CrossLOPER:

Quellist:
*falls off chair laughing* "good game designer?" *splutters*

Oh mr Garriot, what an arrogant dick you are, no doubt fapping away while you remember your old successes, but wait, after those successes were some less liked games, remember? First there was Pagan and wasnt that a fantastic new way to take the series? oh wait, no it wasnt! you turned Ultima into a single player platformer! oh deary me....then there was Ultima "whats a paladin?" IX with its juvenile plot and dialog (i wont blame him for the 3D, i will blame him for the story), sorry bug-ridden mess that it was. Then Tabula Rasa and didnt that set the gaming world alight....oh wait a minute, NO it didnt!

Personally i hope SotA is going to be a trainwreck that only succeeds in Garriots fevered imagination, sorry if thats mean but as far as i am concerned Garriot is so high on the smell of his own crap he's in another dimension and this article proves it.

I am pretty sure he had minimal control over things starting around Pagan since that was when EA took over. They have a habit of wrongly guessing what customers want. Tabula Rasa was an MMO released when WoW was still completely omnipotent; TR didn't stand a chance.

But does he say this? does he come out, hold up his hands and say "yeah, Ultima 8 and 9 were a mess, its really EA's fault but i let down my loyal fans and i'm sorry" no he bangs on about how wonderful he is. The day the guy apologises for how badly he let down his fans is the day i start taking a non-negative interest in him.

He disqualified himselfe when he named Molyneux as a great game designer, among the undeserved arrogance.

Oh and:

"Whats a paladin?"

DiamanteGeeza:
One other thing to note is that it's quite hard, when interviewing, to know if the designer in front of you is any good or not. Artists have portfolios that give you a clue, programmers can take tests, but for a designer? There's not much you can do to vet them other than take their word for successes on their resume.

I'd say they should design games the way supermarket brands figure out cake recipes. That is, the tasters get the final say not the cooks. While story and setting is best left to an auteur, game mechanics are about experimentation and should be decided by tests. Otherwise, the designer with the most power will put his ideas in regardless of merit, QTEs and all.

LOL - oh Richard, please never change...

As funny / ironic as this is coming from the guy responsible for the sandalwood box SNAFU in Ultima V I think it's probably fair to say that he's got a point.

Captcha: head case. Indeed. But it's how you wear it that matters ;)

Carter Rosen:
P.S. This is an era where anything a famous man like yourself says impacts his business by a lot, be careful what opinions you voice to the public, sir. I did like your Ultima series up until EA stepped in an rushed 8 and 9 to hell, of course. I don't want to see any of your future projects to be impacted by an offhand thought.

I dunno that he's really all that famous any more, outside a select group of PC RPG geeks of a certain age. I count myself among that group but as a lot of others have pointed out, what has he really done lately? And by lately, I really mean the past decade or more...

While I am inclined to agree with some of his points, I feel less of this is legitimate thought for the industry and more thought at the expense of the industry to stroke his massive ego.

Yes, Richard, you made a good game once. An excellent game, even. Revolutionary, in a sense.

And then you made a shit game later and now you are just criticizing the industry.

Games aren't going to thrive if we only get one good game every 20 years. Think of these game designers you seem to consider peasants to your lordliness as holding the industry afloat while you come up with something else to make.

The real problem is that there is no way to prove that you are a good designer if you aren't also at least a programmer. Who's going to believe you can come up with really fresh new ideas if it's practically impossible to show anything for yourself.

Entry level jobs in design are basically data entry / QA, or Level Design. The best games are ones that run on fresh new mechanics, but how many thousands of people have an awesome idea for new mechanics and never get to do anything with it?

I have several issues with Mr. Garriots comment. First of all, he didn't meet any good designers? I met several good designers, several bad ones, many of them better than me, but many also better than Mr. Garriot. I mean, this guy invents a new alphabet and calls this "good game design". Well, that's nice and all, but it doesn't make you the best game designer ever.
He complains about designers rehashing old ideas. Coming from a man, whose newest project is a rehash of his old ideas. One of the big innovations promised is "player houses". Whoop-de-doo... He failed with his online game venture and now comes back to the games which always worked for him. Not really innovative. I try to create something new with every one of my game designs. Does this make me a better designer than Mr. Garriot? Unfortunately not, my games are still very rough, because of my lack of experience. It's easy to create great games, when you have the manpower, time and the money. I want to see Mr. Garriot in a 48 Hours game design contest, using nothing but an ordinary computer. Then I want to see his "game design genius".
His old games? Well, I played Ultima IV. I really tried to "get into" the game as intended by its designer, even read all the manuals and first avoiding walkthroughs. The premise is unique, but the execution and the game itself is mediocre, even for its time. The game design is horrible in several aspects.
I think it boils down to "ideas are worthless". It's all about execution. You can have a great idea for a game, but fail for several reasons. Maybe the idea is to big for you to flesh it out or to expensive to create (many of Peter Molyneux' games fall into this category). If you have great execution, you get games like Diablo 3 or Star Craft 2, which are really well polished, and are considered good games although they are just rehashing old ideas. If you have great ideas and good execution you get gems like Portal.
This said, I agree with Mr. Garriot, that the industry needs fresh ideas, but I also see, why the big AAA studios are not trying anything new. But I don't think that he is in any position to advertise himself as a great game designer.

Garriot is a decent designer but like many of the aging "superstar" designers from that generation is an arrogant egotistical twit with an overinflated sense of his own importance and abilities. That is why I didn't back his Kickstarter, or Molyneux's and only reluctantly backed the Elite Kickstarter. Also the only Ultima games i liked were the Ultima Underworld ones.

That is my other concern, with the rise of indie gaming and crowdfunding, we are probably going to see another generation of egotistical "superstar" developers. But I'd rather have egotistical superstars producing good games than faceless, hostile corporations mass producing rubbish.

I could see people understandably having very knee-jerk reactions to Mr Garriotts statements but I for one agree with him completely. Every time I play a game and think "this part of this is crap why didn't they just do this" it's because whoever decided that it had to be that way designed it that way and even some of the best games I've played in the last decade suffer from design flaw, in a lot of cases even things I swear were solved in the decade prior.

Graphics, animation, sound, AI, all the ingredients can be fantastic but if the design is still bad its a bad game. We do need smarter people working in the industry who are willing to not just take an established thing and have it redone a bit different. If we had better designers we'd have fewer boring tedious CoD, Halo and Gears clones.

Frozengale:
Here's a little bit of clarification from Garriot himself. He posted a rebuttal on Gamasutra's article about this

Richard Garriot:

While I appreciate those of you who read the whole thing, to see better the whole context, even still, this article is skewed to make a sensationalist slant. My point was, that game design is the hardest, but also the most valuable skill to build in the industry. That every company lives and dies based on the talent of its game design team, and that as an industry we are not doing so well creating the talent we need in this industry, because educational systems have not caught up in this area as well as programming and art. I was not trying to toot my own horn, rather state that game design is hard. Ah well. :)

SO he apperently has no logn tern memory and catn even remember what he said in the interview?

Treblaine:

Uhh, the original quote:

But other than a few exceptions, like Chris Roberts, I've met virtually no one in our industry who I think is close to as good a game designer as I am. I'm not saying that because I think I'm so brilliant. What I'm saying is, I think most game designers really just suck, and I think there's a reason why."

Escapist kind of left out the middle part of that quote when they cut it in half. As is standard journalistic practice if you cut a quote in half you don't have to include everything from in between. Even omit an entire sentence.

Changes nothing. He is not brilliant. everyone else is still above them. therefore everyone sucks and he is still better than everyone else.

If only there were someone with, say, $30 million to blow, knowledge of game design, and the belief that the state of education for game designing who could step up and create classes in game design... To bad there's no one out there like that... Richard Garriott.

Just saying, rather than throwing stones around your glass house, you might instead put your money where your mouth is and try to improve the state of game design education.

KriticalKiwi:
As someone who would like to one day work as Designer, I've come across hundreds of courses for art and programming, yet not one for actual game design. I think, in this regard at least, he really has a point.

EXACTLY. Yes, he communicated his point poorly and comes across as a tad arrogant, but this still holds true. It's a field that doesn't get enough attention, and it would be a good idea for the industry/academia to correct this.

I agree with him, although I don't think Ultima was that fantastic. I used to play it a lot but never finished any of the games, nor really got anywhere in them. I don't know if that's design or me being terrible at them. Probably the latter.

I don't see the problem.
A lot of you don't seem to understand the difference between game design and game PRODUCTION.
On paper, Ultima, Fable, and others are BRILLIANT. Then you put them in the machine, and the paper catches on the internal mechanisms and wrinkles, jams, tears a little bit, then we get Ultima 9 and Fable 3.

On the other hand, A LOT of games lately have been incredibly unimaginative and, yes, lazy.

Richard had beautiful laurels thirty years ago, and having played nearly the whole series, I feel he certainly earned them. They're still quite nice because he's been sitting on them for the last twenty.

Okay, I read the update and it certainly isn't as inflammatory as the headline. On the other hand, I'm still sticking to my comment.

CrossLOPER:

Quellist:

CrossLOPER:

I am pretty sure he had minimal control over things starting around Pagan since that was when EA took over. They have a habit of wrongly guessing what customers want. Tabula Rasa was an MMO released when WoW was still completely omnipotent; TR didn't stand a chance.

But does he say this? does he come out, hold up his hands and say "yeah, Ultima 8 and 9 were a mess, its really EA's fault but i let down my loyal fans and i'm sorry" no he bangs on about how wonderful he is. The day the guy apologises for how badly he let down his fans is the day i start taking a non-negative interest in him.

That's not how he feels at all:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-12-12-garriott-what-went-wrong-with-tabula-rasa
http://ultimacodex.com/2013/02/richard-garriott-proud-of-ultima-8-and-ultima-9/
http://ultima.wikia.com/wiki/Development_History_of_Ultima_IX

His admitted to mistakes, but states that there were factors beyond his control.

Thank-you, some interesting info there. I knew about the tortured production of U9 but not how he has the gall to be proud of it! Garriot made some spectacularly bad decisions after EA acquired Origin, taking on too many staff, starting too many projects at once. He practically forced EA to reign him in. I'll give him that he apologized for Pagan, but he didn't learn from it. He kept U9 in limbo too long with multiple redesigns just like he did for TR. If he wasn't such an auter and so obsessed with his own percieved genius perhaps he would make better games...

V8 Ninja:
Fair enough. Just remember, Richard; if the design of Shroud Of The Avatar is bad, the internet will never let you live down what you have just said. That includes myself.

I definatly got a whole "John Romero is going to make you his bitch" vibe from this as well, right before Daikatana wound up blewing chunks.

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/game-reviews/daikatana-demo.php

That pretty much covers it.

That said, understand a big differance here is that Lord British is one of the all time great game designers who had a lot more under his belt comparitively speaking than someone like John did. Without him we probably wouldn't have seen video games return the way they did, or see RPGs develop. Innovations Garriot largely pioneered are still pretty much boilerplate for industry game design right now... and the guy made enough money where he not only built himself a couple of crazy mansions where he threw apparently wild theme costume parties, but also was able to afford having himself shot into space.... that DOES put Lord British into a league all his own, and give him some right to talk crap.

That said, whether he succeeds or fails, I think he's right. A lot of what he's said is very similar to what I've said in some of my other posts which have generally gotten negative reception for picking on the game developers rather than just the publishers.

Truthfully I don't think he should have backpedaled, and honestly when the guy who pretty much invented the modern MMO as we know it says something, you should pay attention (and the key term here is "modern", "Ultima Online" was not the first MMO out there, before that we had things like "Meridian 59", "Kesmai", "Club Cairbe", "Dark Sun Online: Crimson Sands" and others, including some very elaborate text-based MUDs, but Richard was the guy who had the vision and skill to put it into the current persistant world scale that we see now, without UO it's doubtful other, now vastly superior MMOs ever would have existed). Ideally I'd love to have seen Richard's statements create some massive shake ups and firings within the game design community, with a lot of people going "you know, these designers we've got do kind of suck and don't do much new" and handing out pink slips while more talented people are sought or trained to replace them, but I doubt it will happen. Mostly all we're likely to see is an industry-wide circling of the wagons (if people even remember this) and people getting ready to counter-attack Lord British, rather than accepting that he does kind of have a valid point, and as gamers we've noticed EXACTLY what he's talking about, with the same games being constantly re-released with a few tweaks here and there.

That said, I do wonder what Richard would say about the designers involved in some of these kickstarter projects like say the "InXile" team who I have my eyes on to pretty much spearhead the return of quality RPGs with "Wasteland 2" and "Tides Of Numinera".

I'd also sort of suggest to Richard that he might want to see about hiring Cleve Blakemore for his design team. They guy managed to stick with a vision of creating an epic single player RPG for 17 years, which he's finally just now producing himself. Seems like attitude-wise he'd probably be a good fit. The lack of success on the "Indiegogo" campaign for the finishing touches (even if the game will come out anyway in May apparently) kind of makes me sad, as does the fact that the guy who did this claims to be employed as a Short Order cook. :P

Treblaine:
After Update:

Maybe what he said in tone didn't transcribe so well in text. The point is this is his "Shtick" he went by the name Lord British for a while, it's expected for him to make grandiose statements about himself, not in total seriousness. PC gamer magazine is used to this sort of humour, it's where Charlie Brooker started his deadpan writing style.

I can't really fault Escapist for having sensationalist headlines, it's kind of their job, but maybe some context, and I appreciate them adding the update.

I will keep this in mind for the future!