Only standout WD is Rockstar and Falllout Vegas devs at this point.
Are you kidding? Naughty Dog, Bioware, Visceral, RockSteady, CD Project Red, Bungie, Crystal Dynamics, Santa Monica Studios, Turn 10 and Ubisoft are some of the great developers the west has. I'll agree that Rockstar and Bethesda are good too, but all these others guys deserve to be right next to them (an to be honest if I were to rank all of them in my favorite to least it would be difficult.
Also, to be on topic, I'm sad the japanese game industry isn't as prevalent anymore. Nintendo still shows its magic, Namco is finally listening to fans and bringing the Tales of Games over to the US. Square still has some magic left in it, they just need to get rid of the dude who's insistent on making XIII sequels (not that they were awful, I still liked them, but they don't compare to X and before). So they still have a few key devs left, but it isn't like it used to be. I miss games like Shadow Hearts, Rouge Galaxy, Xenosaga (still kinda living through the xenoblade series, but still not the same) and all the other classic jrpgs. Basically I miss the great jrpg's on the PS1 and PS2. jrpg's have basically turned into moe jrpgs, (which I just cannot take), and only throwing us the with the occasional traditional jrpgs like Tales, Final Fantasy or Ni no Kuni that follow the classic more traditional jrpg formula once in a while, which leaves us with only a few actual quality jrpgs anymore.
I think western development has improved since the PS2 era while eastern has gone down. Basically Bioware has replaced square as my favorite developer. I'll be honest, if it weren't for Bioware and CD Project Red, I'd be missing jrpg's alot more, but at least I have Tales and the occasional FF title for my jrpg fix and have more wrpg's to play inbetween., but I still wish there were more quality jrpg titles today. It's funny how Bioware or Bethesda can develop a huge RPG in 2 years while square is on it's 6th or so year for a FF game. And it's even been stated that FFXIII took so long because they had so many set pieces, but they never ended up using all of it and had enough to do a sequel. That spells bad management and bad focus, the story boarders and main game designers should have had more focus on what was going in the game, rather than having the artists model out all these extra pieces that didn't even have a place in the final vision of the game.
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