Garriott talks game design

Richard Garriott, the man behind the Ultima franchise and the recently launched Kickstarter project for Shroud of the Avatar, has been talking about his fellow game designers, and his opinions my not be that warmly received by his peers in the industry.

"You know, I go back to the day when I was the programmer, I was the artist, I was the text writer, etcetera," Garriott said to PC Gamer in a recent interview. "Every artist we've ever hired ever is infinitely better at art than I ever was. I was never a good artist, or audio engineer, or composer. I was a pretty good programmer, but now all of our programmers are better than I am-but if I'd stayed in programming I could probably keep up."

"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."

The reason behind his claim is that he feels that game designers come into that role because they're not capable in other key areas, and don't possess the skills to fully understand their jobs: "I usually find in my history that the artists and programmers are, in fact, as good of designers as the designers. They're often better, because they understand the technology or the art."