Spore: A Failure?

[salty mud]

I want to pose a simple question. Did Spore achieve what it set out to? Remember all the way back to 2005 when the game was first announced, and how amazing it appeared back then. Has the game reached you in the condition you were expecting and anticipating? I ask this after reading a lot (and I mean A LOT) of reviews saying the game is a dissapointment, and they are dissatisfied with the final product.

I like Spore, but like others, I have a niggling feeling saying it could be so much better...

[Soduka]

It can be much, much more. It WAS much, much more in 2005.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...v-jXAg&q=Spore

Obviously two things have happened; both of which EA has admitted to doing on purpose.

1) The game was very purposely dumbed down. Really, really dumbed down. Remark from Will Wright specifically stated they rather sell more copies than make a lasting, challenging experience that might not appeal to everyone.

2) The game was sectioned off for expansion packs. A lot of expansion packs.

Think for a minute about the evolution present in game. The placement of the legs, arms, mouths, don't mean anything. Since all the parts were given numbered traits, they all have the same effect once placed somewhere on the body. That's completely against any type of thought and made that way so anyone without a brain in their skull could make a creature. It used to be, as shown in those videos, that the placement and body structure mattered and you would have to adapt your creature to its changing surroundings.

News-Flash- There are no changes in surroundings and your creature becomes COMPLETELY irrelevant only 40 % into the game. How is that supposed to be fun or rewarding?

[salty mud]

Bad decisions have been made. The Tribal Stage (which I was most looking forward to) simply isn't attractive enough. I love the RTS genre, and Spore doesn't do it justice at all.

And don't get me started on the Civ Phase. When I evolve a creature from a cell, I finish tribe and jump straight into space... I simply cannot stand it.

[Bigfoot3814]

I haven't actually played yet, but what I find most apealing about spore is the user content sharing, which so far I haven't heard any complaints about.

[JtheJackal]

It can very much be better, but it set it what it was meant to do and is fun, charming and unique.

[SimonL]

I'm having lots of fun with it and can't stop playing. Yet I am really disappointed with it and annoyed at knowing what the game was meant to be and ended up not being. So it's really bitter-sweet. I think that the fun I'm having will probably be short-lived and the disappointment more enduring.

Still, the user-created-content-sharing thing is GREAT and I think Spore will pave the way for other companies to build on the concept and make awesome games out of it. I mean, sure, user-created-content is not new, but the way it MAKES Spore is rather new.

[WonderPup]

Originally Posted by Soduka

1) The game was very purposely dumbed down. Really, really dumbed down. Remark from Will Wright specifically stated they rather sell more copies than make a lasting, challenging experience that might not appeal to everyone.

I have mixed opinions on this.

I'm a longtime stragegy gamer and have played the CIV series since the original edition. I've also played a few different editions of the Sim City games. I agree that this isn't as challenging as those games. The Civilization phase in Spore, in particular, is pretty bad--I can blitzkrieg the entire planet in a couple minutes, and it isn't that hard to do. From that standpoint, it is going to disappoint some of the traditional hard-core gamers.

However, I have two positives in return:
1) For the gamers: Sometimes simpler IS better. For example, take the Space stage. It isn't as challenging as Master of Orion (MOO) II, but it is about a billion times better than the disaster that was MOO3.

2) For the non-gamers: What I've been impressed with about Spore is its appeal to people who find a lot of games to be too complex. For example, my 9 year old daughter LOVES Spore. Can't get enough of it. And she has needed absolutely no "training" from me on how to play it. The interface is that intuitive and the game is that fun. Another example is my wife. She's never been interested in gaming at all. Period. And when she started seeing reviews of this, out of the blue she said "I'd actually like to play that."


So, yes, it is clear to me that they went for a broader audience that includes non-traditional gamers. However, if it serves as a way to introduce new players into the genre, that's not a bad thing, even if it seems "dumbed down" to us.

I also think that when you're reaching into new territory, it's sometimes hard to figure out what will stick and what won't. By that, I mean that v1.0 of Spore probably has some notable design flaws that were well intended but poorly executed. I think the key thing will be to see how the game evolves from here (no pun intended). Remember the train wreck that was the first release of CIV III? It was a major overhaul from CIV II on many fronts--culture, corruption, etc. It was a headache to play. It got better as the expansions came out and as the modding community fixed it. CIV IV was a further improvement over the new concepts introduced in III.

At the end of the day, I think Spore is still an innovative idea that has room to grow into something that can appeal to both types of audience, but I think it was probably always intended to have appeal beyond the hardcore gamer in the first place--that is typical for Wil Wright.

[3141592]

I don't see why it would have been so difficult to include a simple toggle switch for difficulty. It would have made a lot of more hardcore gamers a lot happier.

[leonel]

I think of Spore like the first SimCity. I'm betting Spore 2 will be more complex and Spore 4 will be so deep and complex we'll get Spore Societies until Monte Cristo makes Evolution Life and Evolution XL

[Hitti-Litti]

Good example about dumbing down: I think that Spore is good, but not absolutely awesome. My little brother and mother love Spore. So Spore appeals to a really big bunch of people; not just the hardcore gamers, but also casual players.

[PlutonianEmpire]

The more and more I read about spore, the more I realize it's probably a good idea to not buy it...

[GoodGame]

I still give Spore about a 9/10. It's obviously not the mega-game that was in development for about 3 years, for the points that Soduka gave, but it's still a good game overall. I think part of the problem with it's reception is that it you have lots of breadth, some detail, but not tons of details, and a lot of the detail is semi-cosmetic with minor gameplay contributions. The other part of the problem is that beyond the novel cell-creature phases, it takes familiar game topics and tries to do them with novel game mechanics, while doing them in a way aimed to appeal to everyone (not just people who already game); That's two attempts to break the mold which doesn't quite please long-time gamers who already have played the evolution of RTS and TBS, strategy and sim games.

The saving graces of Spore are that it: 1. connects all the phases together so how you played each one makes the game which affects how they play and how you might want to win, 2. you can make and share the in-game models easily, and 3. your games and others' games interact somewhat, even failed games.

Having played it now a full week, I have to give the multiple phases a decent rating. Civilization is fun for trying different types of conquest, and grander strategies. Tribe is fun in that what you do influences the later stages, and you want to play it fast to get to the next phases, but you have to play it careful to get the final rating that you want. Space is fun as an rpg/tycoon game that ties it all together.

Space is not fun since the ultimate message seems to be that the "Grox will PWN u".


Things I do critique:
Creatures is sort of an evolution game, yet lots of evolution can't be represented because of the scoring system for parts. For instance the only reason for multiple legs is to mix and match feet. Giant scorpion parts are usually a better investment than arms for instance. The scoring system needs a rebalance so there are no worthless combinations, probably by extending the score of sub-categories to 10 points instead of 5. I think they should do something about the meaningless parts as well. They should make multiples of parts meaningful, and make the antenna and ears meaningful in the game as well.
I look forward to a cell-creatures expansion that adds water and more parts.

Tribes is pretty boring in itself. It's like an RTS designed for 8 year olds. It'd have been better with more of a sim city approach, or at least if late tribes was a city phase with a tech tree, and with more tribes and even other cities to fight. The leap to civilization is too quick and unbelievable. At least token researching/building leveling should be present, not just expansion by alliance/conquest.

Civilization is actually pretty cool when all the strategies and abilities are considered, same with the different approaches to vehicles. City balancing capture some of the flavor of say managing tiles in Sid Meier's Civilization. Taking an economic approach is interesting as well. And the variation between military and religious conquest is cool too (destroy the city or brain wash it). Having multiple vehicles per type was a good design idea, as was assuming the traits of the conquered.
Civ phase is still somewhat weak as an RTS though. I don't agree they need to go RoN or AoE with it, but they should have allowed for multiple units per type, and the trait vehicle abilities should have some variety that should be researched on a tech tree or by a power-up building.
Just adding one more vehicle type per trait type (e.g. so I could field both fast,weak military vehicles and slow, strong ones) would help. But they should have each line on the trait vehicle abilities be different from each other. E.g. there should be a rapid, direct fire gun line ; a long range artillery line; and an area of effect missile line). Adding fog of war and sensors would be a good idea as well.
Similar things for religion. Some items might have more of a city effect, whiles others might convert units faster, or have aura effects. I wouldn't change economics much, as the economic pathway is actually a little unbalanced and very easy to win with, especially with herbivore-social abilties.
Overall, I'd buy a tribes-civ expansion if they addressed those issues.

[JtheJackal]

As far as I'm concerned the game would be "complete" if they gave you more to do in the tribe/civilization phases (something like Space phase but isolated to your planet)

[Dale]

Me personally, I'm over Spore. It's been two weeks of playing and I'm ready to move onto other games.

However, Spore will be a massive success. The casual gamer will eat this game up and the 10 XP's that are on the way.

Interesting to note, my mate runs a Game store, and he says that since they got Spore (1st Sep) they've had four deliveries and the game doesn't get to the shelf. And he says nearly everyone buying it he's never seen before and they don't have loyalty cards.......... casual gamers. He also said the game's only been returned by hard-core gamers.

So whilst there is a few thousand . .. .. .. .. .ing hard-core gamers, what about the millions of casual gamers who buy the game and like it? You'll never hear from them.

Anyways, I won't be buying XP's or Spore 2 (unless they really blast the game forwards in depth and longevity).

[Murky]

The easy, intuitive interface seems like it was made for preteens. The problem is that it will be too dumbed-down for competitive gamers who will get bored pretty quick.

[Sub]

I like Spore, I really do, but it was a disappointment for me. They made some design decisions that while I understand why they were done (to appeal to a more casual audience), have taken some of the enjoyment out of the game for me. To get a brief overview of how I feel about each stage

I liked the cell stage. It was generally what I wanted and expected.

The creature stage felt like a collection of mini games. I wanted it to be a tale of survival, I wanted to be thrown into the wild and hunt or be hunted. Instead what I got was a stage where I was essentially forced to dance and sing my way through in order for the AI to not be sycophantically hostile in the space stage (more on that in a second). It also felt like I was grinding my way through the creature stage. I wanted my creature to look a certain way and in order to achieve this look, I had to do the same tasks over and over until I found the parts I wanted. Not fun.

The tribal stage was okay. I didn't exactly like it, but I didn't hate it. The main thing preventing me from liking this stage is the lack of depth and strategy required to succeed. Easy mode, normal mode, or hard mode, it doesn't matter, I know I'm going to win, the game knows I'm going to win, but I'm still required to go through the motions.

Then we have the civilization stage. My feelings for this stage are about the same as they are for the tribal stage, although I did enjoy this stage slightly more.

Then, we have the space stage. Is it possible to love something but hate it at the same time? I love the sense of scale. If you ever thought we humans on Earth were important, spore helps you to realize that this isn't the case. It's pretty cool that a game is able to get people to realize this.

In any case, space is by far my favorite stage, I feel like the space stage is the actual game and the previous four stages were mere tutorials for space. There are a number of problems with this stage, though, and subsequently, while it's by far my favorite stage, it's also the most disappointing.

The biggest problem with Space is the AI. Let's examine exactly what happens here:

- Player goes out into space
- Player meets empire
- Empire demands money
- Player, having just started the game, has no money. Player rejects demands
- Empire declares war on player
- Empire invades a colony.
- Player rushes to defend colony. Ensue boring minigame in which player dies a great many times having to defend said colony because players ship isn't upgraded at all
- Player manages to kill off the invaders! Yay!
- Five minutes later, empire invades colony
- Player rushes to defend colony. Ensue boring minigame in which player dies a great many times having to defend said colony because players ship isn't upgraded at all
- Player manages to kill off the invaders! Yay!
- Five minutes later, empire invades colony . . .

You see where I'm going with this. It's impossible to dig yourself out of that situation because five minutes is not enough time to get anything done. If you ignore the alien attacks, the aliens will either capture or destory your colonies.

Remember before how I said that if your too hostile early on, you encounter hostility in space? I had to go back and replay the first four stages, essentially dancing and singing my way through (tons of fun ). I even chose easy mode this next time around compared to the normal mode I started with. Well, the same things still happened, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale. In the end, I did manage to break my way out of that ruthless cycle, I now have defense satellites that do an okay job at fending off attacks, but I'm still not enjoying the space stage as much as I could be.

The problem now is that you once again have to rush to the defense of colonies, but this time it isn't against alien attacks - it's against virus' that have the potential to destroy the ecosystem on your worlds. This is another boring minigame that you're forced to do. They aren't as frequent as the alien invasions, but they are extremely annoying. I expected the space game to be a sandbox game, not babysit your colonies by doing repetitive boring minigames over and over.

Finally, another major problem I see in the space stage - You have no incentive to owning a lot of colonies. You have to zoom in to each individual colony to collect spice, then zoom in to other colonies to sell that spice. This makes it so that you only need a handful of worlds to obtain the maximum amount of spice production. An easy fix would have been to make it so each colony gives you a small amount of spice automatically without having to zoom in and talk to the colony. The maximum amount of spice that you can hold could have then been removed and bam, you now have an incentive to having a lot of colonies. In my game right now, I would expand, but I honestly see no reason to.

Oh, and we need long range communicators. Having to scroll all the way in just to talk to a colony is silly. And while I'm complaining about space, the reward for getting to the center of the galaxy is lame.

So I guess to answer the question, yes, Spore was a disappointment to me in that there are a lot of things I dislike. There are a lot of things that could have been improved. I still like the game, though, despite all that stuff.

[Catharsis]

Well, I am a casual gamer, and I can say without equivocation: Spore is the best game I've ever played. Best as in most fun, anyway - it certainly isn't as polished or complex as Civ. But it's simple enough to be playable without getting overwhelmed (as I was by all versions of Civ), and so, as Dale said, it's going to sell well.

Cell is awesome. Creature is pretty good, although I'd like to see stacking bonuses for extra body parts, too, just so long as they were on a curve (i.e. you couldn't add twelve legs to your creature and dash across the entire map in four seconds). Tribe, IMO, is great, although it's the first time I've ever played that sort of game. Civ isn't as interesting as Tribe, but it's still entertaining enough to get by on. I haven't played Space much yet.

Another thing I would add is a harder difficulty setting or three. Not for my own use, but so competitive gamers could have a go too. Maybe then they'd stop chucking words like 'dumbed-down' and 'retarded' around. However much you may despise the casual gamer, remember this: there are more of us.

[Dale]

I faced this dilemma with Road to War (BtS mod).

Do I keep the mod at a certain level to appeal to 100,000 casual players, or do I add the complexity and difficulty to keep 1000 grognards happy?

I chose the bigger number of course, which earned me enough flaming in the RtW forums here.

[SimonL]

It's just that when you're so passionate about gaming, and you are so engrossed by an upcoming product, and spend so much time thinking about it, reading about it beforehand, and you get disappointment due to designs made to please a greater mass of people who just heard about the game a week ago, you can't help but feel rather cheated. But then, what can we do against the power of PROFIT.

[SpurnSpore]

There are many disappointments with Spore
Space the bad.
-No way to save when you even get a hint of impending attacks or be able to start a new game until you finish the whole space game itself.
-Judging the height and level of your ship to attack other ships
-3 or more ships on 1 (when you haven't had time to build strength or more ships)
-the annoying "alien simish" you have a universal translator but that doesn't help we the players
-The colonies should be automatic.
Space the good
Its enormous and looks great.
some of the gadgets and finds along the way are charming.
In some way it reminds me of a semi 3d galaxion/asteriods and the game Sid Miers Pirates.
Anyway, yes I am annoyed and the let down by the lack of depth it could easily have been.and feel conned, glad I payed a lot cheaper than it was, even then it isn't worth that kind of money (as it is) shouldn't need expansions to get more parts or depths.
Glad I have a new whiz bang machine, but I could have battled on with the old one for a bit longer- but to play spore I needed heaps more power in CPU and graphics.
which is wrong for families having to spend the same $500 -$900.
Still I have enjoyed the simple play through of the game until space.and the creative self made parts.
Where I wanted depth but the freedom to do what I want without being hammered.
The space stage will not appeal to casual players the way it is.
I cannot see why Spore didn't stick to a realistic simulation of a creature.and evolution traits and actions that mattered. It would have been more rewarding even for children
to go back and think what their creatures needed to be stronger and survive.
The Spore we got is bubblegum, The spore that was envisioned and hinted at could have been awesome.