So, who else thought Spore was lots of hype and no game? It had builders, sure. But there was no game.
Games require challenge. The only part that had any challenge whatsoever was the cell stage, and that was the shortest stage. The creature stage tactics were like the rest of the game, sterotyped and unintriguing. The social game was stupid and overly easy. A memorization puzzle or something would have made it 100x better. The fighting was not like an FPS whatsoever, contrary to the advertising. If anything, it should have been like a boxing game. But in the end, it was just rapidly click and hope you win. I expect more tactics from an MMO.
The AI in the tribal and civ stages were appauling. They were way too easy. I never had to think ahead. And the social game was just as stupid as in creature stage.
The space stage was the worst, probably because it had so much potential. I was thinking it would be something like gal civ. In the end, it was a never-ending struggle against uninventive and repetitive pirates and epidemics; the missions were stupid; the tactics were non-existant in space and worse than space invaders on the planet. The social game was abysmal. Systems cost a fortune, but weapons don't. Gathering resources was an unacceptably boring chore. My allies always die, and I can't really control them. Blah. This game was worth about $10. The price of the creature creator.
The expansion addresses none of the major issues.
How did this game do so well with critics? Bribery?
i hear u, i played it from cell to space when i first played it but that was the only time i played it, it was to redundent with nothing exciting. i remeber seeing earlyer previews of it and they actually look BETTER than the released game... but yea i wouldnt recomend it to anyone really, and the critics are just there to sell a game, no reall insight to a game through them is what ive found.
Ya, the E3 2005 version was WAY better than the end product. Check it out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8dvMDFOFnA
Heck, I would buy the spore from that video in a heartbeat. Unfortunately they totally redid the graphics and pretty much all of the game to the point where it is a little kid game which should have been titled 'An introduction to video games.'
And to add insult to injury, put a bunch of DRM on it.
Definitely agree with above posts. I borrowed the game from my brother to try it out. It was all right, had some fun with it, took it off my hard drive and gave it back to my brother. Did not bother to buy it. Was not worth the hype.
Did you clear out the hidden Securom installation that stays behind? (you need the utility from the Securom hompage) That's the most vomit inducing part of that particular DRM trend for me. (though the limited online activations stuff comes a close second)
The box looks really good on my shelf >.>
I never picked it up and so have only seen the demos and such, but from what I have seen it basically looked like four mediocre genre games rolled up into one. As for the critics, well I learned long ago that a lot of game critics are shall we say not always up to snuff when it comes to professional objectivity and avoiding fanboyism when it comes to one's pet developer/publisher/genre.
I just hope that Sims 3 doesn't end up having the same fate. I doubt it though because of the type of game that Sims is.
I had high expectations for Spore, just like everyone else. And well, that's exactly why the game just isn't that great. People were at first led to believe that it would be a deep evolution simiulator of sorts with complexity far greater than any of Will Wright's other games. Well, not the case. It ended up being almost like a bunch of "big-mini-games" lumped together incoherantly one after and another.
Addmitedly, the game certainly did push the boundaries of what is possible from user creativity, as proven with the amazing buildings, creatures, vehicles, and planets that people have created. It's just unfortunate though that Spore was more like Little Big Planet than it was like Sim City.
I dunno, it is fun on occassion. I usually just start it up, create a few things, and turn if off. I mean, the gameplay was all pretty mediocre, and too easy. The end game was a bit lackluster, but the Galactic Adventures expansion will probably spice things up.
Overall, it was a nice tech-demo in my book (programmer here) and so it gives me some hope of seeing this sort of technology in the future. So, here's hoping that Sproe 2 is better... You know it's coming in a year or two.
The Spore in that video was the same Spore we got. The only real difference was that the game in the video had more "Earth" tones and the current game is a little more colorful. The gameplay would have been the same.
You can play Sims 3 right now. It's called Sims 2. I don't recommend you buy the expansions, though, unless you want to spend $200 on that game. Obviously, they are overpriced.
Unlike the creepy and cute pack. That was only 40% the cost of the game for 100 MB's of intricate, timeless, and endlessly replayable content.
tool. You know what. That's mean. I apologize. But seriously, if you want to "spice" things up the right way, but Gal Civ Ultimate. That's set in space, and its actually fun.
Spore is crap, it was all set to be the best of the best in God games / simulations, and ended with you just being a lackey with cool editors.
Spore had great editors. That's just about the only nice thing I can say about it. It's case in point of how not to design a game.
I honestly don't know what to think about this whole disaster. It's very clear that it was a screw-up, but why it ended up that way with pedigree game designers and virtually limitless development time is a mystery. Some people say it was an attempt to "dumb down" the game to widen its target audience. This is downright stupid to anyone who has ever watched a kid play his first RTS game. They don't get caught up on the intricacies of deeper strategy. It's the basic mechanics that they have to get their heads around, and once they do they tackle the depth of the game at their own pace, raising the difficulty as they feel comfortable.
At the end of the day, I just have to conclude that the people making Spore didn't have a clue of what they were doing. Oh, sure, they had beautiful ideas and the guys making the editors certainly did a marvellous job. But the implementation was shoddy and lackluster at its best.
Well the Sims 1 was also kind of crap in actual gameplay terms once you removed the novelty. Or how about Black & White - the strategy element just didn't work. But they were still both amazing and important games.
I'm still glad they made it, and I found it very entertaining for a while.
Spore was very much an experiment, and some experiments just don't come off.
The main problem I think was that in order to appeal to more hardcore gamers (like the people reading this as opposed to people who occasionally play The Sims), it needed to not have EA on its back, but such was the technical undertaking, it needed EAs money to work. I don't consider it as bad as some people say it is - they are trying to compare it to 'real' games like GalCiv, SoaSE etc (slight Stardock bias there ), when thats not what it is at all. I agree with Nights Edge that it is in the same realm as Black and White, and I reckon that the technology used to make it will be used in many great games in the future.
As a comparison, has anyone heard of a film called Young Sherlock Holmes? A pretty mediocre mid-1980s film, but it was the first film with a fully CGI character, created by John Lasseter who went on to found Pixar.
Not to mention how much it costed just for the game it self
I wouldn't consider myself a "hardcore" gamer; I consider myself someone who accidentally wastes too much time on forums and games. I wouldn't play Command and Conquer III, for instance, mostly because I don't think my computer would come close to running that game, and I refuse to buy a new one. I can't justify that kind of expenditure for something stupid, like how I waste some time.
I just like when games are fun.
Banned for posting half a year too late... Shit brain still continuing that banned thread.
The most challenging part of spore was the space stage because I had no idea what was happening and it crashed every 5 minutes so I could not make much progress. I quit shortely after.
Spore is not a game. You cannot lose, there is no challange, there is no consequences to any threats against you.
The tribal stage was a MASSIVE dissapointment. I expected a lot, looked like the startings of an RTS game... The game is nothing more than a super hyped up creature creator and sandbox.
I actually enjoyed Spore... for the first... 8 hours. After that, I just couldn't play it anymore. The idea is awesome, but the actual game was only good for a bit. I think the only reason that I enjoyed it so much is because I kept comparing it to human evolution. Taken in that way, it's a little more interesting (to me.)
This is true of any "Sim" game... for instance, Black and White, Sims 1,2, and 3, etc. It's not about "winning", it's about customization, and feeling as though you are in complete control, and getting from point A to point B. (Literally or otherwise.)
Yes, that's because Will Wright likes to make "digital toys" rather than games.
Haha, that makes sense. Sims are like virtual, complicated, Barbie dolls.
"Game" is a word that covers a huuuuuge amount of ground though. It doesn't neccessarily mean that you have to "win" though, just that you have to participate, and, preferably, have fun.
But there's nothing to actually do with the toys. Each of the five stages was scripted to the letter, and there wasn't really that much to actually do in them, and certainly no replayability. The creatures themselves had great aesthetic variation, but there was no functional variation. Oh, sure, I could have more bite force by selecting a better mouth, but this lead to an even more boring predicament where you were either powerbuilding (and there was an obvious optimal build for a fighter or a charmer) or just building for looks. The former has no depth, the latter is a glorified art tool.
I'd have to critique the creature builder as well, for some entirely unnecessary limitations. You can't use the carnivore or herbivore mouths if you're an omnivore, or vice versa etc. So if you want to have an herbivore with mandibles, you can't, because mandible mouths are only for carnivores. That limits both aesthetic and gameplay possibilities for no particular reason. You can just use the external creature creator and mix-and-match all you like, and then inject that into the creature phase, but then you miss out on being able to upgrade and evolve your creature over time.
After creature phase the polish on the game really starts to go down hill, but what really grinds my gears is how weirdly generic the vehicles are. Ground vehicles launch a single arcing projectile, Sea vehicles fire a single arcing missile, Air vehicles fire a tracking downward beam. This too kind of infringes on creativity.
That to me is the most damning issues with Spore, it's a game where, if nothing else, you can be creative.. and then there's these funky little limitations that infringe on that creativity. It's not a total failure in my eyes, it's still a pretty cool toy and I've spent probably a total of 2 weeks with it since I picked it up on release day, but it's notnearly the game that it could've been due to dozens of little balance issues.
The game can be a challenge, I'm a vet at spore by now but when I set it to Hard I died horribly the first time I played Tribe, and couldn't get through Civ phase at all.. at least not as an economic civ, which isn't able to directly attack enemies.
I use a 'Space is Fun' mod that reduces the occurence of attacks and epidemics so you're not constantly getting interrupted. It /is/ a lot funner this way, but there's a massive amount of grind in getting some of the badges. I tried for days to get the Holo-Projector tool -- it lets you beam down to planets and interact with (well probably just -look at-) creatures and tribes and such up close. I gave up after 4 days. I had to just jet around burning up time and buy up 50 systems or so to get the Trader 5 badge or something. Meh!
If they'd had the degree of complexity and interactivity shown in the GDC 05 video, perhaps the massive galaxies and far-off goals would make sense. But as it is, it's just too much of the same and I end up getting sick of the same old crap. Aside from a few super-weapons that some civs get, every race plays the same in space so there's really no replayability or variety to be had.
Return ticket is the only useful superpower. Everything else is either a novelty, will start a massive war against you if you use it, or is absolutely useless.
The holo-projector sounds cool in theory, but once you use it you realize there's actually nothing to do while using it. You walk around and the creatures look at you funny and sometimes run away. Really, it's representative of the problems in the entire game. Lots of cool sounding features, but all of them come off as gimmicks because there's nothing to actually do with them!
The problem is that EA had its fingers in it's development. They tried to make it like another sims by gimping and dumbing down the way this was present in order to appeal to the masses. Instead of making it deep (which very few people actually enjoy in general) they made it functional eye candy and gimicky. Further, they purposely witheld many features that should have been included (first parts pack for example) in order to milk people for all they were worth. Also, the SecuROM activations DRM method used ended up irritating more people then not making reviews not so good. This decision didnt really make sense to me as the target audience for Spore was not hard core gamers (who typically can crack games and play illegal copies), but rather casual players (namely kids and female sims players who typically cant or dont do anything illegal within the digital world). So why put in a harsh DRM into a game that is targeted at less then techy players?
An example of this is that my sister, a casual sims player, saw a commercial on spore and purchased it. She could not get it installed properly due to securom interfering with a few other programs she has (mostly 3rd party programs that are designed for private establishments to keep track of records and such) and therefore could not even play it. Luckily for her I'm quite tech savvy and was able to help her get the game to install and run. Once run, she's played it once, but ultimately went back to sims. She and I have not purchased any other spore related things.
EA itself was the death of spore. If they would have left things up to Will Wright and his crew, it probably would have been more of what we saw at GDC05 which would have appealed to the hard core gamers more so then the casuals. Further, I dont think they would have sprung for such a DRM as to promote cracked versions over legit ones. Now this is all speculation, but I think WW has more sense of what works then EA corporate.
Overall Spore's technology still has potential, but not under the watchful eye of EA. Some smaller, 3rd party developers need to start working on such technology and incorporating into real game. I think RTS's, RPG's and any other games could benefit from players being able to make whatever type of characters they want and apply attributes to them, play them multiplayer, etc... A full RTS of characters and units custom made would be fantastic.
spore was very over hyped. I had very high expectations. good things though, the char/creature creator is quite an accomplishment. Im not a good animator or modeler (lightwave) but the set of tools and provided parts sure made it easy to create things. However the game part really was disapointing. If it was a real game we should have had more variety. Each stage could use upgrades changes etc. Space was the worst part. It gets so boring once your into that stage. I dont care how many times you create new planets or conquer an enemy, its the same thing over..and over.
Even the graphics of the game were serverly limited. No real light sources. all that so called high end light maps was a cheap way to get it done. What happned to camp fires, or light emitting from your tribes torches. Not to mention the cluster fubar you saw when you looked at your buildings/vehicles in the game vs the editor.
if people could take the editors, refine them then use those in other games then that would be cool. But i doubt i ever play spore again. At least until they somehow magically FIX the space era so you can be a pirate clan/empire and run hundreds of ships. leave some to defend you from those chode Grox and etc. *shrugs*
Most of my space stuff though is based on the old Privateer and Moo series. if i could get moo 2 or 3 in an RTS full 3D environment with the options of privateer controls of ships in big battles and the colony building power of Outpost..id give up ..well more than i can say here. Dont worry about the mass graphics with uber cool looking stelar events. Give us light sources, bitmaps, few good bump maps and a whole lot of content, research and chaos. heh if i ever learn how to code i might make it my lifelong hobby.
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