is any of that objectively true?
Since saying "yes" would break logical consistency since its very difficult to implement a way to measure video games fully under purely objective criteria, what matters in the end is adhering to your own personal believes and values and use them to create better games. All this while acknowleging that everyone has their own subjective opinion towards the industry and that you should acknowledge the tendencies of what makes things good or bad so you can understand what you
actually like (or hate) about your most (or least) favorite games. In a way, some people already subconciously do that, just look at how people used their voices to react to Lootboxes which actually is a very polished way to create dopamine yet can be seen as a hinderance of creating more meaningful content towards the game. It kinda gives me hope that people direct their anger less on what people should play or what consoles they should buy rather than what devs implement, which is vastly more important and fruitful than "fanboiwars" you can see on bigger discussion boards such as Steam or Reddit. It also goes to show that there are a lot of people just look for a reason to fight rather than to settle the fights with themselves. The internet in general would be a better place if people would try to understand the nature of subjectivity.
Personally, give me one crude game like Bloodlines, Dune 2000 or even The Witcher 1 over 1000 shitty "fakecrudes" like Nier Automata, which only emulates having a soul and being a passion project. Anyway, if you have read though this rambling of mine, congrats. Here is one of the primary factors to discover if a game is "fakecrude". A lot of people don't realize this, but if any hype in regards to a game is settled and almost nobody is talking about it anymore after perhaps 6 months up to a year, then there is a high chance you may have discovered such a "fakecrude" game yourself. A "fakecrude" game, more than other "crude" games, actually have the tendency of people caring about it less much quicker as time goes by.
