Best Developers & game Creators in the world?

Overall: Rockstar and Valve

The Half Life based stuff (Half Life 1/2, CS, Portal 1 & 2) are among the best games I have ever played and have given me some of the best gaming moments I've experienced.
 
olivier renault said:
Bethesda, Blizzard, Bioware (well I agree, not so much now), Valve, Arena.net, Epic, Crytek...
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I'd go with those. Add Infinity Ward and Rockstar to the list.

There's some titles in there that you would hold against those developers but the consensus on titles like Crysis 2, COD MW3 and SWTOR doesn't undo the great work that these developers have done when creating things like COD and FarCry and KOTOR to name but a few.

So some of those are milking their franchises or have had a nightmare with a new venture, they're well within their right to when you look at the pedigrees.

If I had to pick one though, it'd have to be Valve. Any company that brings us HL1, 2, Portal and Steam, while nurturing its community to invent the most popular mods of all time, which have grown to be massively successful standalone items... I mean seriously, it's just greedy having that many good ideas.
 
Best Quality Polish: Epic Games (at least for the Unreal Tournament series). I don't recall a notable bug, ever, and they patched the games more to add content\features than to firefight technical problems.

Innovative Ideas: Particle Systems. Independence War, despite being sci-fi, used actual physics in its gameplay which you could take advantage of with your ship's secondary thrusters. Not only that but the branching storyline was extensive and well-written for a space combat game. Your in-mission actions had consequences normally reserved for the RPG genre. While Wing Commander did do this first, the ongoing story was a fairly black and white affair in comparison.

Gameplay: Creative Assembly. Their more recent games have been flawed (mostly in the AI department), but I still remember being hooked on Shogun Total War for hours because of the excellent blend of turn-based\real-time elements, and challenging AI. Not to mention the underused setting.

Length: Too difficult to choose one here, quite a few games I've played were long without wearing out their welcome, or have had excellent replay value through multiplayer\mods.

Story: Obsidian Entertainment (I would say Black Isle, but most of them went to OE including what was left of Troika). I can't really fault their storytelling, and the choice & consequence elements are almost always top notch (apart from Dungeon Siege 3 that is).

Optimization: Again I think this goes to Epic for the excellent scalability of UE1 and 2/2.5. You could even run UT2004 on a 32MB Radeon, Geforce 2 GTS, the GF4\Radeon 9000 series IGPs, or even Intel\VIA\SiS IGPs with software rendering which was still playable.
 
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