On quality, polish, fidelity
This post is expanded and adapted from a Cohost post originally published in April of 2024.
I want to clarify what I typically mean by 'quality', 'polish', and 'fidelity' when talking about video games, because I try to use these terms in very specific ways and it's easy for them to blur together (resulting in statements that seem to be contradictory).
Quality is a subjective value judgement on whether something is 'good' as a work of art or as a product. It's a rubric based on one's aesthetics and values.
Fidelity, usually graphical fidelity, is a measure of how well a game disguises the underlying technical artifice it uses to render images and successfully represents a particular aesthetic. We often talk about fidelity in the context of naturalistic game visuals; The Last of Us Part 2 is a high-fidelity game. But fidelity isn't necessarily about reproducing a naturalistic aesthetic, it can reproduce anything. Guilty Gear Strive is a high-fidelity game that tries to present a cel aesthetic, for example.
Polish is more an evaluation of just resources and effort. Attention to detail. A game has high polish if environments in it are detailed and different from one another, if the UI functions smoothly, if it runs consistently on the hardware it's designed for, if players are unlikely to encounter bugs, etc. Polish is a set of technical evaluations divorced from an evaluation of quality; it just implies that attention was paid.
There are many, many example of low-fidelity high-polish games. Modern pixel art games often have big, detailed spritesheets with very nuanced animation and a lot of care put into them – but they still have a low-fidelity presentation that lets the player see the artifice of how images are rendered; you can 'see the pixels' as it were.
Polish is a necessary component of achieving fidelity; I think most people in most cases would also say that polish is necessary for quality. But polish isn't quality. You can, after all, polish a turd (Hyneman 2008). An example of a high-polish, low-quality game is something like Detroit: Become Human.