Darkspore

[Mr_Cyberpunk]

http://au.gamespot.com/events/ea2010/st ... pid=998544
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ywzuKKA ... re=related

Maxis are turning spore into a multiplayer online RPG. I just want to point out that comparing you games to Diablo, Dungeon Seige and other hack and slash RPGs doesn't make your game as good as theirs- this was a mistake Will Wright made the first time comparing Spore to Masters of Orion and World of Warcraft.. it wasn't even close. For that matter I've heard that "the guys that made diablo" selling point before and they produced the shit fest that was Hellgate London. Just because you worked for blizzard doesn't make you some god of game development.

Just fair warning, be very SKEPTICAL about this game- likely Maxis will abandon it ASAP anyway like they have been doing with spore.

I won't be buying this game and I urge you all not to as well because it'll be more trouble than its worth. Expect it to be buggy and underdeveloped.

At least Will Wright isn't attached to pull his "peter molyeneux" esque blatant exaggeration of game features that likely won't be in the game at release.

The only thing Spore did right was the editor, which was well worth $10.. but as a $120 game itself- what a joke.. the game designers should have been shot IMO. I'm to understand that the editor won't be playing as big a part in this game this time around.

[Xesum]

In other news you can get a much better Maxis game, Sim City 4, on steam now.

You can even enter your Sim City 4 deluxe keys into steam and get the game that way.

[Mr_Cyberpunk]

In other news you can get a much better Maxis game, Sim City 4, on steam now.

You can even enter your Sim City 4 deluxe keys into steam and get the game that way.

Yes, Sim City 4 was their last and best game. But buggy.. very buggy.

[Xesum]

That's why god made modifications.

[Dead-eye]

I never played spore.

[Jaedar]

I never played spore.

The first fifth was good(not time part mind you, gameplay mode part). The rest were utterly mediocre or grindalicious.

[Kee715]

I never played spore.

Neither did I.

The first fifth was good(not time part mind you, gameplay mode part). The rest were utterly mediocre or grindalicious.

Good to know.

[Jaedar]

Since I have been somwhat encouraged, I will now disclose my opinion about every phase of spore.

Cell Stage. Good stage. What parts you use, and where you place them matters. It's also really cool to get to outgrow your fellow cells, turning dangerous monsters into easy food over time. It's quite short, and bears simiarites to the free game FlOw(look it up, its a fun flash game). Like I said, best of the 5.

Creature stage. This is probably the worst. It's utter grind, gathering followers/killing encampments. Plus, placement of your parts no longer matter at all, your creature won't attack with the spikes on his elbows, he'll just attack with his fists but still get the extra damage. Plus you get almost all the parts in the first 1/10th of gameplay, and then merely upgrades to those.

Tribal stage. RTS-lite. It's also pretty bad, but at least its over quick.

Civ stage. same as above really. Worst part is probably that you only get to have one vehicle of each type, so no strategy/tactic beyond: Gather up all yer shit and stomp the enemy shit.

Space stage. Grinding, but in space. I never got far, so I can't really tell you much about it, except I spent most of my time flying between my colonies, collecting spice, and then trying to find places to sell it, to buy more colony pods, and more terraforming upgrades, to get even more spice and colonies. Oh and then you have to spend a lot of time defending your colonies from pirates/hostiles, but this combat gets old really fast since it never got deeper than point-click-hold to win for me.

But really, what made me dislike Spore so much is the lost potential. They had something great(see 2005 GDC presentation), but they somehow wound up making utter tripe. It seems the original intention was to let each stage be a small game on its own, but then it seems they decided they should just be glorified and artificially lengthened tutorials instead. I'd have loved to play the game they showed back in 05...

Check out FlOw though, its a great flash title.

[Xesum]

Yeah I think on my old PC I had about 100 planets or so that I just played for the cell stage.

[Mr_Cyberpunk]

But really, what made me dislike Spore so much is the lost potential. They had something great(see 2005 GDC presentation), but they somehow wound up making utter tripe. It seems the original intention was to let each stage be a small game on its own, but then it seems they decided they should just be glorified and artificially lengthened tutorials instead. I'd have loved to play the game they showed back in 05...

Well its biggest problem is that they spent nearly a good 7 years on the game, designing it and developing its technology. They had a fairly large team of game designers working on it for most of the time and they had Will Wright an industry legend who's proven himself perfectly capable of stopping potentially huge mistakes from happening from a design perspective... and yet NONE of those benefits did anything to improve spore.

The way I see it, the game designers spent 7 years doing fuck all and bragging about how awesome it was to work for Maxis, the rest of the time they were either playing Diablo or WoW.

Will Wright spent 6 of those 7 years doing PR and not telling his designers what to do resulted in some disjointed design decisions, what Spore should have been was a seamless hybrid of the genres, what it was ended up being 5 separate mini-games each as bland as the last.

The creation tools did not in any way benefit the game design, resulting in what I think was the biggest waste of development funding that EA has ever done really, they spent the entire time developing great tools and revolutionary ideas- but none of this benefits the design.. it was a waste of time- despite being impressive and the only good part of spore.. their focus should have been on gameplay and making the GAME fun to play- not building a set of construction tools that would have no benefit to the final product- it was fun to make a few creatures but eventually there would be no reason to come back once you'd burnt out. And the game should have facilitated that.

What I think Will Wrights biggest mistake was, he marketed a casual game to hardcore gamers.. this was a HUGE HUGE HUGE mistake- he compared his game to the following:
Cell = PacMan
Creature = Diablo
Tribal = Age of Empires
Civilization = Civilization
Space = Masters of Orion

and I have photographic proof of this, I'm at work now so CBF finding it.
This alone got the hardcore gamers going crazy about the idea that 1 game could be as good as all of those titles combined.. what we got was casual game design puke that was so badly designed and disjointed that it was frankly an insult to the good reputation of Maxis and Will Wright.

Another mistake of Will Wright was marketing the game as Sim Everything.. seriously, this game has NOTHING to do with any sim game he developed. Sim Earth maybe if you tried, but I wouldn't go that far.. the product was terrible compared to his earlier work and a blatant exploitation of his reputation in the industry.

What I want to ask is, how were we supposed to know this would be a casual product, at no point was it stated that it would be, and the gameplay that he made it out to sound like sounded a lot more advanced than what we got. The theory was that the gameplay WAS this advanced and was targeted at hardcore gamers initially, but due to Will Wright "changing his mind" he decided selling out to casuals would be "Better" for the product- thats the gist I got from his "official" forum posts. And that's what started the whole "Science versus Cute" thing, the original product was focused on science, and your designs would impact on gameplay, the style was also more adult than what we have now (blood for example).

Also the GDC demo wasn't supposed to be for public showing, they were trying to convince EA to continue funding development. (the Making of documentary explains this a bit better- but that only shipped with the game.. bit to fucking late if you ask me.)

I've never seen spore as an overly ambitious idea, its pretty doable if you go into it knowing what you want to create. The designers seemed so certain that they wanted their own game designs- you know the saying too many chefs in the kitchen, well I think that's what happened here.. too many people wanted to make spore "Their" way, the result is why there's so much inconstancy with the game.

Also bugs still to this day ensure the game will never be fully playable (space stage is still broken to all hell.) I love how we all wanted fleet battles to be implemented and they kept saying "its coming its coming" and it never happened. Maxis are full of shit when they say they "listen to people" because no one wanted DarkSpore.. NO one wanted their Adventure expansion.

See the thing is, Space stage reminds us so much of Galactic Civilizations (maybe because they had the nerve of stealing their icons I'm like "where have I seen these icons before" GalCiv..), what we wanted the game to end up as is something similar to GalCiv- and just accept that the first 4 stages were just to get your character setup for the big game at the end. Instead they turned the game into an RPG much like WoW using the adventure expansion.. so instead of staying in space stage.. it went back to Creature stage...... THE FUCK?!.. that's probably the biggest wtf design choice I've ever seen from the game- instead of progressing and making Space Stage better, they just abandon it focusing only on creature stage (Which wasn't even fun- Space Stage was probably more fun than creature- so you can see why I don't understand improving on it when its gameplay sucked. Space Stage at least had potential to be awesome. Creature was a total write off. Heck even Civ would have been welcomed if they'd made it a bit more interesting.)

I think Space + Civ combined would have worked better. Creature and Tribal should have been combined (like it was in the tech demo at GDC.. why did they make it a separate stage?!.) If they had done that then they would have developed only 3 stages.. instead of 5.. decreasing the number of stages makes the transition seamless and the game more enjoyable. (also I think cell stage is more of a mini-game, but its actually more fun than the entire Spore game.. the mobile version sucked compared to what was in the PC version- it just needed more levels.)

In the end, Spore should have just stuck with an RTS formula and stuck with it- it would have been easier to develop and to market and would have been a much more effective game. the RPG elements sucked and the RTS elements were the only good parts of the game, but were totally neglected in favor of the shittier RPG elements that just weren't fun, and would never be fun (I mean the only point to it was grinding... go play wow if you want that crap..)- Granted Tribal was terrible too, but Creature was the eyesore that stood out out of all of spore. The final Space and the Civ stuff though could have been developed on and made into a pretty great game. Creature and Tribal were just terrible and seperate from the entire rest of the game (nothing carries over from Creature and Tribal. Civ and Space do carry over things (you see your vehicles in Civ mode in space stage- also your city layouts carry over which is pretty cool, and your cities keep expanding past the Civ stage meaning you still have reasons to go back.)

What I mean by what I said is that I don't think the Galactic Adventures expansion was a good idea, I think making space and civ more connected and more detailed would have been far better and what everyone wanted from the game. I see darkspore as a middle finger to everyone that bought spore- it doesn't improve on the original product, its a standalone product. It just proves that Maxis couldn't give a flying fuck that they disappointed, ripped off and lied to millions of gamers around the world.

I also tried to contribute to the community they have, it was too difficult to get your word in, too many 14 year old trolls or angry parents also complaining about similar things. Maxis would always reply "we're working on it"- 3 years have past.. I call bullshit.

[Mr_Cyberpunk]

http://comic-con.gamespot.com/story/627 ... Btitle%3B5

Ok so this article states Bioware are collaborating.

Further more the article confirms that the creature creator is in the game, but dumbed down to ensure no one makes penis monsters (this means you're restricted to what you can create- I can't see this going well though).

I'm also skeptic that the game will last any longer than a few hours.