I for one have more faith in Roberts than Garriott, who reminds me a bit of Molyneux in his focus on personal branding and professional fame.
Before we fall all over ourselves painting Garriott as some kind of infallible game design ubermensch, let's look at his track record.
His career pre-2000 is dominated by Ultima games, which were doubtlessly groundbreaking, iconic, and by almost all accounts, great games.
His career post-2000 is limited. He produced Lineage II, City of Heroes, City of Villains, and Tabula Rasa. City of Heroes gained a cult, if small, following, and both Tabula Rasa and Lineage II were commercial failures. Lineage II in particular was savaged by both gamers and the gaming press - 6.7/10 by IGN, 6.0/10 by GameSpot, 62% on Metacritic.
But don't take my word for it, this is lifted from the Wikipedia article:
"Scott Stahl of the The Daily Orange praised the game's graphics and design, though he also mentioned that the game "quickly degrades into an incredibly tedious and monotonous process of killing the same monster a thousand different times", and that the character creation options are "incredibly shallow, with maybe two or three different faces and hair styles for each type of character." Andrew Park of Gamespot said that the game "offers either a repetitive grind or a stiff challenge""
By all accounts, Garriott's seemingly unquestionable sense of game design seems to fall apart when he left the Ultima series. I very gladly accept that he was/is one of the top game designers the industry has seen, but treating like "there's no one else like him on this planet" is unreasonable.
Secondly,
> "When there are threads on forums about one game to pick if you had to choose only one (which is very hard to do, but that's the game: pick one and only), if you had to choose "the best game ever", well very often people will cite an Ultima."
Citation sorely needed. If you went solely to a RPG forum, and specifically excluded JRPG aficionados, then you'd probably get a lot of answers to the tune of "Ultima". There have been many "top video games evar" lists made both by the gaming press and by vote participation, and I've yet to see Ultima top any of them.
There's a lot more to video gaming than "old school RPGs".