Spore

I'm surprised to find out that they made multiple spore games. I remember reading about it in the newspaper when I was a kid. It was just like nu man's sky; overhyped, overpromised and delivered nothing.

What a fuckin' failure, can't even derail with dubs

Are you 12?

It's an alright game but it's a fucking shadow of what it was planned to be, you'll never get good disscusion about it going here, it is single handled a good part of the reason why everybody on Holla Forums are such jaded asshats.

alright check my single

I've seen people make cheesecake with it. It's interesting.

FUCKING

CUTE

TEAM

How about fucking off back to >>>/reddit/ if you want to circlejerk over a shitty game that ruined a company and led to its creator to leave the industry after having his lifes work fucked over.

are you fucking new?

don't you know WHAT HAPPENED?

Anyways, it was Maxis's own fault that Spore turned out how it did, the devolpment of spore and why it turned out that way is super interesting. Here's like a 13 page blog post from a maxis employee about it, with other employees chiming in in the comments:

designer-notes.com/?p=654

I love Spore. It reminds me of my childhood game Star Wars Droidworks, but with emergent gameplay. Very visionary. I think Spore pushes the frontiers of video game as an interactive form of art.

I was actually looking forward to this game at one point

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I bought it maybe a year after release and I never really listened to all the hype before/disappointment after, so I just expected a 6/10 game.
It was lots of fun for young me, I think the hate just comes from it not being what you were all sold in marketing. Solid game, but the Space stage got a bit stale, and you needed the Galactic Adventures expansion to properly do shit.

Along with some early gameplay demos, it's mostly Will Wright talking about procedural generation and how he wanted to apply it to this game, not as merely graphics or terrain, but as actually affecting gameplay in a meaningful fashion. His vision was far too grand for this sad Earth.

Rather it was too grand for the religious Zealot on the team
Although i can understand, A lot of American Christians hate Evolution whilst at the same time having never read the bible
Then you've got jews and creationists as well….

Someone get a fedora for this guy to tip.

Shit I want to play Spore again now

Nah, it wasn't anything like that. It was just the beginning of the transformation of video game companies into Big Business. Had Spore been made as little as two or three years earlier, it might have remained untouched. But the EA execs saw dollar signs if only they could transform this game into a colorful model kit for preteen children. They wanted to tap the WoW market, except the slightly younger version. In order to do so, they had to make it simple and cartoony, so they brought in a guy who could get that done.

And, what do you know? It worked! It was released to widespread critical panning and a whole lotta dick-monsters, but it also made EA a ludicrous fuckload of money. That's all that matters to them, because video games are a business, nothing more. It's profit or nothing, and the state of the industry today is what happens when creativity is left to the rich.

You are part of the problem.

Just saying the way they probably saw it when the radical christian on the team complained
They thought, "Gee, if this bitch is being offended right now, how many more of them are going to be offended out in the bible belt?"

It would have got significantly less bad press and been a better game if they hadn't wasted time REMOVING content
Time is money ect…

But it wouldn't have been as appealing to children! Why do you think every summer blockbuster movie these days strives to be PG-13? Why do you think Twilight and Harry Potter are among the beststelling books of all time? Why do you think all the most popular TV shows are "family-friendly"? Why do you think the world's most popular "restaurant" is the one with a motherfucking CLOWN for a mascot?

If you appeal to children, you're fucking rich, and children DON'T care about things like quality and bad press. That's the end of it.

Filtered

Wow, that's some fucking terribly unfortunate shit. I would've loved to see how the game turned out. At least I didn't pay attention to it in its early days of hype only to be disappointed.

I did. I obsessed over that game for literally six fucking years as being the one game that would complete my life. I didn't really follow the development cycles, so my very first indication that anything had been radically changed was when I bought it and wondered why the box art was so cartoony and childish, and how the fuck it got a E10 rating.

That was the very LAST time I purchased a game, incidentally.

Same here user, I was a kid at the time and was attracted by that shitty flash they had on their website
That was probably the Last EA game i bought

Thoughts on pic related? Fun game to play if you've got a few hours imo

Literally the worst city builder ever made. It's the reason why we'll never get another good SimCity, like 4.

what are you talking about?

That's a traffic simulator with a SimCity skin on it. Not the same. The free-form roads and lack of any sort of unified grid system is better in theory than how it was implemented, with all the building lots having gaps between then.

it's almost exactly the same as simcity 4, and you can mod out any issues you have with it.

I don't know man, now I can't remember but Sim City 4 still did a bunch of things better, the visual style and soundtrack are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head.

I prefer the original.

I prefer Real Lives

Man this needs a remake badly. Or at least a spirtual succesor somewhere. This game with a good graphics engine, would be so fucking cool. I remember bombing the fuck out of my planet so hard with metors that it would crash my friends computer. Those were good times.

I would play it if they didn't add the RTS and civilization stages.

got a torrent or a zip of it?

Seconding this

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REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

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I can only imagine the sights we would have seen were it not kiddified.

Spore wasn't good and would never have been good despite what nostalgia fags on vee claim.

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thats where you're wrong kiddo

everything will wright makes without EA bossing him around has been good.

kys.

I remember buying this.

At the time I was pretty much unaware of internet communities, so I literally had no idea what it was or the hype that had been built. I just saw it on a shelf and grabbed it.

Cell stage was interesting. I spent about twice the required time in cell stage, which isn't saying much seeing as it takes half an hour or less to complete it. I remember thinking it was a bit simple, surely it would ramp up. It was fun devouring other cells either way.

Next was creature stage. God, creature stage. I spent so much time roaming the landscape, looking at the creatures, eating whatever suited my fancy, battling those big dangerous guys (and the even bigger dangerous guys, though that failed). On other playthroughs I dumped a ton of time in creature creation, bending the spine my creature to it's limits, combining creature parts in crazy ways to push the game as far as possible to make the things I was imagining. It was the greatest shit ever, but sounderwhelmingly simple and underequipped that you always felt held back. It would have needed ten times more parts, more options, more paths to evolution, more everything. If spore was just a well-made creature stage it would have been goat every year.

Then came tribal stage. I remember thinking "oh, we RTS now!", being extremely excited at the prospect of turning the creature I'd spent so much time prefecting into a society. Starcraft, except with a 100% custom race, here I come! Actually, it sucked. The system was the most simplified shit ever and I've played a shitton of flash games. It was just "gather food, you grow now, donate your food like a cuck to others or grab some spears and kill the motherfuckers" and done. Barely any progress, still the same shitty binary ascension path, no basebuilding to speak of, ridiculous population cap and aesthetically unappealing as fuck. I was expecting building the fucking tower of babel or some shit. That was the first mode I did not spend any more time than necessary in.

Next up, we buildan cities across the world! Also introducing wonky-ass vehicle buildan. Unlike creature stage, this one had a pretty good palette of decorative parts. It was also completely pointless to spend time on since there was hardly any correlation between your design and it's effectiveness for one of the two purpouses, I'e combat and trade (wasn't there one more? Was it diplomacy?). Either way it was mostly "slap parts on a box and call it pretty". The gameplay was similarly shit. You get money that you build vehices for, then you send them to do one of the 3 things. I had a vague hope that by the end of the stage, I would be building nuke silos, sending spies and making deals with people, sort of like a mixture between alpha centauri and red alert 2 (or just alpha centauri realtime edition). lolnope, it's the same boring shit till you're done.

(1/2)

Last and neither least nor most, space age! Another one I had hopes for. I figured "oh, so they probably spent a lot of time on creature stage, realised they have no ability to make strategy games and just threw something simple in for tribe and civilization stage, then dumped all their actual effort on space stage". Because it seemed promising at first. You had a whole galaxy full of races, base buildan on your home planet (and with obvious prospects for colonization), terraforming, diplomacy, combat, all the good stuff. Well, it lasts until you realize it's impossible to scale. If you ever dare anger anyone, expect having enemy fleets constantly spawning on your planets, breaking your shit. Oh sure, you can build defenses, except they are so unbelievably weak that a single enemy ship can easily defeat an entire city. Can you build your own ships, planetary defenses or such? Nope, it's just you. You have to defend everything yourself, because your people lack any semblance of initiative. It's incidentally pretty common that you'll get attacked in multiple places at once and since you can't be everywhere at the same time, you're fucked. Did I mention everything is typically shallow? You want a tech tree? Closest there is is some rare upgrades that you have to trade for. Ofc you can't build or develop your own tech (in spite of the fact that I got the science archetype with the "wipe out everything on a planet" ability), because unlike previous stages you no longer have the choice between multiple paths. There is a half-assed raiding system, since you can steal spice from others' cities, but it's not worth it since they'll aggro and literally hunt you across the galaxy. No being a sneaky raider here! No attacking trading ships in transit. No building structures i space. Literally no fun whatsoever. The only way of
winning the game is to essentially abandon your civilization to ruin to venture to the center of the universe, while the fucking robot assholes there keep trying to convo you only to tell you they hate you (because isn't it fun in games where you get dozens of comms requests each second? Alpha Centauri does it sometimes, Stellaris does it all fucking time) while your framerate slows to a crawl from all the ships chasing you. Then you get the fucking meme ending with Steve and you get a staff that lets you terraform a bit easier, because that is useful when you literally can't maintain more than 3 planets due to
the unbelievably shit game mechanics.

Fucking hell, what a waste of money. Though at least creature stage was good…

The creature stage and the cell stage were the only two good things about the game
even if they were a bit simplified

Nothing AAA from the US will ever be good again. Now that AAA companies have the max RoI formula down, we will never get a great AAA game again. At some point spending the extra dollars to polish mechanics meets diminishing returns. And if a game becomes"too challenging" then the total sales volume will drop and profits will be lost. This is just the new norm for AAA games. Assume it is shit until the exception that proves the rule comes along. But your odds are probably better playing the Power Ball.

The only thing I really have to say about Spore is that, past its being a rotten mess of oversimple mechanics, is that it is an absolute travesty that it does not have a proper save system. Only one slot, used for autosaves, manual saves, and stage starts in one; in the civilization stage, if you save at a point where you will deterministically fail without knowing, you are fucked and lose the playthrough. This is very unlikely on easy & normal, because both are babymode and the only difference is how much tedium they add. On hard, they become psychotically aggressive and quick to expand, meaning if you don't do things just right and snowball hard in a good start you'll fail.

My last playthrough intended as a spiteful sendoff some time last year ended in this fashion when I saved without knowing that there was in fact no load function, trapping me in a bad early start with an unsustainable conquest followed by steamrolling from a neighbor who pulled resources from nowhere if I got map control and pissed them off and also followed by steamrolling if I tried to tiptoe around them and wait for a more ideal moment while they didn't really expend themselves much on any remaining neighbors. I was less than pleased that I didn't even get to head into the space stage and ruthlessly abuse monoliths to get capital planet production-tier spice colonies by uplifting dribbling savages and annexing them instantly afterwards, nor engage in petty border wars (the only kind in Spore, because apparently no one had ever heard of 4X as a genre let alone thought to implement its mechanics in a light real-time form) with shithead aliens.

gave me depression/10

I had a friend that was aggressively into SimEarth as a kid. Used to walk around with this guide like it was literally the bible and force people to listen to him read off animal facts and shit. Wish I had better taste back then, really missed out.

I abandoned hope at the civ stage, could just feel it getting progressively worse. I was downright pissed that it kicked me out of creature stage actually.

I had more fun in the creature creator demo than I had in the actual game. Making spaceships is kinda fun though.
I remember the ebin cute vs. science wars on the sporum. Hundreds of top mad 12 year olds, that was also fun.

What has he even made after EA?

According to wikipedia he founded some think tank that has done literally nothing. He's also on Second Life's board of directors.

Adventures were fun to build, that was also a good thing about the game

Poor bastard.

It was very fun if you're creative. A prime example of why you should never buy into the hype, much like NMA it's actually a good game if you don't go into it with expectations of your dream game after which you never need to buy another game again.

Reminder

spore.com/comm/prototypes

space stage exploration was fun
everything else was bland and obviously unfinished

alright, where does hecker live and how much does an assassination cost?

Underage won't understand the betrayal.

I guess a broken banana hitler is alright twice a day

Is there any more of this?

EA crushed his dreamgame, so he's a broken soul wondering the halls of the industry.

Are you new? Maybe you remember what happened with pic related.
>tfw i paid for it and i have 66 hours logged

shit, I remember that

The only way to have fun in space is to be the Space Mafia.
As long as you never personally attack anyone and keep on everyone's good side (and stay far away from the Grox), you can ignore any "we're being attacked" alerts because it'll only be harmless pirates. With environmental centers on each of your planets (so you won't get plague outbreaks), you can generally run around taking over the universe without any annoying interruptions.

dropped like a rock

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A game with a lot of potential. One of the classic examples of EA shittery.

I humbly request a torrent/zip

None of those anons were implying that imbecile, they said that because what happened with spore is widely known even in halfchan.

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Oh that reminds me. How could I fucking forget? (Must have blocked it out of my mind like PTSD.) The game had a criminal lack of any sort of decent autosave system, which was especially bad because it CRASHED ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Probably four or five times I lost SEVERAL HOURS of tedious work in space stage due to a crash.

It was the final nail in the coffin to my never picking up the game again.

you can google the thing, but all the versions i find don't work for me because of some error

EA had nothing to do with Spore coming out how it did, both artbooks, multiple articles from mutliple sites, as well as former maxis employees all consistently say it was due to internal disagreements on the team

see the 13 page long post from one of them and the comments from other eomployees here

The civ stage was just terrible, completely shallow RTS gameplay and the vehicle creation disappointed me - I thought like giving them different weapons or forms of movement would give them different effects in shit but they all act and shoot the same other than having different speed/health/power.

This also describes the Tribal stage user
But even the tribal stage was better in terms of RTS gameplay

He is a /leftycuck/. It goes without saying.

There are no words for how mad I am.

I'm STILL sad about this.

Might and Magic?

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I'm no fan of procedural generation for worlds but it's a horrible shame that this kind of stuff for creatures is essentially lost, these things should be brought forward into new engines and dictate the minimum of their abilities.

I remember finishing the cell stage and thinking "oh boy, time for some comfy swimming in the aquatic stage".
Then the game told me to get out of the fucking pool.

It's grim that I have to remind myself that every time he says 'buy mode' he *doesn't* mean making people pay actual cash for digital trinkets.

What happened to the world?

Jews.

I'd disappear from the video game industry too if I were fucked over this hard.

I still can't get over the fact how Maxis or EA thought the "average folk" would be turned off by science when a poll of their own audience suggest otherwise.

EA sure knows how to screw people and companies over but I think he bit of more than he could chew with the SimEverything concept. Personally I'm more sad about the cancellation of SimMars, that could have been something. Spore would always had to be shallow due to its nature, SimMars had potential.

He works at Linden Labs now fyi.

You know what else is fun?
Broken promises Cut content On-disk DLC

Except that's a personal blog by a former maxis employee, not an official EA product, and the accounts in the EA products are backed up by it.

It's not a fucking conspiracy, even before the game came out we knew from interviews there was an internal debate at maxis between the science team and the artsy team

please use archive.ism/boards/threads/blame-chris-hecker-for-ruining-spore.172357647/

God I fucking hate the mandatory archive.is shit, I don't care about cucking the sites out of their ad revnue or whatever, gamergate is just a single general, not the whole board, I just want to talk about video games

archive.is/r20FO

volafile.io/get/L9swFwFryL5T/Real.Lives.2010.Incl.Crack.7z