Quite frankly, I worry that this attitude is exactly why AAA games have been in a sorry state for such a prolonged period of time. By now every major company besides Nintendo has pushed out their old creative directors, and it seems like it's backfiring.
The creative directors, like all the other people, come and go in all companies, including Nintendo. The creative directors who did work in Gamecube and older games aren't there anymore. Some are working as executives or producers, other ones aren't even working at Nintendo anymore.
In the 8 bit generation AAA games were made by a few guys, in 16 bit by a dozen or two of them. 32/64 bit generation by some dozens, and 128 bit generation they started to be hundreds of people. This generation we're talking about a few thousands of people working on a game.
Making games always has been a about collaborative team work where everyone adds their part. Some people think that because there is a creative director or CEO who is the PR star of the company is the single, or main, creative mastermind behind the games when it isn't the case and in many cases they didn't even work in that title.
Even basic ports of old PS2 games come out like trash because publishers go for the lowest bidder rather than actually do any quality control because they stubbornly insist "everyone can be replaced" as a way to keep the next wannabe Hideo Kojima in his grunt-work place. Yet, as can be plainly seen, Konami's old IPs were in better days when their creative devs were around. As were Sega's. And based on how things are going now, it seems Ubisoft is going down that same path. Not everyone is so easily replaceable as the penny pushers want you to believe.
There are a handful people in the world like Kojima. Basically all the other ones are replaceable. I mean, I think Mario Odyssey or Breath of the Wild are better games than the ones who had Miyamoto or Aonuma as directors/creative directors/lead game designers.
Thats underestimating the importance of a creative director a bit
Thats like saying that Jaws would have been the same if they've replaced Spielberg because "there were thousands of people working on the film"
The role of creative director in modern AAA games or movies has nothing to do with Spielberg in Jaws, it's way less important. If creative directors would be able to do what they want they wouldn't keep doing sequels and sequels of old IPs, they'd move to do new and fesh IPs with innovative concepts and mechanics.
But they work in projects that cost hundreds of millions of dollars so they must bet on what it works and what people buys and like, and that is mostly what they already know and bought. So this is why there's people like product or brand managers adding the output from marketing/sales to know what people the market likes or not in this type of games, this is why they also have CRM to get player feedback from social media, forums or focus testing or playtesting and internal game statistics. And there's also art directors and concept artist who define the art style, composers and audio designers for the audio, tech directors, tech leads, CTOs, lead programmers etc for what the game can do or not in terms of programming, narrative directors and writers for the story, producers managing the budget and making sure the team reaches their milestones on time and with the better quality possible, game designers designing, balancing and tuning the gameplay mechanics, etc.
There's a ton of people working on each game, most of them specialized in a single area they master and they are in charge of that because of this.
So as I said, as happens every year this rumor gets debunked. They are working on it. It's a big ass project, so it will need time.
