In a few months they are releasing an expansion pack called “Galactic Adventures”. I think the gist of it is that you can create “adventure planets” where you can basically build whatever you want, wherever you want along with various scripted events and whatnot. But at this point I’m having trouble even caring.
Here’s the problem, and I say this as a big Simcity fan and as a casual fan of The Sims 2. In those other games, you basically create a world by placing various buildings or objects in the world environment. The people or “Sims” of that world will then react and interact with those buildings or objects. Build a powerplant, sims get annoyed living near it and move away. Build a park, the opposite happens. Forget to put a toilet in your Sim house, conditions become…unpleasent.
IOW, you don’t control the Sims directly (although you can at times), you modify the environment, sit back, and see how they react to it and each other. THAT is the fun of Sim games.
Will Wright didn’t do that with Spore. You basically drive your creature around killing other creatures. Nothing you do really matters. Nothing affects anything else. Even with the new expansion pack, all you seem like you are doing is plopping meaningless props around. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s awesome, by I doubt it.
My daughter bought me a copy for Xmas. I thanked her and told her I appreciated the thought, but had her exchange it for something else that she wanted. (She bought me waaaaay too much stuff.)
I actually had a lot of fun with the creature-creator part - experimenting with branching limbs, or weird skeletal structures and whatnot. Six-legged, winged devil-cows, the whole nine yards. There were a few issues with wobbly legs and I really would have liked more in-depth controls and all, but it was fun. Even throughout the creature phase, it was fun getting new parts to play with, and making new, weird creatures. Unfortunately, there wasn’t really much content except that - the creature creator was very repetitive, other than looking at the other creatures, and I stopped caring real quick. So, I ended that phase, and found that the next two were basically the same, only even more basic - the parts for buildings and vehicles didn’t even do anything, they were just shapes. And then the space stage requires you to manage an interstellar empire by flying back and defending everything yourself. No, thanks. I hear there’s a bit of content in there at the galactic center, but by then I didn’t care enough to prop up my empire long enough to get there.
Basically, it seemed like they had one really cool idea - procedural animation of people critters - and then ran out of time to tack content onto it. They sort of got playable but simplistic versions of the first two phases, but then didn’t spend nearly as much time on the rest of the game, and it shows.
During the runup to the release of the game, the developers released all these (I forget what they were called now) toy versions of various parts of the game. For example, there was a demo of the space phase, using 2-d sprite graphics. And there were city development demos, and galactic formation demos, and several others besides. For most of these, it was clear that what was running was a simulation of some kind. The city demo had little agents walking around behaving according to simple rules, and their behavior together made for a city-like configuration of agents. Much like sim-city. Similarly for many of the other demos.
This was exciting to someone like me.
But then upon game’s release, it became clear that every single little bit of simulation had been removed from the game. (Or rather, as far as I can tell, had never actually been in the plans for the game in the first place.) The release is perhaps the finished product of a prior simulation, but it contains no simulation in it whatsoever. Take the city mechanics, for example. You do see little people animated and moving around in the city–but they are just animations and mean nothing to the gameplay mechanics. There are rules about what kinds of buildings can be placed next to other kinds of buildings, and what values they generate as a result. But there’s no simulation here–it’s just straightforward simplistic mechanics. “Do X to get Y, do more of X to get more of Y.”
Why they released the simulation demos, I’ll never be sure, but it was really aggravating to go from the demos, which promised so much, to the game, which delivered so little.
Expansion packs only matter if people liked the original game.
I don’t think I’ve seen such a dropoff in interest in a PC game from opening hype to post-game disappointment since “Daikatana.” Actually, this was far worse, because “Daikatana” was becoming a joke even before it was released. Spore was supposed to be The Gaming Shiznit. It was drolled over for YEARS before release. And it turned out to be a turd.
That’s what pretty much killed the game for me. Every thirty seconds I had to go from one end of my empire to the other in order to defend against pirates, stop a bio-meltdown, find the best price for spices, etc, etc.
Like what was said above, if the demos were like the game, I would have loved it, but there was just no depth to the game whatsoever.
In one of the demos it made it sound like you, in the tribal period, placed either a drum set or spears. Then the animations would do what they wanted and that’s how it decided on whether your tribe was warlike or not.
Well, except for the fact that it was ridiculously difficult, to the point that most of the fun was sucked out of it.
3000 made a huge, huge misstep IMHO (including famous landmarks, but making them free and having no effect - what a wasted opportunity that was) but it was otherwise a fine game, a good sequel to 2000. 4 just made the game ludicrously hard. I liked the idea of adjoining cities having an effect on each other but it almost required that you use them, which I found frustrating and pointless. I wanted to build a city with a moderate degree of challenge, and it didn’t do that.
It may be worth pointing out that Will Wright has left EA.
There probably will never be a Sim City 5.
And Spore wasn’t as bad as so many make it out to be. If you forget about the hype, you will realize that it is a marvelous game.
An Uber Turret will take care of pirates by itself. You can ignore those warnings. Bio disasters are not that common, and even if you ignore them, they don’t have permanent negative effects. Once you max out about a dozen spice producing planets, you can make millions in a matter of minutes, making money a trivial aspect of the game by this point.
Your actions from each stage determine your special traits and abilities in all the later stages. By the Space stage, you have 4 qualities that are determined by the outcomes of each previous stage. While it is not easy to drastically change your course by the civ stage, its simple in each of the others.
And you only had one ship to do it with. Most 4X games give you the option to construct, you know, mutiple ships and organize them into fleets. Maybe even organize self defense forces for planets to allow them some sense of self sufficently so the first pirates to come around don’t require the one ship I have to run all the way across my empire to help them in single combat.
And considering the civ stage allowed you to construct mutiple units, I don’t see why you can’t do that in the space stage.
If you’re referring to SimCity Societies I’ll point out that that game wasn’t SimCity at all. An absolute joke. And SimCity 4 was an awesome game, I don’t understand why everyone thought it was so hard.