Seeding the Future
Despite claims of widespread piracy, dumbed-down gameplay, and DRM nightmares, Spore reportedly sold more than one million copies in the 17 days following its release. That's a remarkable accomplishment for a PC title, especially one based on entirely new IP. The length of its tail remains to be seen, but at this point Spore appears to be a major retail success for EA.
If Spore's ultimate accomplishment is nothing more than an impressive retail record, though, it will have been a tragic waste of talent and innovation.
I'm on board with the conventional complaints about Spore's underlying gameplay, recently voiced by many gamers and the enthusiast media. With the possible exception of its space-exploration phase, Spore's evolutionary stages are oversimplified and repetitive. It doesn't require or reward deeply strategic thinking. And it often channels player choices to contrived outcomes. It's clear that EA Maxis developed Spore with an eye toward the non-gaming masses. It may sell millions, but it won't ever be cited as an example of deep strategy or 4X game design.
Even so, Will Wright's latest brainchild could still prove to be revolutionary.
Spore's standout feature is its content creation system. With just a few dozen customizable parts you can build limitless varieties of vehicles, buildings, and living things. Fairies, monsters, fortresses, racecars, flying saucers, factories, and even humans – nothing's off limits. Spore will breathe life into any monstrosity, no matter how anatomically bizarre or unsound. And you don't need to know a thing about gaming, 3D modeling, or animation to build incredible content. Put it together, and Spore make it walk, roar, cry and dance. It's like a stripped-down Maya for the masses. The next generation of Pixar artists are building their first robots and spaceships with Spore.
Spore's creator is an astonishingly versatile, sophisticated bit of software. So versatile, in fact, that it's incongruent with Spore's gameplay. I personally found that switching back and forth between the intensely creative content-building tools and the rest of the game was a bit jarring. By the time I reached the space exploration phase I started wishing that the stuff I'd made could find its way into a different game. I mean, I had all manner of vehicles and creatures to play with. Why couldn't I play with them outside the confines of Spore?
And that's where Spore's real potential lies. Not in the game itself, but in the technology it employs, and the creativity it inspires. The creator is the obvious example, but it's just one of several Spore components that could find new uses in other games. Spore's procedurally generated animation system and soundtrack, for example, are amazing. And its content cataloging and sharing tools are fantastic.
EA Games Label president Frank Gibeau has already hinted that Spore's tech will appear in other titles and on other platforms. You know what? It damn well better. To leave that kind of potential solely with the Spore franchise, at the service of a series of Sims-styled content and expansion packs, would be downright criminal.
Spore may not be the most engaging game, but it's poised to usher in a new era of community-based game design. If that sounds grandiose, keep in mind that when EA released Spore's standalone Creature Creator, users created and uploaded more than three million bits of digital life. Sporepedia content now includes more than 35 million pieces of unique content. That's community participation on an epic scale.
Imagine that kind of creative energy turned loose outside the Spore universe. If EA doesn't take that potential and run with it, they'll have squandered a remarkable opportunity.
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Great article Fly, but I'd like to point out one thing. There are indeed 35 million pieces of unique content. However all of that content is non-dick related. If you include all the dick-based content the number is closer to 100 million .
NOTE: Not a doodle bug.
Steam-XBox-PSN: Lobstermancer
But Lobster? Penis!!!
http://www.mazianni.com
Tempest says: "A team hat doe snot communicate and talk to each other about what the next move will be is going to lose."
I am very much excited to see Spore's technology brought into future titles - better character creation is always welcome, as are more impressive sharing systems. I just have an expectation that it be attached to, you know, a game, not a toy.
Steam: Dysplastic
I'm interested to hear how many "finished" and re-rolled. I'm getting towards all-badge completion and will be ready to consider a "do over" soon. How different is it going back for the second time? The missions that some of the races give out now seem to be much more difficult and involved. I hope we see some sort of open mod option for the engine soon. I seems like this is just the sort of easy-to-use tool that's needed for mod-tech to really take off.
"There’s two arguments that clash in my head repeatedly:
#1 is “You shouldn’t play Dark Souls until you’re done with Demon’s Souls”
#2 is “These aren’t story based games, so you might as well play the newest one with the limited amount of time you hav
I have yet to pick up spore mostly because I am just not that into the Sim or "Playing god" style games all that much. I would love to see other games with heavy procedurally generated content though. Something along the lines of a lighter diablo 2 with completely random everything might be kinda fun. Exploring a completely new world full of new things for you to kill every time you start a new game of some sort of cartoony FPS could be fun as well. Even on the RTS front could you imagine having to learn what all of your opponent's creatures do every new game?
Nice article. Yeah, I've been tinkering around with Spore quite a bit and really wish there was more to do with my creations. I've replayed through the stages a couple of times. It's more enjoyable to replay when you have a better idea of what's going on and a clear concept for where you're going. The game's really about getting invested in your creations, not so much what you do with them. And also seeing the creations of your friends and neighbors. But anyway, here are my thoughts on the phases (for what seems like the third time I'm making this list):
Cell - Always a short little joy, my only complaint would be that the initial movement speed for your cell is too slow. This stage also is the only one that highlights the potential for gameplay to be influenced by user content creation because it plays out differently on where you put parts on your cell rather than just which ones you stick on. It's also the only one that's significantly more fun on harder difficulty levels.
Creature - I find this phase to be a chore, both in terms of gameplay and creation. Hunting is slightly more fun than befriending creatures, but both activities seem shallow. Whenever your pack ups and moves is also damn annoying. But the worst part of this stage is that you're severely limited in the parts you have access to in this stage, you have to grind to get them, and by the time you finish the stage you aren't even close to having all of them. And some of them I think you'll never get, like the other types of mouths. This especially hurts if you have some concept for the creature you'd like to make but you run into the problems of a) Don't have the parts you want. b) Not enough DNA points to stick on a bunch of the more expensive parts. (The complexity limit I don't mind so much since they are maintaining the database for this stuff after all and need to limit the size of the files. Although you have to think ahead now if you want to boost the complexity with outfit parts later.)
Tribe - Meh, a one unit RTS. Gather food, mass units, attack/charm, repeat. At least it doesn't feel like a grind like the creature phase. It introduces the outfit editor, which is perhaps the simplest editor except for cells, but I like it as a natural extension of the creature editor. Basically this stage just acts as a selector for what type of game you're gonna play in the next stage.
Civ - A little better than Tribe but still not really that deep. Military/religion is just mass and attack, economic you don't have to mass and just throw money at the problem directly. This stage also bombards you with editors, too much for one phase I think, and all of them now with little to no effect on how the game plays out. Personally I wish tribe and civ stages were smushed together in a blender with some other good bits thrown in, like more advanced diplomacy options.
Space - This stage seems deeper than the other four stages, but really it's a superficial depth. Once you've played it enough times, it's easy to excel. Although I admit I don't play it on hard difficulty because, unlike Cell, the increased difficulty just seems artificial, requiring an increased grind to overcome. But I do find it more fun still than most of the other stages, despite its superficiality. The most striking thing about this phase is that it's the only one without a real editor of its own. I suppose you can count the various terraforming tools but most of those are hidden away, even harder to find than parts in creature phase, and don't give you much control anyway. I've yet to really consider terraforming a planet beyond changing the color palette a bit, just doesn't seem as fun as the other creators. There are a few other fun little toys in this stage as well, like the creature tweaker, but again while you're running your empire and keeping your allies happy it just doesn't feel like you should be fiddling around and wasting money on this stuff. But I dunno, I haven't tried maxing out badges in Space yet, so maybe once I'm done building my empire I can try these features out.
But to be frightfully honest, looking back now, the shallowness of Spore's gameplay makes it harder and harder to stick around despite how much I like the concept and the creators.
Do the sales figures include revenue from those of us who bought the extended creature creator?
I loved the creature creator. I liked the vehicle creator. The building creator was ok and by far the weakest and least in depth of the bunch. On that note neither the vehicle nor building creators had a fraction of the customization of the creature creator. Its one of my biggest complaints.
I don't know why they went to a turned based combat in creature stage. They could have combined the creature and tribal stage and kept the RTS controls/combat.
Being fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster.
It's important to realize that the first four stages of Spore are just a ruse to get you to love your creation, and the Space stage is there to make you hate the lower left corner of your screen. They do it by filling that corner with annoying emergency missions which require you to shlep halfway across the galaxy just to euthanize five glowy sheep.
I don't mind that it's more a toy than a game, because knowing the Sims, I figured that would be the case. Fly is right, the creation tools are brilliant, and deserve to be in the hands of other creative gamers, not just those who bought Spore.
Steam ID: http://steamcommunity.com/id/nyles
Favorite puzzle: Grim Fandango -- the metal detector
I flamed out a bit in to the Space segment, not sure I'll get up enough excitement to return.
In no small part because whatever enjoyment I had in building up a unique species in the first couple of segments, the benefit of that is completely gone in the Civ and Space stages (that I can tell).
After the effort to put together a functional and interesting species, it's now just so much wallpaper and my choices had no impact on the latter half of the game.
My little unsubstantiated guess: The typical person who played with both the creature editor and the game itself spent more time in, and enjoyed more, the creature editor.
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anybody else felt that the combat and exploration in Spore felt very MMO-like?
XBLive: Interstate 78 / PSN: Interstate78 / STEAM
Interstate - yes, i felt very MMO in the creature phase.
Fly - To me, Spore for all it's tremendous achievements, is a proof of concept. In some ways, I'm even more excited for Little Big Planet precisely because I've seen how creative folks can be when given a defined toolset. Content is indeed other people.
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"Publishers still speak in hushed tones about el bunny de la muerte." - *Legion*
My computer science friends all want to have access to the tools in a modding environment. What student RTS wouldn't be better if it was as easy to create units or buildings as it is in Spore, for instance? It would even be possible to create whole new classes of games if the science/universe tools were available for modders.