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

Most would agree that better performance leads to a better game. (Except the cut-scene of the 4 giants stopping the moon in Zelda: Majora's Mask. The lag-reduction on re-releases of this game make the music in the cut-scene get abruptly cut off instead of being timed properly to the lag.)

Many would also say that widescreen is also a great improvement for most games (except first person horror games that intentionally have a limited FOV)

Many would say that backporting the spindash from future titles to Sonic the Hedgehog would also be a great improvement (except the game plays differently without it, and the nuance of the momentum based mechanics are lost upon adding this ability)

Notice how each example given has issues? It's a slippery slope to list more quality of life features as the "best" way to play a game as the artists intent gets left behind. This wiki is coining this term QoL-creep.

Dude, this wiki is here so that you know to play Arkham City on PC instead of the WiiU. Not so that you can autisticly list all 7000 Skyrim mods you have together and say it's the "best" - BWTP_Admin

The general policy of handling QoL is to only recommend that which can be reasonably inferred as the developers original intention- except in the case where the artist is an idiot and their game needs fixed.

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.