Quality Of Life

"Quality of Life" is an umbrella term to loosely explain mechanics that enhance the gameplay experience. Things like higher frame rates, widescreen, FOV settings, farther draw distance, better post-processing/shaders/sampling are all recognized as Quality of Life improvements for a game.

QoL-Creep

When a game gets so many quality of life enhancements, or enhancements that are just blindly randomly without respect to the nature of a game, it can lead to problems with the gameplay. Some games intentionally have low draw distance to hide future areas, some games have low FOV/aspect ratios to lend itself to horror game mechanics. Sometimes modders will port mechanics from future games back into previous ones which can greatly change the flow of a game. This Wiki refers to this phenomenon of poorly adding enhancements as QoL-creep.

The relationship between a developer making a game and the player experiencing a game is obscured by the fact that the play has direct control of a game; it can be further obscured by adding features not present in the original game. Sometimes The Artist is an Idiot and QoL improvements lead to the game being in it's best state. Other times The Player is an Idiot and adding such features ruins the entire experience.