• RebekahWSD@lemmy.worldEnglish
    48 minutes

    I loved Spore, but I’m easily pleased with video game. I liked creature stage the most, but also liked space and puttering around!

  • GrayBackgroundMusic@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1 hour

    Oh I remember this game. I’m still irritated at the fraudulent claims. The game was not at all what I expected. Marketing can eat me for this one.

  • HexagonSun@lemmy.zipEnglish
    11 hours

    The thing that really bugged me about Spore was how lame the “evolution” was.

    If early developments in your creatures set certain things in motion that then played out differently that would be great and add replay value.

    But nothing was meaningful at all, you could completely change stuff back and forth. Very little in your evolutionary history actually mattered, at all.

    • placebo@lemmy.zipEnglish
      11 hours

      It’s just a summary of a recent interview, relax.

      • Redditisbollocks@feddit.ukEnglish
        9 hours

        If there’s any way to make things worse, it’s telling people to “relax” or “calm down”.

        I was relaxed, now I’m just annoyed at a random internet stranger telling me to “relax”.

        You relax. Next time, don’t comment.

      • remotelove@lemmy.caEnglish
        11 hours

        Not yet.

        I think there is a much higher probability of oil prices being manipulated in the short-term.

  • wuffah@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17 hours

    Bullshit.

    EA did what they’ve been doing for 30 years: buy a competing game studio, release a few token cash grab titles under their beloved name, then shut down the studio and lay off all the developers. EA mediocritized Will Wright’s original vision for Spore, and trashed the last SimCity game with their always-online, closed architecture and slapdash support.

    The really insidious part is that EA does make fun games, but they have remade the industry in their image: closed source, online only, DRM-infested, yearly release, day-one “expansion”, cash grab software that inspires none of the community and creativity that used to foster legendary franchises. And, they’ve killed countless game studios to create a quasi-monopoly to do it with.

    I am still bitter over what they did to Maxis. I will never buy another EA game for as long as I live.

    • MalikMuaddibSoong@startrek.websiteEnglish
      26 minutes

      The mediocrity as I understand was from the rift that developed in the team about the vision of the game being a sandbox vs a campaign.

      However, I witnessed a new divide among the team which was less well-known; as more core game developers (such as myself) were recruited to help finish the game, a cultural gap emerged between the newer ‘gameplay’ team and the older ‘Sim’ team. The former group (which went on to spearhead Darkspore) was primarily concerned with how Spore played as a game. Were the mechanics engaging? Did the player’s choices matter? Was the game replayable? In contrast, the ‘Sim’ team carried the traditional Maxis DNA and was more comfortable with Spore as a toy box. Could the players express themselves? Was sharing one’s creations with other players meaningful? Did the game spark the imagination?

      These cultural divides ruined Spore’s chances to be a focused, cohesive experience.

      http://www.designer-notes.com/2013/09/

    • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15 hours

      “Closed source” is reaching. As much as I think Doom shows why it should be desirable, let alone not taboo, it’s always been the industry standard and applies to 99.99% of games.

      • wuffah@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11 hours

        Certainly. I probably should have said “extensible” or “mod-able”.

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.todayEnglish
      11 hours

      that was the fate of cnc, they released the cnc4 for a cashgrab then pratically ruined the franchise(online version of the "spinoffs’ dont count)

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
    12 hours

    The only fantastical promise about the game I ever remember reading was the animations were supposed to be kinesthetic based on how you made your creatures; kinda like how GTA’s Euphoria physics engine works.

    And as far as I had read regarding that, they were struggling with it and had to abandon it at the behest of management not giving them more time to figure it out.

    • Kushan@lemmy.world
      English
      10 hours

      I know this is a dirty thing to say, but this feels like one of the few actual genuine use cases for AI in games.

      Animations are extremely finicky and requires a lot of manual tweaking and adjusting to get right, it doesn’t surprise me that they struggled to make a procedural animation system because if they could solve that, they’d actually solve a well known industry challenge.

      If you were building spore today, you could train a little local model that purely creates reasonably good animations for arbitrary creature designs. It wouldn’t be perfect, but for a game like Spore it would be good enough.

      • slimerancher@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9 hours

        You should have written the last paragraph first, would have gotten less downvotes.

      • PhoenixDog@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9 hours

        I know this is a dirty thing to say, but this feels like one of the few actual genuine use cases for AI in games

        And everyone just immediately stopped reading your comment.

  • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    12 hours

    Spore taught me a lesson on not trusting hype.

    It was my first experience with a hyped disappointing game.

    Also I do not think it was something technical. It was just EA evilness to their marketing team though that a more child oriented game would sell better than the hardcore simulation the devs wanted to make.

    I still remember that E3 trailer with the willowsaur, it showed more advanced characteristics that the final product. They straight up downgraded their game.

    • iamthetot@piefed.caEnglish
      17 hours

      I think some of the love for Spore is rose-tinted glasses. It’s ultimately kind of a shallow game. The sim aspects are not very well fleshed out, and 90% of the content of the game is really in the space age.

      • Gerudo@lemmy.zipEnglish
        13 hours

        There was a space age? I remember playing to a certain point, getting bored, and just restarting it over and over.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      13 hours

      It had the depth of a cup of spilt coffee, once you’ve played through it once there’s no additional content to experience.

    • Kilgore Trout@feddit.itEnglish
      12 hours

      We remember it as awesome, because we played it when we were very young. The Creature Stage still almost is, but the rest of the game is not.

      • Kalothar@lemmy.caEnglish
        11 hours

        it depends on what you want out of it

        I’m 33, I played it when it came out and I played it again last year.

        The game is still pretty fun if you like designing dumb alien animals with its weird mechanics for the creature stage, making a weird little tribe/society, and get to the space stage and want to terraform little planets and then go find earth, and the center of the Milky Way.

        I wasn’t even particularly young when I played it the first time, I was a post Halo 3 16 year old lol.

  • justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io
    17 hours

    I played the simple shape demo of the creature world.

    It was vastly superior to the crap they launched. It had an actual ecosystem, but admittedly led to you dying a lot at low tiers because you were the equivalent of a meal worm.

    • Cavemanfreak@programming.devEnglish
      13 hours

      the simple shape demo of the creature world

      What game is that? Searching any of those terms give me nothing

      • Kilgore Trout@feddit.itEnglish
        12 hours

        I think they are referring to one of the showcased demos of Spore, of which the most prominent is the 2005 GDC one.

        https://spore.fandom.com/wiki/Removed_features#Creature_Stage

        Behavior of creatures

        The behavior of the creatures also had more depth than the final game. In today’s Spore creatures rarely leave the perimeter of their nest, and possibly has a simpler ecosystem (until Space Stage). This feature was prominent in earlier versions, as in the footage of the 2005 version, small creatures hopped around, grazed, or simply wandered off with no nests for them.

        I love Spore, but replaying it today I see how much is missing from making each stage really fleshed-out. Being honest, the Creature Stage is clearly what received the most attention, while subsequent Stages are not as fun.
        A lot of it is to be attributed to Maxis and Will Wright: apparently much of what was shown in 2005 and 2006 was never really playable.
        But things like this suggest a heavy involvement of the publisher as well:

        During the SXSW 2007 demo, Will Wright said that the Aquatic Stage was on the verge of being cut. He also said that, if cut, the Aquatic Stage would be one of the first things to add via an expansion pack, though ultimately no such expansion was released.

        There was a plan to add the Aquatic Stage into the full game via an expansion pack titled “The Depths”, although it was never publicly announced. except for one advertisement.

        • justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io
          5 hours

          It was a downloadable demo, yeah. Just had various polygonal shapes on a black background, top down and could move with WASD and could interact with plant sprites and creature sprites. Very simple graphics, but had different level creatures wandering around, so it was hard to stay alive when you had level 5 creatures hunting near the starting beach.

  • Murse@slrpnk.netEnglish
    14 hours

    Spore devs say the evolution game’s previews were more ambitious than what they were actually making

    Not often they just casually admit to false advertising like that.