What makes a properly done game great: 1. An artistic style good enough to stop playing and soak it in like a painting at a museum. 2. Music that’s emotionally charged enough that it also can “pull” you away from the game. and 3. If the game is the full package, it will have the two previous aspects yet still be so fun that the graphics can look like classic atari and still be enjoyable.
There is no catch-all answer to this, no matter how much people may try to define it.
A fun game is a great game
Yes there is: hard work and dedication.
That doesn’t always make a great game, either. For instance, the people actually making a game can be as dedicated and hardworking as they want, but make something boring. Alternatively, they could be working for a publisher who doesn’t wait long enough for them to clear out game-breaking bugs, or they could have a ridiculously small budget that doesn’t let them do anything decent by any stretch of the imagination.
All factors are reliant on other factors.
I usually go by this formula:
if(gabeNewell.transform.position<100)
gameQuality=100-Vector3.Distance(gabeNewell.transform.position,transform.position)
else
gameQuality=Random.Value*userSkill*userLuck*marketingBudget;
My point is you can’t make a great game without a good dose of both of them. not that every game that is made by hard working, dedicated developers will be great.
Thats not true. for example, Diablo 3
LOLOLOL HATERS JOKE LOLOLOLOL.
I keed, cant wait till the 13th <3 xoxoxo
but no. thats a fools idea.
15th
What?! Nooooooo.
To be honest, what makes a great game for me:
Replayability.
I want to be able to play a game in multiple ways, with multiple characters down multiple paths with different skills abilitys pros and cons.
That, makes a great game.
Another thing that people always argue about is graphics.
Great graphics != great game.
Horrible graphics and good gameplay breaks immersion, for me. I’m talking about bad stiff animations, strange texturing, art styles that don’t blend, the lack of shaders…
Good graphics and good gameplay = good game.
That’s how I view it. You don’t need to go head over heels making graphics. Graphics are what the characters see and are EXTREMELY important, but not as important as the gameplay itself.
I stopped to think about some of the games I loved, but I can’t find a common quality that is a sign of greatness, since they’re so different. Surely, they all share some things. Mainly, a clear display of passion, dedication, and polish (and often great ideas). But that doesn’t mean you will make a great game just with passion/dedication/polish - those are the basics. Just that without them you surely won’t.
I think a game can be great in many ways!
There’s a few things I think about:
The player has to care about what’s at stake in the game. He must not want to lose. But you have to be careful when putting too much at skate in the gameplay, everytime the player loses, he gets frustrated, so it’s a double edged sword.
A storyline could add drama to the situation, but it’s hard to make a player “care” about something through a simple storyline, if there’s going to be a storyline, it must be worthwhile the player’s time, otherwise it’ll do more harm than good. If a storyline is a must have, it must be easy to digest, and really really put things at stake, and it must have an impact on the player. If your game is going to be dramatic, you must first work to make the player attached to something in the game, and it isn’t enough to say “this is your father, he’s dying, save him” IMO… the player knows that’ not really his father, you must work to immerse the player into the game, assume your player is an insensitive bastard, and he’s probably going to skip the intro… STOP him from doing that (not by disabling the skip intro key), caught his attention with something, because the player doesn’t want to waste his time saving some old man, he must really feel his father is going to die unless he ACTs in the game!! Drama is a good thing, means important things are at stake. I think drama sucks and we have enough IRL, but deep down it’s what we humans care about. Make the player believe his wife is going to leave him, his toddlers are going to get kidnapped, his house will burn down in flames and his dog is going to run away; but first make him attached to those things, add value to the things he must save!
I’m not saying you absolutely need a storyline to put things at stake, it’s merely an aid. A game with no storyline, like tetris, is great because it’s simple, there’s no storyline, so the only thing at stake is the player’s ego for losing because he wasn’t fast enough or smart enough. It would be hard to make tetris better through a storyline, maybe make the player think he’s disarming a bomb, but why would you do that? A storyline can be harmful sometimes, that’s why if a game’s going to have one, it better be good.
Another point that can make a game more interesting, is unpredictability…if you can somehow bend the rules and surprise the player, he could feel for a moment your world is unpredictable, and a sense of discovery grows into him, and humans love to discover, it’s in our blood!
Good games do the extra mile! Imagine a painting, and the paintings frame, the painting ends when it meets the frame, that’s what happens with most games, it’s all about what’s necessary for the game, and you pretty much know what’s going to happen next. I think if a game is unpredictable, it can do a great job hooking the player into caring about progressing in the game.
Another aspect, come to think of it, is progress. I think all games should make the player feel he’s making progress, all the time, progress is reward for the player’s time in our game. This is also a double edged sword in the sense often progress in a game means more content that has to made.
This can be avoided with a bit of strategy. Place most of your rewarding frequency at the beginning, and slow down “progress” as the player becomes more hooked to the game. The more progress the character makes the more committed he is, and the more you can get away with not rewarding him. But the slower the progress, the higher the risk of player frustration, if the player becomes frustrated, you risk him quitting the game, and maybe never playing again!
But still your best bet is to make him committed as soon as possible, fastest progress should be at the very start of the game. In fact, with so many games, players need almost instant reward after they’ve launched the game. If you can somehow skip any intro and menus, and start rewarding the player somehow instantly, you’re a genius!
anyway… rambling’s over!
…only if gameQuality equates to blandness. 
I like almost everything about Valve except their games. Oh well.
Has the gamer who likes to spend lots of time exploring disappeared? Exploration/puzzle-solving is important to me, so long as the puzzle isn’t too difficult that most people are likely to give up but maybe the average person’s mind is less inclined to enjoy this style of game play nowadays. A good example I can point at is the difference between Mario64 and Super Mario Galaxy. From what I’ve played/seen(only a little at a Gamestop store, plus some Youtube video), Galaxy is too fast paced and makes me long for the larger, less crowded levels of 64.
Personally, I hate this new trend (“new” as in “the last 15 years”, sigh) where puzzles have to be easy. I want HARD puzzles! Especially in adventures! Otherwise they’re just like watching a movie, and in that case I prefer a movie 
Great ideas here.
I think It would obviously depend on the player and the game ! I find myself attracted to different game for different reason :
For some of them I wanted other people to play the game : Beyond God and Evil, Portal
I wanted to be part of this word : Mascarade : bloodline
I was interrested in the community : Minecraft
Great challenge and replayability : Bonzai blast, Tetris
The game make you feel somethings and is cleverly design : Katawa Shoujo
+1
A game has intrinsic value as long as it’s fun to play.
Whilst understandable, the danger of making things hard is that you lose large numbers of players. Not simply because the game is too hard (though that happens frequently), but due to large number of potential players simply not having the time to invest in a hard game.
For example, if they only have an hour a night to play a game and for several nights in a row they are stuck on the same puzzle (and don’t want to simply look at a walk-through) then they will just move onto a different game, one which will reward their time spent. The issue being that if they don’t feel any reward for trying out endless possible solutions the fun can quickly evaporate. Of course if they do use a walk-through then the game has lost its difficulty and so once again there is a loss of ‘reward’ for the act of playing.
Its a tricky situation to reconcile, certainly more could be done, such as ensuring there is never only one puzzle to solve at a time, having failed solutions provide some form of ‘reward’, even if its just a funny side-effect to encourage continued play, having harder puzzles that are not story/game completing critical etc.
@OP
The real problem is your question is way too subjective, what you may think is a great game I may think is de-risible and vice versa.
None of the points raised in the replies (however important) are prerequisites to a great game, making a fun, polished game yes, but not necessarily a great game.
Look at it this way, check out the IMDB topp 100 films, do you agree with the list? Are there films there that you don’t think are great? Are there films there that you can’t even ‘acknowledge’ are great (i.e not your sort of film, but you see why people think its great)?
Not completely sure about that, at least for what concerns adventures. Once there was a distinction between casual gamer and gamer. Now, to be on the safe side, all gamers are looked at as casual (at least with adventures), and everything is easier. But this way all “serious” adventure players are not interested anymore, and the adventure genre has kind of died (obviously, maybe the reasons why it died are completely opposite, but still). Hope I’m not going too off-topic