Spore: What happened?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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-...

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...

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.

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.

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.

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