Forums → Games → Best Developer Tournament! Round 2: ID vs. Creative Assembly

This is Your Friendly Neighborhood Satanist, with something different this time around. I'm asking you, the community, to participate in a little tournament. We're going to pit a group of developers against each other in a 32-man bracket featuring the likes of Blizzard, Bethesda, Mojang, even Frictional Games. I'm hoping this gets Stickied like the Popular Media's Battle of the Bands thread, but its just a dream. Until the mods grace me with that honor, here's the bracket!




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Developer Tidbits of info

Bungie had success with the ONI and Marathon series before redefining the console shooter and catapulting Microsoft into the Game Industry with the giga-hit Halo: Combat Evolved.

Ubisoft Montreal has a slew of releases under its belt, including the Assassin's Creed, Splinter Cell, and Rainbow Six series.

Neversoft was most known last generation for their Tony Hawk games, but this generation they did nothing but pump out Guitar Hero for Activision, with the semi-decent Western GUN released in 2005.

Blizzard is a massive developer wielding no only the largest MMO on the market, but also the largest E-Sport (Starcraft II) and has hype surrounding Diablo 3 on a biblical scale.

Capcom is the master of fighting games and Zombies, Dead Rising and Resident Evil take on the genre in drastically different, but still awesome viewpoints, while Marvel v. Capcom and Street Fighter dominate the EVO scene.

id Software didn't just create awesome FPS' in Doom and Quake, they CREATED the FPS with Wolfenstein, and their new FPS, Rage, looks incredibly promising.

Volition had minimal success with the FPS' Red Faction and its sequel, but saw success in the third-person market with Saint's Row and Red Faction: Guerilla. However, they seem to be falling into old patterns with the recent lack-luster Red Faction: Armageddon.

The Creative Assembly is known for the Total War series, a game where players take command of a Risk-esque game board and send armies to fight in real-time RTS battles, with Civilization-like Turn Based strategies holding the experience together. It sounds weird, and is a far cry from base-building RTS' like Age of Empires and Starcraft, but totally redesigned the RTS into a tactical, position-based combat system.

3D realms holds the position as the guys who stuck it with Duke until it killed them. Despite DN:F's lack of success, the original games were quintessential in the development of the FPS genre.

Visceral Games had minimal success originally, but found instant success with Dead Space, one of the best-known horror games of this generation

Bethesda. Ahem. Elder Scrolls, Fallout 3... yea. It's Bethesda.

Naughty Dog went from a cartoony platformer with an animalistic protagonist in Crash Bandicoot, to a fantasy action-platformer in Jak and Daxter, into the Action-Adventure gold found in Uncharted.

Gearbox Software was one of the developers behind the ever-popular Counter Strike, made six Half-Life games, a bunch of Brothers in Arms games, shocked the world with the epic Borderlands, and finally brought a disheveled, but still funny, Duke Nukem: Forever to our tables, and has Borderlands 2 on the way in a golden oven of Awesome.

Double Fine Productions is spearheaded by the eccentric Tim Schaefer who has a humor as wide as his imagination. Psychonauts was one of the greatest games of last generation, while Brutal Legend garnered another small cult following in 2009, with Costume Quest and Trenched trotting about the Xbox LIVE Arcade.

Insomniac Games is best known currently for their recently-released Resistance 3, but like Naughty Dog, also made two cartoony series previous, Spyro the Dragon and Ratchet and Clank.

Ninja Bee is a developer known for smaller titles that hit hard, the two Keflings games, Raskulls, IloMilo, Ancients of Ooga, and Cloning Clyde.

Mojang was a small indie developer with a few games under one man's belt before he made a game called Minecraft. The community exploded, a team was built, and new games are coming from this developer of Awesome.

Sucker Punch evens out the Triforce of Cartoons with Naughty Dog and Insomniac with their previous work in the Sly Cooper series, but moved on to make a more mature series in inFamous.

Fireaxis games are the team let by Sid Meier that created the game that invented "One more turn" gameplay, Civilization.

Epic Games not only made the Unreal Engine found in many games nowadays, but also used it to their major advantage and created the beautiful-yet-awesome Gears of War series.

Rare is one of the oldest developers in this Bracket, only outlived by Nintendo itself. They made over 130 games from the NES to now. Their best-known works are Banjo and Kazooie, Viva Pinata, and Kinect Sports.

Digital Illusions CE (or DICE) is the Swedish development team that brought class-based, 64-player, First-Person Shooter multiplayer to the world in the form of Battlefield. After major success on the PC market, they were drove to the consoles after popularization of the platform, and came out with the two Bad Company games using a new Frostbite engine. Their up-and-coming Battlefield 3 is looking to take down rival shooter Modern Warfare 3 this fall with the shiny-er and newer engine, Frostbite 2.

Valve Corporation. If it isn't Gabe Newell dancing around waving Half-Life Episode 3 info behind his back, its awesome sequel after awesome F2P announcement after awesome Zombie game. They created the most popular platform for PC gamers that destroys the competition found in Xbox LIVE and the PSN (well, idk about the PSN-Steam thing, I think they merged?)

Nintendo is the oldest developer on this list. The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Pokemon, Kirby, Star Fox, Mario, there's no denying the legacy surrounding this legendary team. Their recent attacks against Rovio has shown a bit of their evil side, and the general dismissal of the Wii as last-gen tech has brought their legendary status down a bit, but with Skyward Sword, the Wii U, and the potential held in the 3DS, Nintendo has a very bright future.

Irrational Games is known for only one thing, Bioshock. This epic tale of a Capitalistic Utopia gone wrong garnered many awards, spawned a... somewhat quality sequel, and a side-quel... if you want to call Bioshock Infinite that. Their innovative storytelling and gameplay is also found in their lesser-known release, System Shock 2, but shines throughout Bioshock like one of God's angels on horseback.

Crytek makes few games, but puts a lot of its work into its reiterations of the Cry Engine, the most powerful engine seen in a game as of writing this (Frostbite 2 has yet to be released in Battlefield 3). Far Cry and Crysis are some of the games behind this visually-perfect developer.

Infinity Ward emerged as creating the best WW2 FPS games with the original two Call of Duties, then revolutionized an entire half-decade with their swan song, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. They have met recent failures, nearly all of their talent left to form the ironically named "Respawn Entertainment" under EA, with the new Modern Warfare 3 under development from Sledgehammer and Raven alongside Infinity Ward.

Pandemic is the only "Dead" development team on this bracket, but has to be mentioned for their games overall attitude. Whether it be Destroy All Humans!, Mercenaries, Star Wars Battlefront, or The Saboteur, all Pandemic games have a feel of "This is awesome, I must play more" about them.

Rockstar takes the seat as "Most Controversial" game studio in the Industry with their releases of the Grand Theft Auto games. They're great fun and some of the best games out there, but the amount of violence packed-in has garnered more than one story on Fox News. They proved they can tell an excellent story in a non-urban environment with the release of Red Dead Redemption, then explored even more ground with the decently-received L.A. Noire.

Lionhead Studios is led by a crazy Brit with no hair who believes you can have feelings for a bunch of 0's and 1's. Peter Molyneux is the most out-spoken man I've ever seen, but while his words and promises are usually miles ahead of the development, the games the team releases, Black and White and Fable, are high in quality and are always a blast to play.

Harmonix invented the guitar-peripheral genre with the original two Guitar Hero's, then went off and added the other instruments with the excellent three Rock Band games. With the music-game industry on hiatus, one has to wonder what's next for Harmonix?

Finally, we have BioWare. This is one of the few developers where you don't have to worry about the story, just hope that the team didn't mess up gameplay too much. They struck gold with Knights of the Old Republic and kept mining out hits, Mass Effect, Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect 2, his some Copper in Dragon Age 2, but more diamonds and gold are ahead in the to-be-released trilogy finale, Mass Effect 3, who is on par with Bioshock Infinite to take home the gold next year.



Long post, but make sure you vote! Just pick the developer you feel has affected, influenced, and made the Game Industry all the better with its work and presence.

Happy Voting!

-Chillz