> There's so many things in games that are taken for granted at play time but which actually take a lot of thinking and work to get right.

I have a small list of these things in game dev. Over the years, I found some games that were more playable (in my opinion) than I thought they deserved to be. Kind of like a well written book with a bad story.

For me at least, the number one most important thing is how well the character -- person, car, spaceship, whatever -- moves. Does it handle well, as expected. I'm at the point where I think this may be the single most important aspect of a game that finds itself in a competitive space.

I think blizzard stands out for this with Overwatch and World of Warcraft. They avoid the jerky start and stops with their characters. Their characters feel both performant and natural at the same time, adhering to reality but breaking physics as necessary (air strafing for example).

Building out roads correctly feels like an offshoot of this for games which include cars. A car should be able to navigate a turn without going through weird contortions as it hits pinch points, or unnatural wiggles when roads join.