I think the reason that the people he credits as being as good designers are from his generation is because that was back in the day that a designer could make a top quality game with a team of 5-10 people.
I don't think that it's because designers suck, but that when you are working with AAA games with 100 million dollar budgets, you often don't get a single designer whose focused vision can drive the project. You have multiple designers working on multiple systems, and then you have a layer of management who wants to hold some of your feature ideas for their DLC monetization strategy down the line, and you need to maybe break some of your systems in order to add social media integration options or compromise on your core ideas in order to create some integration that can justify the always online DRM that you need to put in place.
When Richard was making Ultima, he could just say no. Well, up to a point anyways. By Ultima 7 and origin's acquisition by EA, references to difficulties with EA even bubbled into the game. I mean the main antagonists were named Elizabeth and Abraham. Origin's tagline was "We create worlds" the evil force in the game was known as the destroyer of worlds.
Even if you're skeptical about that, nobody can doubt that the quality of Ultima 8 and 9 were, at least in terms of game design, quite poor. Was that because Richard all of a sudden became one of those bad game designers? Or was that because the design of the game became more committee based and had to cater to focus groups and demographics determined from on high.
Maybe Richard had to work with other bad designers. But that's just how things work now. It's just that because you can't work by yourself so much any more, the quality of management and other designers directly influence people's perception of you. I mean, if Richard were to be judged, instead of by his work on Ultima 1-7 but by his work on games like Ultima 8-9, Lineage 2, CoH/CoV, Tabula Rasa, his highly anticipated "Ultimate Collector" someone might consider him a designer who sucks.
It's not the designers who necessarily sucks, it's the ecosystem that allows sucky design to persevere. In the 80s if you had a designer who sucked, they made a game who sucked. Today if you have a designer who sucks, you have one more bad system in an otherwise good game. That becomes tolerated and users are willing to get yet another bad system in a good game, until the games become a mass of "could have been nice" features that end up poorly realized, rushed, or retooled to appeal to a wide audience.
I don't think that it's because designers suck, but that when you are working with AAA games with 100 million dollar budgets, you often don't get a single designer whose focused vision can drive the project. You have multiple designers working on multiple systems, and then you have a layer of management who wants to hold some of your feature ideas for their DLC monetization strategy down the line, and you need to maybe break some of your systems in order to add social media integration options or compromise on your core ideas in order to create some integration that can justify the always online DRM that you need to put in place.
When Richard was making Ultima, he could just say no. Well, up to a point anyways. By Ultima 7 and origin's acquisition by EA, references to difficulties with EA even bubbled into the game. I mean the main antagonists were named Elizabeth and Abraham. Origin's tagline was "We create worlds" the evil force in the game was known as the destroyer of worlds.
Even if you're skeptical about that, nobody can doubt that the quality of Ultima 8 and 9 were, at least in terms of game design, quite poor. Was that because Richard all of a sudden became one of those bad game designers? Or was that because the design of the game became more committee based and had to cater to focus groups and demographics determined from on high.
Maybe Richard had to work with other bad designers. But that's just how things work now. It's just that because you can't work by yourself so much any more, the quality of management and other designers directly influence people's perception of you. I mean, if Richard were to be judged, instead of by his work on Ultima 1-7 but by his work on games like Ultima 8-9, Lineage 2, CoH/CoV, Tabula Rasa, his highly anticipated "Ultimate Collector" someone might consider him a designer who sucks.
It's not the designers who necessarily sucks, it's the ecosystem that allows sucky design to persevere. In the 80s if you had a designer who sucked, they made a game who sucked. Today if you have a designer who sucks, you have one more bad system in an otherwise good game. That becomes tolerated and users are willing to get yet another bad system in a good game, until the games become a mass of "could have been nice" features that end up poorly realized, rushed, or retooled to appeal to a wide audience.