I buy games that I think are good from whoever makes them baring extreme ethical concerns that keep me from doing so, but that rarely happens. While that's true the only triple A developer that may approach a little admiration or respect from me anymore is CD Projekt Red, and I have a feeling even they will fall prey to milking their stuff for all it's worth to maximize profit, just quite making good games, or fall off for another reason just like everybody else has someday.
Developers that I would put up as the best in the past include:
Rocksteady - Until the Arkham Knight on PC fiasco otherwise I would put them up there with CD Projekt, at the very least they are on thin ice with me.
Rockstar - Great until they got stupid with GTA 5 online years ago to the point they quit caring about the base game, and got ridiculous milking people with Shark Cards that people were stupid enough to buy, didn't do enough with hackers online because they didn't want centralized servers or didn't care, and then finally when they bothered to do something they went after the innocent aspects of the modding community pissing everybody off.
Bioware - I'm not a automatic doom and gloom person when a company buys out another one, but...yeah EA really totally screwed up Bioware like most people thought would happen. Remember when people thought the Baulder's Gate games, Knights of the Old Republic, and the first two Mass Effects were awesome. It's been a while. Bioware now is a shell of it's former self that's running on the fumes of it's former excellence and puts out crap. Having one of the best creative new original fictional settings in Mass effect be almost totally ruined by one of the worst ending in the history of fiction didn't help it at all either.
Obsidian - I want to like Obsidian. I really do, but there always seems to be something they lack whether that be putting out a bug filled game, putting out a game that's just a little short of great, or putting out something that's not complete that always seems to hang over their heads. It's like they just can't figure out that last step for catching lightning in a bottle, putting that certain X factor in their games, or they just run out of time and resources. (Although running out of time and resources hasn't always been their fault.) While I'm glad they were able to make it, and it's a decent game, Pillars of Eternity left me underwhelmed to be honest. It's not a good successor to Baulder's Gate games. That's for sure.
Konami - Was once one of the best studios with a very long tradition of making good video games. Then they just quit caring about video games or making them. I will always have fond memories of Castlevania, Metal Gear, and Contra games, some of the longest running best best series of games ever, but all that gaming tradition was discarded. The studio gets huge negative bonus points for treating it's workers like crap, and not just badly, but to the point where they actually make working for EA or Ubisoft a workers utopia by comparison.
Black Isle - I'll be honest, I don't know if you could really classify Black Isle as Triple A even in it's prime so it might be cheating putting them on this list. I also don't really think they ever got as good as Squaresoft or Bioware at their heights did at making RPGs, but what they did make was great. The first Fallout games as recognized and acclaimed as they are might very well be underrated, and Planescape: Torment is still probably the best written game of all time as far as plot goes even almost twenty years after it came out. The workers at the studio seem like good people that care about games, and I'm glad a lot of them are at good indies or went to other studios, but it's sad Black Isle petered out.
Nintendo - The fact they can still make games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild shows they never lost the ability to make great games, but I wish they would just concentrate on making great games and hardware and stop with the damn gimmicks they feel the need to put into everything because they got complacent and lost out to Sony and the Xbox and now think they need them to compete. They also need to stop catering to kids and casual gamers as much as they do. I don't even care if they come out with a system that's not quite as powerful or advanced as their competitors, but stop with the gimmicks. The NES and SNES didn't need them, and if you look at their library of games there is a reason those systems did so well. I give them credit for saving the industry form the early 80s crash. The industry might not be what it is today if it wasn't for Nintendo, but again that was a long time ago and they can't live on that forever.
And finally...Squaresoft - Where to even begin? At it's height Squaresoft was simply the best video game developer in the industry's history and kicked video game ass like nobody had or has since. If you look at the list people in the industry come up of the top 100, top 50, top 25, top 10 video games of all time it's amazing how many of them are often Squareosft games from a six or seven year period. Saying they were on fire from 1992 to 1999 would be an understatement. From that period they put out games like Final Fantasy 4, Final Fantasy, 5, Final Fantasy 6, Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy Tactics, Chrono Trigger, the Secret of Mana games, Xenogears, and Super Mario RPG. Even some of their lesser things like SaGa Frontier, Parasite Eve, Bushido Blade, Secret of Evermore, Chrono Cross, and Front Mission 3 were very good. About the only game developer that might challenge that is Nintedo with it's series of Zelda, Mario, and Metroid games, and even then they had the benefit of getting popular historic video game icons going when they had little competition, an advantage Square didn't have. I don't know how long it will take to see a developer put out a lineup that strong in such a short period of time again. To put it in perspective Cd Projekt Red put out the Witcher 3 last year and it's considered one of best games ever and historically great, probably deservingly so. To match what Square did in the next six years they would have to put out two or three games equally as good along with equal number of games almost as good on top of that, and then five or six games more that are at least considered pretty great. In this day in age I don't think most people would see a game developer doing that as something that's going to reasonably happen. It makes what happened to Square all the more sad and the worst on this list. It's like soon after Final Fantasy 7 they all got together in a room and decided they just weren't going to make great video games anymore after that point when they did that well for that long.
The developers I like now all seem to be smaller studios, or indies(sometimes even individual people) that will sometimes come out with a good game.
