It's Time for Another Spore Thread. Again.

[Stark]

Furthermore, Spore was not designed to be incredible in and of its individual phases, but rather a collection of toys, in his own words. Cheap, easy fun, rather than a fully developed game.

I guess that explains why the development has been so on-schedule and features haven't been cut then; it's not 'fully developed'. lol!

Frankly, Spore SOUNDED interesting when announced (I can't even remember how many years ago that was), but the more you find out and the more they drop the lamer it looks. Sorry, Wil Wright is not Jesus and I don't think his the game gets +5 Awesome from him being involved. Spore looks right now to be a bunch of simple Flash-esque games connected by a simple data-transfer layer, with the only interesting part being the use of player created content - and I haven't seen ANYTHING to suggest Wright or his team have even considered the massive problems that this entails. I hear it's a simple way of cutting costs, and not a feature that opens the games to all kinds of exploits and problems?

I heard a great interview on a podcast months ago, where the guys making some shitass game (I want to say Time Shift) were just agreeing with buzzwords. Will it have emergent behaviour? Of course! Will it have player-created content? Yes it will! Will it be massively multiplayer? Hell yes! Will it have an open, dynamic world? But of course! How will any of this be implemented? Dunno, but it'll be FUCKING AWESOME! This sums up modern game hype to me; a bunch of idiots or liars agreeing with every buzzword-ready trend in game design and delivering nothing.

[Molyneux]

I actually liked the original SimCity games, but it's a far cry from "He made a good game once" to "He'll make a good game now".

The Sims is a POPULAR game. It is, perhaps, a well constructed game. However, it is largely mindless, repetitive, and ultimately boring to me outside of the "one more turn" syndrome. I played it, realized I was spending more time organizing my character's life than my own, and promptly shut the thing off.

Popularity != Quality. American Idol should be proof enough for that.

And again, just because someone made an awesome game twenty years ago does not mean they'll make an awesome game today, especially when you're talking about completely changing the scope of the game involved. If the developer of, say, Final Fantasy 6 told me he was going to make an Oblivion-esque game with a totally open world and organically flowing characters, I'd be very cautious until I saw something resembling the final product, because while both games are huge, sprawling RPGs, the qualities of a Final Fantasy game and an Elder Scrolls game are rather different.

Similarly, Spore promises 4X and RTS gameplay, plus city-building, plus cohesive behavior citizens, and huge scale. I can see right off from the videos he's shown us that he's taking huge shortcuts and that those aspects of the game are going to be, at best, mediocre. He has not history of developing anything like those games, of course, so naturally I would expect them to suck, and the entire process of Spore is a giant case of "Too many ideas, too little time". The fact that he cut major parts of the game out and has basically redesigned it is indicative of this fact.

Bottom line: He's promising us the world and giving us Hoboken. Just like Molyneux. He might have a somewhat better track record, but at this point, just be glad it's a disappointment like what Molyneux comes out with, and not utter shit like what Derek Smart churns out.

Okay, just a bit off-topic, but for a few seconds there that last paragraph was very hurtful. Then my brain kicked in, of course (assuming that those ARE referring to the creator of Black and White), but it was still a weird moment.

I was dearly looking forward to being able to create an underwater race (something about the ability to build domed, water-filled cities on land), but even with the cuts that have been made to the game I am looking forward to it. It just looks damned cool, especially the creature creator.

It might not turn out to be some world-changing new experience, but it still looks like a solid game to me. I'll just hope that they figure out how to add in water civilizations in an expansion.

[Andrew J.]

Hear hear. Black & White will always be the ultimate expression of this syndrome for me, and since then, I've stayed well away from games that are really toys masquerading as games. I don't remember who drew that distinction on SD.net, it was a few years ago, but it was a very good one. I want games, not fucking toys.

Uh...all video games are toys, aren't they?

[Vympel]

Uh...all video games are toys, aren't they?

No. In the gaming sense, a game that's a mere toy is a frivolous piece of throwaway shit - like a pog or something. GalCiv 2 or M2TW or Dawn of War or whatever are games- The Sims, Black & White, and probably this Spore shit, are just lameo toys.

[Andrew_Fireborn]

It really depends on your standards for gaming...

Though in the end, all single player only games are really just toys. It's the reason so many games try to incorporate some kind of multiplayer... The staying power of competition makes games often survive well past any reasonable expiration date. (Case in point; CS1.6 and Starcraft. Neither are really that great, but thousands have blown man-decades learning how to game their systems into submission, and they're both edging up or passed the decade point.)

[Stark]

Games have rules and goals. That's why a spinning top is a toy and a rubics cube is a game.

[Molyneux]

Games have rules and goals. That's why a spinning top is a toy and a rubics cube is a game.

The thing about a great toy is that it lets you come up with your OWN rules and goals (as well as, say, taking the rules & goals that someone else has formulated and trying them out). Look at LEGOs, for example, and the brilliant MOCs that people have made.

[Stark]

Irrelevant. The distinction stands.

And relevant to Spore, a bunch of flash games does not a pile of LEGO make.

[Molyneux]

Irrelevant. The distinction stands.

And relevant to Spore, a bunch of flash games does not a pile of LEGO make.

Wait and see.
And my statement was in regards to the assumption that selling people games is superior to selling them toys...the success of SecondLife would seem to bely that. Toys let you make your OWN games.

[Stark]

Vympel simply said he wasn't interested in toys. He wants an actual game.

And I don't have to 'wait and see' to judge what's been shown. If the game turns out to be good, that doesn't stop the marketing being preaching-to-the-choir stuff. Frankly, claiming that the game is a 'toy' and thus means you can 'make up' your own rules is simply reinforcing my belief that most people don't seem to understand the serious impact using player content in such a framework is going to be.

[18-Till-I-Die]

What IS "player created content" anyway?

Do they mean like mods or something? Cause we can do that already.

[loomer]

18, please, watch the videos I linked to get a better idea.

Those editors are not just for creatures. They're for goddamn EVERYTHING. The player designs his cities, his creatures, his buildings, his vehicles, and they filter into other player's games.

[Molyneux]

18, please, watch the videos I linked to get a better idea.

Those editors are not just for creatures. They're for goddamn EVERYTHING. The player designs his cities, his creatures, his buildings, his vehicles, and they filter into other player's games.

They've said you can have a friend list feature, as well - it'll preferentially select items from your friends, before it goes looking for random stuff.

It would be nice to have a multiplayer expansion, but that might be a bit hard to implement well.

[loomer]

And they've also shown us a tag system. You want purple? Look it up and browse. So it's random filtering (with preference systems), limited filtering, and selective choice.

[loomer]

Spore's creature creator demo officially comes out tomorrow for Europe, but was leaked several days ago. In two days, it comes out for NA.

The free thing has only 25% of the parts (still fantastic, I nabbed the leak), and the full thing, for 5 pounds or ten bucks, is all the CC parts.

[Commander 598]

Yeah, I'm not too big on paying for demos...

[Stark]

Especially when the creature creator is the part most likely to be interesting. Doesn't say jack or shit about the actual GAMES.

[Ohma]

Yeah, unless the free version is pretty damn fun, I can't see myself paying for the full demo. Though I can spend hours tinkering with my little virtual doll house to get just the right decor so I may end up finding the free version much more entertaining than other people would.

[Stark]

There's no way of knowing it isn't like Impossible Creatures - a really cool and sophiscated creature creator with heaps of possibilities and interesting ways to go... and the worst RTS ever to use them in.

[Ohma]

Oh yeah, hopefully it won't be like that, but it could really easily be like that. You guys are right that there hasn't been near enough information on the actual game parts to say that they'll be good, my whole thing earlier in the thread was just me going on a tangent to point out that Will Wright does in fact have a better track record than Peter Moleneux.

[Molyneux]

Yeah, unless the free version is pretty damn fun, I can't see myself paying for the full demo. Though I can spend hours tinkering with my little virtual doll house to get just the right decor so I may end up finding the free version much more entertaining than other people would.

Well, it's a subjective assessment, but I've made four or five critters in the free version already. It seems pretty darn fun, can't wait 'til I can get more options.

Oh, and if you buy the $10 version, it apparently comes with $5 off of Spore through Amazon - so if you buy the full game from there, you get half back from the creator.

[Covenant]

I'm having fun with it, but really, all I want from Spore is a sandbox. I'm not expecting world-changing gameplay, but I would like something fun to play with and mess around with. Essentially like a merger of some variety of gameplay with a 'toy' aspect, in that I am essentially amusing myself with an object (my critter) rather than trying to accomplish a goal.



Plus, you can make some fairly interesting creatures. Most of mine are a lot cooler than that though. That one I posted just bcause it makes Nephtys cry, but the rest of them are quite fun, and I think it'll be a great game in the same vein as Sims was. I hated the Sims, it was moronic and lame. But Spore will be moronic and lame in a way I like, so I'm down with that. Did anyone play E.V.O. on the snes? That game was moronic and lame too, and I loved it.

[Resinence]

E.V.O was one of my favourite SNES games ever, I never knew anyone else liked it, awesome

That creature is kind of creepy man, spore is supposed to be "cute" and that thing just sends out a "rip you apart with mah 14 arms" vibe. >_>

Hopefully as others have said, the actual game doesn't suck like impossible creatures.

[Ohma]

How do you connect multiple limbs like that anyway?

[Molyneux]

E.V.O was one of my favourite SNES games ever, I never knew anyone else liked it, awesome

That creature is kind of creepy man, spore is supposed to be "cute" and that thing just sends out a "rip you apart with mah 14 arms" vibe. >_>

Hopefully as others have said, the actual game doesn't suck like impossible creatures.

Man, I loved E.V.O. I actually read a Nintendo Power article about it long, long before I got to play it, and thought it was the greatest idea ever - then when I actually found the game, I realized that it was horribly goofy, but still fun.

I beat that game the first time I played it as a triceratops-horned, T-Rex-jawed bird.

Oh, and Ohma - click and drag a limb from the menu-thing while holding CTRL. It's in the help thing under "advanced features", I think.