
Spore: What happened? - mshafrir
http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/spore-what-happened-/1387746
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patio11
One day Will Wright and Peter Molyneux got together and decided to settle,
once and for all, who could ship the most awesome tech demo in a box declaring
it was a game. Molyneux got the drop on Wright by nearly a decade with Black
and White, which featured stunning graphics, adaptive AI, some of the best
emergent behavior I have ever seen, and a campaign mode which could not be
beaten because apparently QA had missed level 4 (it was cleverly hidden by
being shipped with only 5 levels, not the planned 82, thus lulling QA into a
false sense of security) and did not see that the scripting was impossible to
complete.

But Wright toiled and toiled for a decade, and then came out with Spore. And
yay the gamers did look upon it and say, verily, it was an even more
impressive tech demo than Black and White, with beautiful graphics and a host
of content creation tools (though no AI to speak of), and that Wright had
successfully created a null game while making it appear to the player as if
there were six of them.

Thus Wright won the contest.

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icefox
I followed all the news and was very much looking forward to playing Spore.
But I didn't buy it at the last minute because of the DRM. EA was using Spore
to push DRM even tighter for PC Gaming and I just couldn't agree with that. I
also didn't pirate the game so I still have never played it. I put my money on
the line and said no. Maybe I am only one guy, but by not playing it I also
didn't tell my friends about it.

~~~
Retric
I did the same thing. However, it was more out of fear what the DRM would do
to my system than an unwillingness to have any DRM. Granted, I heard the game
sucked, but I would have still gotten it if the DRM had not had such a bad
reputation.

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dantheman
It wasn't fun. It tried to be too many things, and none of them were
sufficiently polished or really all that entertaining. I think the Real Time
Strategy portion sucked the most.

Also, the game was very simple -- If it had more complexity it might have been
more fun.

~~~
Batsu
It's strange.

In the beginning, they described their model creation, the procedural
animation, the sheer massiveness of working with an entire universe... stuff
never seen before in a game. It was huge. Everyone was excited.

In the end, the game was much too simple to be enjoyable.

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ryanelkins
I really wanted to like Spore. I got it the day it came out and played it for
quite a while. Ultimately it was just too simplistic for my tastes.

Even if it remained simple, I might have enjoyed it more if I could more
freely explore. It just seems like the game is worried about you getting bored
and so injects alot of things that have to be taken care of relatively
quickly. Even in the space stage it seems I could never get too far away with
someone needing me to come all the way back because of an attack or eco-
disaster. I just got tired of being interrupted all the time.

The Massively Single-player concept didn't seem to scale well as your empire
got larger. The massiveness seemed to punish the player rather than reward
him.

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replicatorblog
I wrote a lot about Spore when it launched. The sad part is the potential it
offered will likely never be realized with Wright gone from EA.

It was the first game to aggressively try to marry bits and atoms. Bing Gordon
wanted the creature creation tool to serve double duty as a way to make
customized "Pokemon" style games offline. It was the first game designed to
have the characters 3D printed.

[http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2009/01/review-spore-
sculptor-...](http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2009/01/review-spore-
sculptor-3d-printing-service/)

The metadata in a .png file could be used to recreate the design in the
editor.

It was a terrible game, but probably the best entry level cad program I ever
used. You could do just about anything.

[http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2009/02/75-creative-uses-of-
th...](http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2009/02/75-creative-uses-of-the-spore-
creature-creator/)

It is the kind of launch only a big company could do successfully and
unfortunately it didn't work out. I hope they would at least consider open
sourcing the design tools. I agree with the general sentiment that the game
was just terribly boring. Put the tech in the hands of someone who gets
gameplay and there is still potential.

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noarchy
DRM issues aside, the game simply wasn't good enough for me to recommend it to
anyone. The early play experience was decent, but I quickly found myself
losing interest. In particular, once I got onto land and found myself facing
MMO-style grind quests...yeah, that quickly drained my interest. I tried to
stick with it, but couldn't.

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dkimball
I agree with those here who are observing that it failed because it was a
lemon. No one should generate _that_ level of hype, especially not while the
game in question is trapped in development hell to the point that they cut an
entire "stage" of the game and any number of features from the others.

People have a high level of tolerance for corporate BS when the product behind
it is good. _Spore_ only offers five or six hours of gameplay, not the five or
six years it seemed to be promising; if it had delivered on its promise of the
moon, I think we would have heard an awful lot less about SecuROM.

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Roridge
it came... it saw... it failed... everyone felt sad because Robin Williams
said it was great... but it wasn't

