That’s probably getting even more vague, but I’m not sure I have the ability to describe it if you don’t just “get it”. If I were to sum it up as tightly as possible, I guess I’d say that a high quality production ultimately means that the player gets an experience as close as possible to what the developers intended.
Of the elements you mentioned, pretty much all of them apply. STALKER may have done a lot of good things that most games never think about doing, but it also stumbled over all the small things we expect to be done correctly no matter what. The fact that you mentioned STALKER pretty much tells me you have no idea what I’m getting at. And that’s just staying within the FPS genre. What kind of things do you consider part of “production quality”? Depending whether it is the technical prowess of the HL2 engine, art direction, cinematic feel, atmosphere or photorealism, I might pick titles such as Gears of War, STALKER, Bioshock, Crysis, Resistance, the new Call of Duty or even Valve’s own Team Fortress 2.
