I’ve been playing around with the Spore Creature Creator. Great fun. It got me all excited about the full game.
But lately I’ve been looking around on the online Sporepedia. This basically shows all the creatures people are creating and sharing. And I’m worried. Because one of the ideas with Spore is going to be that the creatures you encounter will be ones that were designed by other Spore players. That sounded fun to me, until I started looking at the creatures other people were actually designing. Many–probably the majority–are on the enjoyability scale somewhere between neutral and really neat. But many–at least a large minority–are just no good. Some are inexcusably ugly. Some are clearly just someone fiddling around with no real intention to do anything creature-productive. Some are really, really neat looking–when you take a snapshot of them, but not once you actually load them up and watch them move around. Many of the cleverest ones are more like sculptures than creatures. For example, there are several creatures called “motorcycle.” Many of these are pretty amazing and clearly took some skill. But they stretch the boundaries of what Spore was designed for so far, that once you actually put them in the game and let them move around, animation problems ruin the experience.
I’m afraid I’ll get the game and end up with far too many of these bad creatures in my game. I know there will be ways to filter creatures, only getting them from particular people, and so on. But I’d rather be more open than that. If I limit it to certain people, then there will be thousands of others who are making good creatures that I’ll miss out on. Meanwhile, though, if I only eliminate people who I actually have seen make a bad creature, then I have to see the bad creature first, and that’s exactly what I’d prefer to avoid.
So, in a move that may seem obvious to everyone else, I’m starting to worry that maybe an online phenomenon may turn out to tend to pump my computer screen full of worthless junk. :smack:
Does anyone know anything more about Spore than I have said here which may alleviate my worries?
Yeah, I hear ya. I’m a bit worried as well. It’s all well and good to have a game designed by the masses… until you remember that half of the masses are below average.
I seem to recall that the internet download aspect can be filtered and even turned off.
What I’ve been doing, in addition to creating my own creatures that are hopefully realistically playable, is downloading creatures made by others that I’m sure I’d want in my games. I have a couple hundred creatures in my folder now, all creatures that are inventive but realistic enough to function in the actual game.
I think you will be able to restrict creatures your avatar encounters to those you download manually. Certainly, you will be able to remove any creatures you don’t like and even ban creators who make stupid crap. Also, creatures in your game are supposed to be close to the complexity level of your avatar.
Note that you can report “penis creatures” and other stupidities of that ilk.
Actually EA is making in active effort to clear the database (and keep it clear) of “Sporn.” Good or bad idea? You decide.
ETC: Oh, I see you were referring to a similar comment. Carry on…
Anyway I heard you can control certain tags and such that your game will download, as a means of preference and control. Obviously this won’t mitigate ALL the crap, but you can probably tone it down a tad with good filtering choices. My worry is… um… it’s EA and Maxis, uh 1 year later
Spore: Underground Expansion
Spore: Underwater Expansion
Spore: Flying Expansion
Spore: Wacky Part Pack
Spore: Bedtime Cuddles Pack
Spore: Christmas Limbs Pack
Spore: Bombarded By Cosmic Radiation “My God What Have I Done!?” These Are Total Sins Against Nature Expansion
Don’t forget Spore: Hot Alien Encounters, with the vibrating sleep chamber. :rolleyes:
I think I’ve discovered part of the ‘problem’. My 6yo daughter and 8yo son both love this thing, but you might rather not run into their creatures in the Sporiverse. My daughter’s tend to be blobbish and lacking at least one set of limbs (though artistic as she is, they’re beautifully colored and plumed), and my son’s tend to be murderous-looking 12-foot dragon-beasts with great wings and claws (see the ‘Rovan’ below). I just figured I’d give them a little more time to refine their art before unleashing it on the general populace, so for now, they work strictly off-line.
According to the ‘Events’ page in the program, 574,000+ people now belong to the ‘Spore Universe’. 10,500 signed up in the last 24 hours. 1.5 million uploads to date. Any way you slice it, that’s a lot of 6-year olds whose imaginations (and impatience) are slightly ahead of their understanding of anatomy and physics. Here are my first creations.
To borrow Knorf’s phrase, I hope you’ll find them ‘realistically playable’. (I’m especially pleased with the ‘Bushmaster’.)
I just discovered this today and have been busily building creatures all afternoon. And evening.
Here’s mine. (Well, not that first one; it’s just named “mswhatsit” but was created by someone else.) The ones that have every possible spiky armor thing attached to them would be the ones that my 6-year-old son made.
The biggest problem that I see is that the creature creator gives you no motivation to create a creature that will be competitive in the game. It just gives you an artistic blank slate. The original concept - getting creatures from other people’s Spore games, and such, creatures that are intended to succeed in the actual game - works fine. But, the creature creator ones are just doodles; nobody makes creatures to have good stats or to be functional.
I hope it will be a possibility to turn off Creature Creator creatures and only have real Spore creatures. Or, that creatures with shitty stats (like no movement) will be filtered out.
Yeah, most people seem to be making apex predators- so most of my creatures are prey animals. Some of them are defenseless, while others aren’t quite so helpless. Still, all those predators are going to need something to eat.
Not everything is a competitive predator, and some of them aren’t even competitiveness prey, but they all have a potential place on the food chain.
FWIW I have made a few with a specific trait in mind (I have on my page a creature called Ripill that was meant to be a long ranged fighter with a backup, less powerful bite attack for instance, also his paint job sucks). I have a recent one that getting close to would pretty much be the worst thing you’d ever do.
It occurs to me that one thing I wish Maxis had done differently is to give certain kinds of parts penalties. For example, fierce predators with lots of weaponry as well as formidable armor. The armor should have a slowing penalty, more like the natural world. Highly armored creatures cannot move swiftly enough, usually, to be effective predators.
Armored predators … yikes.
Of course I made a few like that myself. Muwahahaha.
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