How Spore ended up "cute" and dumbed down

Games
61

Lack of a better selection function for good vs. bad emergent behavior aside from “Make the player play until they like the results of step n+5 with the un-intuitive and non-direct cause of having chosen to do X in step n” is why they didn’t make Spore an emergent simulation.

A physics simulator is an emergent system. You don’t see people releasing physics simulators as games, because they’re not games. It takes structure and pruning of a huge possible phase space of potential emergent behaviors to those which are interesting, viable, and have a relatively clear path of attainment to make it into a compelling product. Sitting around trying to balance where on the body to put the arms for optimal dexterity when you get to the civilization/phase space is definitely emergent, but it sure as fuck doesn’t sound like very much fun.

62

Since this thread is fairly gonzo already I’ll go ahead and stray off topic. I never agreed with the urban myth that simmers killed flight simming. I think game developers made the games they wanted to play, pushed the envelopes they wanted to push, and simply used the vocal hardcore players are a rationale for doing that. And I do think we got some amazing games because of this.

If there really were a good market for simplified flight sims nobody was stopping anyone from making those.

63

Why doesn’t that sound like fun to you, mouselock? It sounds pretty damn fun to me. Just look at how much time people just spend fucking around in Fable 2 with the emergent mechanics that it has. Hell, half the fun in Sims 2 is in making a sim with an atrocious personality just to watch it screw up its life or manage to miraculously get by without player intervention.

It would’ve been so much fun to create a giant creature (e.g. an elephant or whale) that walked on other creatures as a means of attack but later found itself being driven into extinction by a group of smaller, intelligent and more numerous animals because it can’t outbreed them and due to its size, it consumes too much of the ecosystem it depends upon.

Or how about an intelligent tool-using social creature that works together with a species of pack-hunter animal in mutual defense/offense against a powerful solo predator species, and eventually the smaller species of lesser intellect becomes wholly dependent upon the smarter, tool using creature and the two species form a symbiotic relationship?

Translation: Primitive human societies band together with primitive packs of wolves to fend off attacks and eventually annihilate sabretooth cats that prey upon them. The wolves and humans develop a mutual relationship by hunting for prey together and eventually the wolves find themselves entirely dependent upon their human counterparts, who train them to herd sheep and eventually fight other human tribes.

I’m dreaming. I wanted Spore to have at least 10% of the complexity I just described. Instead I got a series of minigames with absolutely no depth. And to top it off, they weren’t even fun.

64

Because I played SimEarth?

I think there’s very little audience for a game where there are what would appear to be random disconnects that vary the difficulty level of the game. It would be interesting to design a critter only to be told “Unfortunately, your beast is incapable of evolving the necessary manual dexterity to operate heavy machinery, and your species can not progress to the industrial age. Please start over.” I wouldn’t classify it as fun, however.

I can think of lots of nifty little technology things that I think would be cool to find were behind a game. I can even think of ways to use them to make a game better. I can’t say that I find the game of life all that compelling as a game however, and I think that’s ultimately the difference you’re talking about.

Sounds like you wanted a whole universe sandbox instead of a game. I get where the desire comes from, but I’d have to side with the “cute” side when it came to actually making a game. If I want to muck around in a CA sandbox or a GA sandbox, I’ll download one of the number of CA or GA programs that exist on the web and play with them. (Where do you think these ideas came from, anyway? Will Wright wasn’t inventing whole realms of computer science just for this game, I assure you.)

65

I was horribly disappointed with Spore. Seemed to me like a boring flash game tacked onto a mediocre triple A flash game tacked onto a mediocre space trading game tacked on to a pretty good creature and vehicle creation module.

66

I’d have been happy with an Evolution Sim that focused on the transition of spores to land-dwelling (or sea dwelling. I wanted cthulhuoid species, dammit!) creatures that eventually dominated the planet… or perhaps simply lived in harmony with the rest of the planet without having to wipe everything out. The civilization stuff and the space stuff holds none of my interest. I wanted an emergent game.

67

I was disappointed that my flying creature didn’t nest in the trees. Look at the Kakapo damnit. Who wants to be a Kakapo?

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Personally I think that Spore was fucked from the get go. There are some clear design problems with the core concept and their target audience that were pretty intractable.

It’s interesting to contrast the cell phase and the creature phase of Spore. In the cell phase they weren’t dealing with animal bits that people were familiar with or cared about. So they were able to put in a lot of gameplay and it plays well. IMO it was the most fun aspect of the game and it probably shows where they were headed with the more science-heavy versions. Once you get into the creature phase though there’s a lot of pressure between cool designs and cool gameplay. Should you let players make whatever they want and have that be viable or should you let their designs have a profound impact on gameplay as happens in the cell phase? I think it’s clear that they needed to emphasize one or the other. I also think that it’s clear that either decision would disappoint a significant part of their audience.

On the one hand, the cute, simple implementation is necessary if you think that the game is supposed to be successor to The Sims. Telling a person that their cool creature can’t walk in a straight line because it’s legs make no sense is a bit hardcore. On the other hand, divorcing the design process from the gameplay as they did really compromises all of the cool promise of the initial demos. The “cute” approach might have been fine but they also paired it with particularly shitty minigames for each phase. The tribal phase considered as a game unto itself is fucking worthless and I have no idea how that got out of the design process. The other phases are only marginally better and only the creature phase stands out as a decent, solid game. The science approach would have been fine but that they needed to have the right expectations. They could have sold a more hardcore, sandbox game as long as they were “ok” with not getting Sims numbers. It could have been a solid, but slightly niche title.

I think the Sims was the death knell for creative designs at Maxis. Maxis was always about cool sims that happened to be fun games, not about mainstream appeal. It just happens that one of their cool sims had extremely broad appeal, made a shitload of cash, and then redefined them as a company (and redefined Will Wright). If Spore had been made to be the successor of SimEarth, SimAnt and SimCity I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more but it would have hit the same limited audience that those past games did. Instead it was built as the successor to The Sims and that ultimately seems to have made the decision between cute and accessible versus more intellectual and fun.

And ultimately I think that it was a mistake to ever think that Spore was going to have the success and appeal of The Sims. The Sims has a very visceral appeal that is obviously mainstream in that it is fundamentally about things that everyone can relate to. I don’t think the strengths of the concept proposed by Spore was every going that direction and it was never going to hit the same size of audience. Making cool creatures and spaceships is a pretty nerdy activity.

69

Sadly, there’s a slight difference between “I’m some guy on a video game forum who wanted this game to be this exact certain way, and therefore thinks the entire development should have been done exactly to my personal tastes” and “This is the direction that a hardworking team with dozens of bright and opinionated people, years of their lives, and millions of dollars sunk into it should head towards.”

If you have a brilliant idea for a game you’d like to see, by all means, make it. I’m sure there will be plenty of posters on internet forums who will be happy to comment on your work (and judging from this thread, your enormous failures and misguided personal motivations, apparently) as well.

70

I don’t make games, but when people pay good money for them people do expect them to be close to what was advertised, especially throughout the game’s development. The expectation’s hardly unfair.

If the game comes out and it gets mediocre reviews, are people supposed to cut the developers slack because they’d spent time working on the product? What about everyone who’s ever worked on an Uwe Boll movie?

71

My main problem with Spore (And I admit, I couldn’t make it past the tribal stage.) was that the illusion of choice was so flimsy as to be non existent.

You had two and a half paths through the game, charm/kill and a little of both. No matter how you designed your creature the game always played the same for each path you chose. A one-legged charmer played exactly the same as a flying charmer. You just bought the upgrades that made whatever you were doing easier. Your choices in the creature creator basically amounted to nothing more than how your creature looked once you’d gotten past the very basics.

It’s ironic that whatshisface was knocking the Wii because Spore seems to be the very sort of over-simplified novelty game that most people say abound on the Wii.

72

Very obvious. Previous post was being rhetorical. Don’t seem to understand the simple concept of “he said, she said,” let alone just how complex game development can be, especially on a project that big. That’s before interaction with the publishing/business unit even begins, to say nothing of marketing/focus testing, feedback from press corps, etc. that seem to have further effects on process.

What exactly was “advertised”? Something that conformed exactly to your specific personal tastes? Unless the answer is yes, you don’t have a leg to stand on. From the sound of it, real answer is “I read some of the previews and in my mind, I filled in the gaps with an unrealistic, idealized version of my highly personalized idea of exactly what the game should be and prepared myself to scream bloody murder the instant I found out the final game wasn’t exactly tailored to my individual tastes.”

Suggest you re-read my previous post on how reasonable your expectations actually were.

Seem to be operating out of a perspective that anyone who dares to commit the crime of putting out a bad game needs to be “punished.” Exactly why you seem to think so, isn’t clear. Nor why you think that if such “punishment” is justified, why you, some guy on an internet forum, would be in any position to dole it out? Don’t try to answer that, no credible, plausible answer you could possibly give. “I bought the game and paid good money” doesn’t count, since that may give you the right to be unhappy about your purchase, but not to try to start some kind of bizarre witch-hunt crusade for a person you’ve never met, on shaky grounds that you think you thought you saw you heard, re-posted on some other forum on the internet.

For record, if a game gets negative reviews, the game, and its developers, have already been “punished,” and to whatever extent negative reviews affect game sales, the developers, and the publishers, likely already sustain further “punishment.”

They have already suffered far more punishment than anything you could dish out, even at your most misguided and vitriolic best, friend.

Suggest you let this go and take up other, more meaningful pursuits to fill your life. Women might be something to look into. Or, what if you put that vigor behind a positive, meaningful cause that would truly benefit society. That’d be a sight to see.

73

Hulk still mad!

74

FYI, I didn’t write the original post at the top. Also, defending Spore seems silly, considering how bad it turned out. You should feel ripped off.

75

A parallel train-of-thought: designers make, and gamers play, what is currently the hot thing in popular culture/mass media. In the early days of simming, it was everyone wanting to fly like in Battle of Britain or Star Wars or Top Gun. No movie released recently has had a similar impact on the mass culture, and so the desire to recreate the immersion of flying just isn’t there anymore.

76

I wonder if World of Warcraft could attribute its popularity to the recent fantasy craze (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, etc)

77

Actually, from where I’m sitting there appear to be a lot of people saying “Sure, Spore was boring, but this line of complaint is just crazy talk”.

78

Aw jeez, not here, too.

The original post is nonsense. I’m trying to figure out how to handle this now. I’ve been ignoring it for a month, and it looked like it would fade away on the various forums, but some people seem to need simple explanations and a single person to blame for their disappointment, and now it’s hit the front page of digg and reddit.

I <3 the internets,
Chris

79

I’d hardly blame Will Wright for it, checker. I enjoyed reading about Wright’s vision for the game, up until the game came out. It was pretty disappointing to actually play it. Brendan’s post was pretty much spot on.

80

Yes, we’re just a bit slow.

Keep ignoring it (and Sol). Let PR handle it, that’s their job.