How Spore ended up "cute" and dumbed down

Sure, I’d be more constructive if the game wasn’t out yet. It’s a bit late for that now, isn’t it? A lot of the fanboys and the developers kept telling people to be ‘more constructive’ on the Hellgate: London message boards, and a lot of people did comply. But that amounted to nothing because it was too late to fix anything without remaking core parts of the game.

It’s not going to happen. The game’s forever ruined.

Ok, this is Fersis stupid post:
Anyone knows if its gonna be released on PS3 ?

I don’t really care about cutesyness as such. I mean, kawaii! It sells.

But the gameplay is just too dumb for me to care about it much. Spore needed more significant and meaningful choices in evolution and design, and more active choices in actual play at every game phase.

I don’t think it would have been a good idea to require “emergent” character animations to directly drive motion, physical attacks, and the like. That would be too complicated, and would also kill some of the fun of weird animal forms.

But the fact you can just plop parts on any which way, and the creature’s speed, combat capabilities, and so on appear to be completely unaffected is admittedly kind of silly. There could have been some kind of middle ground.

Anyway the whole thing, every phase, including space, is just too simple and uninteresting. I haven’t played Spore after the first week or so, and just uninstalled it when I noticed it was sitting there unused.

It’s a pity too, because there’s obviously some brilliant work in there at many “substrate” levels, even if the superficial game systems are kind of dumb.

I was just being argumentative. I didn’t really mean to compare him to Hitler but the obvious potential for it was just too much to pass on. It makes for an amusing argument, so don’t take it too seriously (hence my note that “I just went there!”)

On a more serious note, I think that a more worthwhile comparison can be drawn between a chef (Will Wright) and a sous chef with a crew of cooks who think they know how to make a better recipe than the chef himself.

My real name is plastered all over the place if you bother to look up any of my websites.

Well let me say, I really enjoy the cute personality of Spore and I also would have enjoyed having evolution and a more reactive creature generator play a stronger role in the gameplay.

Gamers, like the Dwarves of Warhammer, enjoy a good grumble.

Aw, that’s so sad. Now that Flagship is dead and Hellgate is dead, poor Sol has to find another big bad game and developer to define himself in opposition to.

Cuteness is alright but I totally agree with you on the role of evolution. If our little monsters were the result of emergent development and natural selection (E.g. true evolution) rather than intelligent design, the game would have been so much more compelling to play. It’d have had infinite replayability due to the sheer infinite number of possibilities.

Chris Hecker is the reason why didn’t they make Spore an emergent simulation rather than an intelligent design game.

Oh please. That’s not what this is.

In Chris’ defense, the Wii IS a piece of shit. Two Gamecubes stuck together with duct tape? Let’s not be so generous.

Yeah, I just went there.

Maybe the simulation wasn’t very fun? The “intelligent” part of intelligent design is the player. That’s the actual, you know, gameplay. A good chunk of spore’s success is the degree of freedom players are given to indulge their creativity in creature design.

If true AI that could pass the Turing test were put into more RPGs, they’d deliver a world that is much more life like than the cutesy bullshit we see in games today!

Chris Hecker is the reason why didn’t they make Spore an emergent simulation rather than an intelligent design game.

Yeah, well Chris Hecker… and you know, the reality of current technology.

Hopefully the original poster isn’t banned from all of his EA games for this.

And seriously, people, calm down. Maybe Spore sucks, but it was unlikely it was going to match up with the ridiculous expectations people had.

Yeah, I just went there.

You really are the stereotypical internet nerd rage keyboard banging douche, aren’t you Sol? While your point is entirely valid, the way you put it merits not an ounce of response. Think and calm down before you post personal attacks, mkay? These people didn’t come into your house and do anything to you, they just made a game you thought was disappointing.

I don’t think the problem of Spore was how much un-/realistic and/or un-/scientific was the game, or if the game was too cute.
The game just suffered with the division in five “minigames”, some of the stages were really trivial (tribal, civ), others were repetitive (creature, space), Space was only fun while you were unlocking new tools and equipment, strategy itself was missing in the equation, simulation wise it wasn’t really interesting, there were important interface issues, also some control issues, etc etc.

See, the problem is that the right response to “two gamecubes stuck together with duct tape” isn’t “Is not is not is not!” but rather “Yeah, so? Does that make Mario Kart any less fun?”.

People get hung up on the processor / graphics power like that’s the only relevant metric. And, well, getting past that is kind of the point here.

This kind of thing would be interesting in a post-mortem “what went wrong and how can we avoid it in the future” sense and not just scapegoating. But you really need a much more reliable source and independent perspective to do it properly, and this isn’t it.

Must be trying to compensate for something, I figure. What, I don’t know and can’t imagine.

Glad I didn’t waste any time or money on Spore. DRM aside, it became just another casual cutesy game. The suits won and the PC got another nail in it’s coffin.

Yeah, I went there.

So first off, I bought Spore, I played Spore, and I don’t like it all that much. I think it’s boring.

All of that being said, the incoherent conspiracy-theory rant that started this thread has a few problems.

First off, Chris Hecker was one member of a team. Complex software projects have a lot of people involved in deciding when the game is baked enough to release to the general public. Let’s say, for the sake of argument even though it’s certainly not true, that every bad idea in Spore is entirely this guy’s idea. Did he implement them all? Did he decide to go with them? No. He presumably would have presented his ideas to the team, there was discussion, and the manager in charge of the project made a decision.

The second problem with this rant (and I’m going to stop at two problems, or else I’ll be here all day) is it suffers from the typical nerd-rage fantasy of “This game that was never released is better than this other game that was.” It is always the case that software that doesn’t exist is going to be better than software that does. Software that doesn’t exist has no bugs. Software that doesn’t exist has no design flaws. Software that doesn’t exist is perfect in every way. So the implicit assumption in these posts is that the changes made to Spore made it worse. As much as I am bored by the game, I can easily imagine it being even worse. So the argument “Spore would have been perfect but for this guy” should be treated, frankly, with utter contempt.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go play the only actually perfect game ever made, Star Control II.