The level of detail in a creature's design should be determined by the distance of the game camera to the creature, and the scale of that creature on the screen. Many games fail to consider this issue when designing creatures, and what they end up with is an overly grainy and busy texture page that fails to read well within the game. Smaller creatures need to be kept simple. With larger creatures, detail becomes much more important. If a boss monster is going to take up half of the screen real estate, the player is going to be looking for a higher level of detail. This was one of our key areas of focus when designing some of the monsters in Titan Quest.