Poll results - 2010 most envied rendering

Update: Results

Unsurprisingly the game that got most of the "best graphics" awards also won our poll. God of War III had 28% of the votes. I don't have a PS3 (couldn't give money to sony after they gave me such a bad SDK... and with that ugly design... now I actually like it, I'm considering to buy one) so I could not play it too much, but I see its greatness.

Frostbite comes second with Battlefield Bad Company 2, 15%

The surprisingly there is a tie between Mass Effect 2 and Red Dead Redemption. I say surprisingly because in my opinion Red Dead is one of the best looking games ever. I finished it mostly because I enjoyed so much the vistas. Mass Effect 2 is an awesome game, but graphically it's pretty standard Unreal Engine stuff (but very well used, especially in the cutscenes... proving also that dropping frames is not that important during cutscenes if your visuals are nice).

Among the iOS devices Carmak clearly wins over Sweeney (3% vs 1%)

All the other games follow with just a few votes each, I didn't expect Kirby's Epic Yarn to be more popular than Black Ops among developers (6% vs 4%), Starcraft 2 deserves its 7% and I'm also happy to see that it's not only me to think that NBA2K does not look like such a great achievement graphically (only one person voted for it).

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Originally I had in mind another poll for this most. Something more technical, about programming languages... But a year just ended, all the gaming websites are running best-of 2010 specials, and I've been tempted to do something similar. Also this year something happened while I was playing a game...

For me games and programming have been pretty much part of the same experience. I started on a commodore 64 that belonged to some cousins of mine, playing games. I was a kid, around seven-eight, and my mother didn't like the idea of me playing videogames too much so she asked one of my bigger cousins to teach me programming... 

Now even if I've been doing those two things for a while now, on a professional level they are very distinct. I'm a rendering programmer, and I never really cared too much about the game I was making, other than trying to achieve the best visuals possible. 

That's not to say that I do that on purpose, it just happened that I've always worked on game genres that were not what I like to play, and that was never a problem for me. In general I don't care too much about the overall product, I would try to help other game areas for sure but it's not quite the same thing. 

And I always thought I would be fine even working on a mediocre game in terms of gameplay if it was striving to be the best it could in terms of graphics. And even when I look for a job I rarely care if a given company makes games that I enjoy or not... 

...That at least until this year I played Modern Warfare 2. I have to say, this game hooked me so much on its single player campain, that after finishing it I went straight to check if Infinity Ward had some suitable openings. It's just that amazing.

So my 2010 poll is the following: which game (among the ones shipped in 2010) you'd like to be part of (rendering development wise!)?

As always, I'll post the results on the blog. You can vote using the widget on the right of this blog page.