I’ve been playing Spore for about a week now. Got myself the GOG edition a long while ago (includes the Galactic Adventures expansion) and I’ve just filled out the evolution bar for the space stage. I had been putting it off for a long time since I kept hearing how it was incomplete or not well thought through. In my experience playing through the game, it seems pretty well thought out and developed.
My playthrough
I started out as a little green filter-feeding amoeba thing, a “Kaitonelle”, then evolved into this sort of lizard, a “Kaitonite”. The lizard became a flying lizard centaur “Kaitonbeast”, then a flying spider-raptor-monkey “Kaitonfiend”, then right before sentience I ditched all the extra features and entered tribe stage as a green ape-man. I gave my “Proto-Kaiton” ape-men skirts and put masks on their shoulders and faces.
The Proto-Kaiton tribe became the Proto-Kaiton nation (the name was locked in). I ditched the green fur, opting for a pinkish flesh color with occasional hints of green detail. I also outfitted them with hair and clothes, which took forever. By the time I finally bought out the planet of Andor, they lived in nice 50’s style red-brick buildings with cars, zeppelins, battleships, freighters, WWII-style bombers, etc. Made myself a spaceship that looks a bit like a satellite, re-fitted my race with new clothes and shoes. Now we’re taking over our little corner of the galaxy with white retro-scifi style buildings and vehicles, trading spice and uplifting random creatures only to buy them out later - I noticed that you get nine cities if you buy out a home planet as opposed to three for colonizing.
I have a couple minor issues with user interface choices, like I wish it was consistent with the right and left mouse buttons in different stages, and that you couldn’t target your pack/tribe/units/allies. I think the planetary minimap in creature mode is poorly designed, and there ought to be a galaxy minimap. I also wish you could rename your empire, mine got stuck as “Proto-Kaitons” where I would have made it the Kaiton Empire. I tried renaming the file, to no avail. I wish you could copy creatures and vehicles from different editors with shared parts - at first I made my tank in the economic vehicle editor since I didn’t know there were different classes of vehicles. It would also be nice if I could interact with planets from the galaxy view, maybe from a list on the left, and perhaps automatically fly to the individual planet when initiating video feed.
There is also room for improvement when it comes to core mechanics. Perhaps you could gain specialized evolution points for whatever parts you are using, and spend those points to unlock new parts. Maybe mating would involve gaining a large number of points from your partner, and the ally ritual could tell you what points you would gain. On the harder difficulty you might lose points when you die. From the civilization stage forward Maxis could have added more complicated dynamics given their experience with the Sim City series. They could have also had an actual tech tree in that stage, where you spend money to unlock things for your civilization. And the space stage could have military and economic space units like the civilization stage. Maybe you could arrange your badges and trophies in a special editor for the interior of your spaceship. But I don’t hold any of these against the game; for an all-ages game, Spore is pretty complicated as is. Unlike the above paragraph, I don’t hold the lack of any of these suggestions against the game.
I haven’t tried online access yet and I have barely gotten into the Galactic Adventures - the ones I’ve done so far have been overall cheesy but not out of line with the rest of the game’s humor. The scenes are actually really cool in and of themselves in showing what is possible, it looks like the engine is quite powerful although I have yet to try the adventure editor.
the problem with spore is people wanted a cross between meier’s “civilization” and “the sims” and when they didn’t get it it was dismissed as being quick and shallow (or as one reviewer sais "sim earth 2.0) and to an extent they were right we beat the game in 2-3 days and other than taking the other choice you didn’t take the first time there wasn’t much replayability
i think part pf the problem was will wright wanted a more expansive game and EA was being EA and it became a “let’s just get it done” thing at some point cause wright left not long after and ea walked back on some of the creator content it was supposed to release because it wasn’t as popular as it was supposed to be
The only thing Spore ended up doing really well was the creature creation toolset. The gameplay itself was mediocre and no single level was enough fun to justify it as an experience.
I mean, I thought it was lots of fun. Designing stuff - my creatures, vehicles, buildings, has been tons of fun in my opinion. I would not recommend this game if you’re looking for a challenge though - the fun comes from my own creative input, spending hours in the creator. I’ve also had fun collecting things and exploring in the space stage.
I’ve heard a lot of the criticism over the years, which is why I hadn’t played the game until now. I wasn’t one to follow video game news in 2008, so if the negative reaction is due to over-marketing instead of actual deficiencies, I was spared the hype. I was expecting a really bad game and was pleasantly surprised.
The fundamental problem was that it was supposed to be “A game where you can do whatever you want!”. But what it was actually was just “A game where the developer can do whatever he wants!”. But the thing is, all games are games where the developer can do whatever he wants. If you wanted to do the same things he did, you were fine. If you wanted to do anything else, you were stuck.
Thats the problem I had with Spore, when I played it all those years ago – yes, you could spend hours designing creatures in the creator. But when you were done, it didn’t actually make any difference. The creature’s stats weren’t based on what you created, beyond the very shallow level of what the highest level strike/horn/poison attack part they had, or what kind of legs you equipped. Multiple spikes don’t help, size doesn’t matter, shape doesn’t matter. A sleek looking quadroped is identical to an awkward biped if they have the same pieces and a little blob with level 5 bite/horns/claws can easily defeat a massive creature with dozens of low level pieces.
And that applies to your vehicles or tribal equipment of spaceships. What they look like doesn’t matter whatsoever.
The flexibility in design is great but it is wide as an ocean but shallow as a puddle. In the promo (especially the e3 announcement) they claimed that the game would use procedural generation to calculate stats based on what you had built. That was a lie. They claimed depth but delivered none of it. That’s why I was disappointed, at least.
I did like Spore when I played it, but I feel no urge to play it again, I don’t think it’d be any different. The best thing about it by far, as others have said, was the creature creator, and the way it could make almost any awkwardly build thing walk was a revelation at the time. And your own creations could appear in other people’s games as well, that was a big, unusual thing at the time. But the game itself is kinda dull.
I thought the vehicle balance thing was sort of cool. The stats are decided by percentage representation of the parts - add more weapon parts and your vehicle has a higher percent of its stat points in attack. It would have been cool if more from the creature stage stats worked like this - I think the jump effect stacked the more features you put in. You’re right about clothing - strategically, you just needed the best piece of clothing for each stat. I don’t believe there were any stats on spaceships, but you had to unlock and buy those abilities and upgrades.
As a cell I thought the placement of features was very important. Spikes on the side meant an entirely different strategy than spikes on the front or tail.
The cell stage was my favorite level of the game, hands down. The choices felt important and affected gameplay. And then the rest of the game happened and it went way downhill.
I did not (gave up on Spore long before it was out) but I think I’ve heard good things about it – does it add more stuff to do in the space age? When I played space was pretty boring, only a small amount of stuff to actually do
It might be worth watching a video on. Your space-age dictator is made into a RPG-like character with individual abilities and a level/rank. You beam down to planets on these missions where it’s like creature mode but with dialogue and clear, linear objectives. As you complete missions you level up and choose your abilities with multiple lines of upgrades - then to actually use your abilities you have to add the new part to your captain’s outfit.
As I said before, the missions are pretty cheesy (parody of Romeo and Juliet; how a bill becomes a law; stealth rescue mission; defend against the Grox invasion), but it comes with an editor and I’m sure there’s tons of user-created adventures online.
That’s how I felt. Sure, it was fun designing stuff. But ultimately it didn’t matter. Spore was marketed as an “universe of everything” simulator, combining aspects of The Sims, Sim City, Civilization, some galaxy space sim or whatever. Mostly it was pretty light on all that.
Maybe it led the way to later games like No Man’s Sky, Space Engineers, Empyrion, Star Citizen, Astroneer, Starbound, Eve Online, etc.But generally, creating an entire universe and populating it with enough interesting shit to keep people occupied is a tall order for any technology for the foreseeable future.
