Spore devs say the evolution game's previews were more ambitious than what they were actually making, and they 'built a fantasy in people's minds that was unachievable'
1d 18h ago by piefed.world/u/Agent_Karyo in games from www.pcgamer.com
The evolution sim that was never meant to be.
Original Source:
Spore: An oral history by Jay Castello / Designroom (free registration required)
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.
"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.
Certainly. I probably should have said “extensible” or “mod-able”.
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.
SimCity is the last time I was excited for a modern remake of a game, and likely the last. It was such an incredible letdown, you couldn't even open the game at launch because of the always online stuff. Most every remake of a classic has been terrible ever since, I'm happy to be proven wrong though.
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)
We know this.
We've known this for decades.
Why is this now news?
Slow news day?
It's just a summary of a recent interview, relax.
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.
Buddy, take a breath.
Friend, chill out.
You'd think someone whose username complains about reddit would exhibit less reddit-like behaviour
Chill out, you're not on reddit anymore
Your original comment was pointless. Don’t expect praise and flowers for it.
Strait of Hormuz is open
Not yet.
I think there is a much higher probability of oil prices being manipulated in the short-term.
Yes, but:
RIP VG Cats!
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.
That's because children adults would get stuck on a path that was untenable, and management didn't like that idea. It would lead to a bad experience and a negative review.
There were a couple details that mattered.
Whether you were aggressive vs friendly vs neutral at each stage had some consequences for all later stages. Creatures you befriend in the Creature stage could become pets in the Tribal stage, which could include the powerful lone wolf ones.
The game got released in 2008, why is this a modern day article as if the game was just released, while the information is what everyone who ever played the game already knows? The game is almost old enough (just 2 more months) to get it's drivers licence and buy alcohol in my country. When I was reading this I was like: "wait... Was there a new Spore game released?" But no, it's just about an 18 year old game 🤷
I thought the world was going to shit, but apparently there's nothing else to write about than an 18 year old game, from a sea of thousands of game being released per year.
Ok, Thanks for sharing, at least it's not bullshit from Trump or Musk or whatever I guess.
If you made one now it would work a lot better, modeling evolution and proteins is vastly better Science now.
Yeah... Evolve to an inteligent species, then evolve into egocentric low IQ assholes that constantly almost blow up society because of a dick measuring contest... Until they do press the button. First dominate and kill other species, then dominate and kill your own.
Much more realistic game, don't know if it's more fun.
But jokes aside, I wouldn't mind a new version of that game, or something similar. It's rather unique in its genre.
Yeah it sucks that the Internet won't let you create your own better posts about more modern games.
Holy shit dude, nobody's forcing you to read it and comment all that drivel.
A website made a recap article about it, including interviews with developers. That's an extremely common practice in journalism. This submission is a recap of that interview. Instead of losing your shit and typing all that out you could have read 4 lines of the article to learn that yourself.
Oh sorry, I didn't know reality checks on timelines weren't allowed.
By the way, this just got in: a plane just flew into the WTC. We don't know much yet, but there's a high possibility it might be a terrorist attack on the US. Stand by for a press conference from your president George W. Bush.
You're the one somehow bemused at the existence of an article about a part of history (of gaming), which again is a very common thing. Consider therapy.
To follow your bizarre example, we'd never have articles or interviews about 9/11 ever again. Let's just not bother talking to people who were around back then.
I'm deeply sorry I didn't follow your rules for posting comments on the internet. I will indeed find therapy to deal with the shame, and to learn about your rules so I won't make this mistake ever again. Even my mom called me to tell me I was her biggest disappointment (although in general, not necessarily related to my comment mistake) so you must be right.
Yeah we were there when it happened
I bought my first ever PC that was built for and came with spore.
I was happy with the computer, the game was... less than what I thought it was going to be.
I got the collector edition. Never again.
But spore was awesome though
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.
There was a space age? I remember playing to a certain point, getting bored, and just restarting it over and over.
Modern age was the weakest. Beyond that you got to space which could've been fun if you managed to get that far.
So long as you turned on Stellaris when you got to the space stage
It had the depth of a cup of spilt coffee, once you've played through it once there's no additional content to experience.
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.
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.
Every creature on the box art is impossible in-game one way or another.
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.
the simple shape demo of the creature world
What game is that? Searching any of those terms give me nothing
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.
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.
It might be one of these
I mean, they did have some interesting ideas early on that I was surprised didn't make the cut. https://www.spore.com/comm/prototypes
Those of us not in the industry refer to that as "lying."
Electronic Arts deserves every bad thing that happens to them. Vulture capitalists.
Fuck EA.
I loved Spore, but I'm easily pleased with video game. I liked creature stage the most, but also liked space and puttering around!
I even really liked the cell stage because the gameplay loop was fun and simple, plus you got to eat the bastards who were eating you before you got bigger.
I still have and play the game sometimes. I would have loved for it to be what I envisioned but it’s still the most enjoyable evolution based game I’ve played. I should look and see what else might be available. I really like the concept.
Evo: Search for Eden is my vote for best evolution game.
There is a game called thrive that is attempting to do a really hardcore version of spore. There's still really at the early stages of evolution and the complexity of the bacterial stage is pretty intense.
Maybe someday we will get a spiritual successor to spore
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.
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.
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.
You should have written the last paragraph first, would have gotten less downvotes.
No, that's a problem we've already solved, with math.
You can make a rig like that yourself, just by following some advanced tutorials.
It feels like you're saying "this is hard, let's throw AI at it".
That's not the fun way for humans to do things.
Can you link what you're talking about? Because I'm not aware of any animation system that's purely mathematically derived AND that can generate aesthetically pleasing animations for arbitrary body shapes.
There are certain techniques like Inverse Kinematics that might vaguely fit your description, but that's a tiny piece of the puzzle - it might get you 5-10% of the way, but given arbitrary body shapes it's gonna look horrible in most cases, and it doesn't give you actual animations since you'd still need to purposefully move the creature's extremities.
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.
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.
Same here, I remember being 15 and sharing the video around school on this amazing new website called Google Videos. I watched that demo multiple times and ate the hype big time, and then we know what happened next.
A few years later, EA ruined Battlefield and I've never bought a game from them since.
As a kid my first experience of it was a friend playing it so I got that feeling of wonder from that instead of trailers and the like, and because of that i was very satisfied with the game
It might be worth to link to the original source: https://www.designroom.site/spore-an-oral-history/
Design Room is a new online magazine authored by one of the writers laid-off by Vox Media when it acquired Polygon.
You can read the Oral Histories after a free subscription.
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.
The devs didn't handle marketing.
That doesn't vindicate the marketing.
Never said it does, just that it's not so much an admission as pointing the finger.
Exact same thing that happened with No Man's Sky. That first trailer was so obviously curated out-the-wazoo, and I remember people insisting it was the last game they'd ever need to play based on it alone. And we all know what happened when that one came out.
I don't know how much of that was developer hubris and how much publisher (Sony) pression to deliver. Internet historian made great video about NMS, and at least from dev perspective it was a clusterfuck of massive overprimising and bad circumstances.
Translation: "We were just shitting you, so don't buy our game."
Now I'm really worried that this chould severily damage the sales of this game
The game still was somewhat of a technical marvel, especially for its time. I don't think I've seen anything like the creature editor where it would allow you to create fairly arbitrary creatures, try to automatically detect what was the head, torso, legs; and try to animate them all correctly. Then, entire creature definitions were encoded into small PNG files using stenography, which could be shared with minimal data usage.
It's cool, we have Thrive
Have you played it? The main setting of Spore is the Creature Stage. So far, in Thrive, only the microbe stage is available.
Okay since people seem disturbed - Do you all remember DARKSPORE?