Ultima series creator Richard Garriott  believes game design need to be more creative if the medium is going to continue to advance.

“There are tons of free-to-play, beautiful looking MMOs that are feature-complete and challengers in theory to World of Warcraft, they come across from Asia every day.” said Garriott, also known as ‘Lord British,’ in an in-depth interview with Industry Gamers.

“They’re all beautiful, they’re all full-featured – if you try to go why is this game not as good as World of Warcraft, you’d have a hard time picking individual features as to why, but with all of them you go, “look, it’s free to play, free to download, I’ll try it!”

But the man behind Ultima Online believes that rather than trying to introduce new features, many developers are just trying to recreate game design elements of their competitions titles.

“You go, “OK, kind of looks the same, here’s my town, here’s my shop, here’s my level one monsters I have to fight,” he said. “And you spend an hour or two going through the play cycle and finishing a quest and levelling up, and you go… well “OK, it works, but why do I care?”

“The vast majority of people are making these me-too games, they’re quality, there’s nothing wrong with them, there’s just nothing compelling about them.”

Garriott added that he hopes to be able to look at his own work, including Ultima and Ultima online and be satisfied with what he did to change games.

“And I’m hoping that if I look back on my career down through the years, I’m very proud of the fact that with some periodicity, I have truly advanced the art form in some meaningful way.”

The full interview with Richard Garriott, an interesting read for Train2Game students, can be seen on Industry Gamers.

So Train2Game, what do you make about his comments on game design? Does more need to be done in order to make games innovative?

Leave your comments here on the Train2Game blog, or on the Train2Game forum.

[Source: Industry Gamers]