Some Spore questions

[Dragon45]

So I heard that the commercial release of Spore had some restricted gameplay elements; that creatures all moved similarly, animations were very similar, and that a large number of models' asymmetries were not able to be created. Are these true? Are there any others?

[imbaczek]

that's basically true, yes. also, the game's quite boring.

[smoth]

I will tell you it is not for hardcore gamers, it is for people who want to fuck around and not do a lot. I.E. entry level gamers.

[imbaczek]

true, but then, i'd rather fuck around designing spaceships in galciv2 rather than spore.

[smoth]

probably, can't you also do that in sins of a solar empire as well?

[TheBigPK]

It appears the base version currently released is lacking quite a few features I was excited about when I checked out early development videos before I got it.

There were a ton of features present in some presentation video I found on youtube a long time ago that arent in the game; the most memorable was an entirely different 'space' part that expanded to controlling entire galaxies and the possibility to start over on planets near your initial species which is kind of possible but not at all what I was expecting. Also, you could drop items in the tribal stage and your tribe would try to use them instead of just building a hut and telling them to grab maybe 6 different tools.

The creature stage is actually pretty fun as you evolve your species and pwn the other ones. Tribal stage is horribly short and clearly sucked dry of all the cool sounding features they planned. Civilization stage is kind of fun and decently well planned but only allowing one type of ground/air/sea unit and one weapon defeats the point of designing cool vehicles armed to the teeth kind of (though it does matter how many weapons/armor plates/propulsion systems you add proportionally, the system feels thrown together). Space stage is the absolute worst part; its repetitive and boring and takes ages of repeated actions to win an unsatisfying reward.

Now, they're releasing more parts/building blocks in packs so I can see this going the way of the sims with content packages. Perhaps an expansion or two will include more fundamental feature upgrades, too.

What they released is an entirely dumbed down version of what they initially planned so they could sell more copies and make up for the astronomical production costs. I don't really blame them, but the game really is boring and much more limited than it should have been. Don't get me wrong, its a fantastic game in most respects and the procedural stuff is cool, but I feel like it could have been a lot better.

Haha, I dont think you were asking for a long review, but there ya go.

You cant design ships in Sins, either.

[Boirunner]

So I heard that the commercial release of Spore had some restricted gameplay elements; that creatures all moved similarly, animations were very similar, and that a large number of models' asymmetries were not able to be created. Are these true? Are there any others?

so i heard you cared about overhyped computer games

[rattle]

probably, can't you also do that in sins of a solar empire as well?

Ship design is very limited in SoaSE

In GalCiv2 you can freely pick from preassembled parts, kind of like playing with LEGOs. However it's just a gimmick and pretty much useless, like the combat system itself.

[[TS]Lollocide]

Spore was a good game idea, it had plenty of potential, I mean tons of it, but they ended up screwing over the majority of gamers by making the possibly uber-cool new game into a pathetic breeze.

I loved Spore, it was a great playthrough....once. There was zero replayability (Aside from the first stage, which I still enjoy as a tiny 30 quid waste of money gameplay) because once its done, you've finished the game forever.

EA could have done alot with their most recent release, but instead of better game mechanics/more indepth game elements/additions to every stage of the game aside of the space stage, they added in 'More parts and more dancing'.

[Snipawolf]

I wanted dynamic animations. the crap they have currently BLOWS
they also got rid of the old combat system, which actually affected the enemy, iirc. You can't knock enemies over by charging them, or anything... This whole game is made of gimmicks.

[Argh]

Thus far, they haven't even come close to breaking even, btw. The casual market, which was supposedly going to be their gold-mine, hasn't shown up in anything like the numbers they hoped.

Last quarterly shareholders meeting hyped up the 2 million sales it achieved in the first 3 weeks, and was... noticeably reticent about sales after that, when you got past the smoke and mirrors. We'll see, when the next SEC report is filed, whether Christmas saved this game.

But frankly... the MetaCritic user reviews are really, really telling. Lots of complaints about shallow gameplay, no replay value, etc. I think that the single most commonly used negative that I saw was "disappointing".

Maybe Wright's crew will be given enough time to save the game EA hoped would become a franchise. Maybe it'll even work. I still doubt it.

[Muzic]

I thought it was okay..I played it for about 2 weeks and that was it.

[SwiftSpear]

Thus far, they haven't even come close to breaking even, btw. The casual market, which was supposedly going to be their gold-mine, hasn't shown up in anything like the numbers they hoped.

Last quarterly shareholders meeting hyped up the 2 million sales it achieved in the first 3 weeks, and was... noticeably reticent about sales after that, when you got past the smoke and mirrors. We'll see, when the next SEC report is filed, whether Christmas saved this game.

But frankly... the MetaCritic user reviews are really, really telling. Lots of complaints about shallow gameplay, no replay value, etc. I think that the single most commonly used negative that I saw was "disappointing".

Maybe Wright's crew will be given enough time to save the game EA hoped would become a franchise. Maybe it'll even work. I still doubt it.

I think they can still make a franchise out of spore. IMO the initial excitement for the game still hasn't gone away, it's just been frozen by an unresponsive offering. They could still easily release Spore 2 a couple years down the line feeding us some bullshit line about "The research we were putting into the game was taking too long to make the first one the game we really envisioned, but now it's here" and people would eat it up. After all, that's the game that most gamers really wanted.

[pharoph]

Maxis=EA=piece of unfinished, rushed piece of crap that results in people regreting to buy it.

[Snipawolf]

Shut your mouth. EA doesn't release only crappy games. Maybe 1/3 or 1/4 of the games are pretty damn good, with the rest failing hard.

[SwiftSpear]

Maxis=EA=piece of unfinished, rushed piece of crap that results in people regreting to buy it.

I honestly don't think spore was rushed by EA. It was rushed by maxis, and it wasn't that they rushed it in the convetional sense, I think they just frittered thier design time away playing with fun procedural stuff, they didn't really have time to design a real fun procedural game, they realized they would never execute a universe growing from start to finish in full simulation, so they had to just put something together. Unfortunately "something" ended up being a bunch of lackluster mini games.

Ultimately, they're working with a genre of games that can very quickly grow into a monster on a programmers back. You have to fight feature creep somewhere to actually produce a finished title... but when you're simulating a universe, where do you even start?

[hunterw]

spore is 4 shitty minigames which have almost no influence outside of themselves, and one big shitty space sim where you will stop playing

[Spawn_Retard]

can i point out that they've had about 6 years of dev time.

I can remember this game being announced in like 2002 and they said then it would be released pretty quickly. They have had about 6 years to make a decent game, similar to the SIM titles.

I completed the game in under 3 days, with huge gaps in between game times.

The cell stage and creature stages are the only cool part of the game. and the only re playable parts also.

When i opened my copy i wanted to love it with all its imperfections, just like i do with most games. But this title was a game that only a mother could love, or the devs for that matter.

in my opinion i had more fun in SIMs 1, even though ive been waiting for this game to come out for so long.

features are missing, cell stage is fun but their are only 3 ways of playing it, with about 3 different weapons, and really do suck, i thought there would be at least 20 minimum.

Creature stage was pretty cool, i think they spent most of their time here, (maybe all 6 years?) because its the only section that looks more than 50% complete.

Tribal stage was a joke, and nothing like it was originaly intended to look or play like. (from old youtube videos on gameplay footage)

Civilisation stage was also a joke, no learning curb with the RTS style game play, it was in your face, and at some points i felt i was under huge amounts of unfair forces.

The way Space stage is on this version of Spore shouldn't even be in the game. It reminds me way to much of GTA4 story line, (e.g. everyone phones you up because they need you to hold their hand while they have a TINI problem with their planet and stupid amounts of time needed just to make allies and keep allies just makes you load up an entire wasted hour if you piss an alien race off by the slightest.) The other aspects are that you have to do like 90527952897325 missions to get anything good for your space ship, and even when you unlock it all you need credits to buy one of those cool new things you wanted (like changing the landscape ect.) which are intensly harder to get as you go on. Most of the missions are either finding an artifact with this annoying radar, which you need to suck up with your spaceship then fly off to 12 other planets which are on the opposite end of the area your in. The second mission is to kill a paticular creature before it ruins their ecosystem because its infected (retarded because they look like normal creatures but with yellow goo coming from their feet)

Repeat that about 34549045354 and you can actually explore some of the space. (note, if you ever wanted to find SOL, our planet system in spore, don't bother, because you'd need need to spend about 2 weeks of ingame just to get the amount of travelling power to get there. Also, the creatures are way out of proportion, each creature looked like it took 1/10th of Australia.)

you can only visit planets, because everything else is unstable, so basically it just limits things down to random planet spawns, colour size and species.

This like a ton more to talk about, but i cba, rent the game, don't buy it.

[Snipawolf]

Argh, my poor spore, what has become of you...

Watch the 35 min vid from 2005. Fucking ea made them make it child friendly... It was so much more vibrant and awesome then..

They had more dynamic interations.
They had COLLISION based fighting, which means PLACING YOUR WEAPONS WAS IMPORTANT.
He says the propellers and junk affected vehicles, so weapons should, too, so Swift would probably have enjoyed that.
Everything just looked a hundred times better...

It was neither finished NOR rushed, it was redirected to something crappy. They should've fixed their features and released in '06 or maybe early '07.

[TheBigPK]

watch here

This is the one I was talking about too, and 2 minutes in, they had a creature stage in water before you get legs. WTF FFFFF