Game Discussion of the Week: Spore

Ahem,  I think I suggested Spore back in October 2017, but anyways...

Promising concept, but ultimately fell short of its promises. For one, I was totally looking forward to building an underwater civilisation. It more like a series of evolution-based mini games than a series big game. At least they introduced an expansion pack that allowed your alien to hop off his spaceship on other planets.

First off, there is the Cell stage. Choose your diet, swim around eating berries or other creatures and find extra parts along the way.

Then, there's the animal stage. 3D platformer adventure mode. Befriend or kill other creatures, or befriend then kill them, getting extra parts to customise your spawn along the way.

Tribal and City stages are tacked on RTS stages. So simple a 6 year old could do them. Shouldn't take any more than half an hour combined.

The Space stage. This is where all the action is! Hop in your spaceship, meet other peoples' aliens, trade spice with them, kill them, abduct them, do missions for them, drop big monolithy things on primitive worlds, terraform planets or blow them up! There's even an achievement unlocked for finding Earth. You will find all sorts: hippies, capitalists, fundamentalists, lunatics, Federation of Planets or Mr. Spock types

But you know what's good about this game?

-Choices you make in the past influence the future of your species. You can buy off cities and become a commerce based race, conquer them and become a war race or annoy your rival cities enough and become a Saintly religion race.
-Build your own buildings, vehicles and spaceships. Like the creatures, there's all different pieces.

But, for the seasoned gamer, it's lacking, but I hear it still has a fanbase. I still got the game, its expansions and a cool concept artbook. Anyone wanna buy it? Please? it's a great game, I promise!

Spore was perhaps the single most hyped game of the second half of the 2010s. It was touted by the press as "Sim-EVERYTHING", because it was a universe building simulator by Will Wright, the man who created The Sims, Sim City, and pretty much revolutionized the simulation genre of video games. As you can imagine literally EVERYONE was beyond hyped for this game, ESPECIALLY me. Being the nature-freak I am, it's always been my fantasy to create life and planets, so a game that gave me all the freedom to do so and then some was right up my ally. Spore wasn't just a game for soccer moms and teenage girls like The Sims' audience, it was a game that would appeal to everyone. I vividly remember watching the E3 beta and prematurely ejaculating in my 13 year old trousers out of pure excitement. This one:


Then years later when I saw the final product and read the reviews, all my enthusiasm died instantly. The visual downgrade was unacceptable; the art direction went from being just realistic enough for my liking to looking like a cartoony chinese knock-off of the beta build. It felt to me like EA pulled a Wind Waker like Nintendo did with The Legend of Zelda years earlier, in an attempt to broaden the appeal of the game, only this time it backfired because I wasn't the only one who was offended by the toonified visual downgrade. In addition to that, a whole bunch of features that were seen in the beta were cut entirely, like the ragdoll physics, complex skeletal animations for aliens, and entire stages. And then there was the whole DRM controversy surrounding the game upon release (particularly its limited activation scheme), which actually got EA into some legal trouble, but thankfully that isn't a problem anymore since only digital copies of the game are sold now.

Spore also seemed to underperform financially, as it only sold a little over 1 million units, which is probably nowhere near the sales numbers EA was expecting given how much attention the game got during development. To add insult to injury, Will Wright left Maxis shortly after Spore released, presumably due to disappointment over the finished product, although this is merely speculation by the gaming community, as I don't think he ever gave an official reason as to why he left Maxis.

I must confess that I never actually bothered playing the game due to my disappointment with the numerous downgrades made to the final product, but most people who did play it seemed to enjoy it enough to recommend. Seeing as how 2008 marks the ten year anniversary of Spore, I thought it was only appropriate to reconcile with my pub mates on what was deemed by many as one of the most disappointing games of that decade.

I remember the hype and subsequent shitstorm for the game's release back when it was happening, but I was never really interested in playing it. I was really impressed with the character creator feature though.

Balder Thanks, bud.

I don't know what happened behind the scenes, but maybe they should've released each stage incrementally so they had enough time to fully develop each stage.

That's the impression I also get about it: that each stage is underdeveloped. There must have been some pressure to meet a deadline that was not enough for the developers, as it was certainly not for a lack of experience with this style of game.

I might have fared better if they found a way to use the same gameplay through every phase, so the game would not feel like a bunch of different minigames mashed together.

Another thing that should be pointed out is that the game also suffered because of its intrusive DRM scheme. This was right during that time in pc gaming when every publisher was going for a more intrusive and malware-like kind of DRM; Spore had to be activated and verified online (not too uncommon, but still annoying for a physical disc at the time), had a limit of 3 installations (absolutely terrible) and its version of SecuROM would remain hidden in your system even after the game was uninstalled (unacceptable). To make things worse, SecuROM wasn't mentioned anywhere in the box or even the license agreement.

Procedural generation is the lazy-man's world building.

They deserve what they get.