click and help them *points down*

thefrostman2 wrote:click and help them *points down*

NO, stop spamming.

Well anyway, based on what I've read I am even less happy with Spore. Funny but most of the time since I hit space stage I've spent my time in the forums instead of the game. I'd also be happy with refund. I don't think the blaming in here has helped, from what I've read, Chris H's contributions to Spore are good and bad - so tarring him isn't necessarily constructive. We're all too far out of the loop to even know what went on, so there's little point in us discussing or flaming further.

The fact remains though that much of the stuff we, as paying customers who're also evidently pirates (otherwise I would not need an unannounced, silently installed rootkit on my computer, would I?) are unhappy about appears to have come about as a result of his actions. There are of course good things he's added - but they were things we were expecting anyway. The stuff that's missing he has effectively put his hand up and almost gleefully said, like Jim Carrey in the lift in Liar Liar : "It was meeeeeeeeeeeee". Of course we're angry. We've been ripped off.

Then you go and read the Wii rant and you wonder well.. maybe his biggest problem is he just spouts whatever #### comes into his head.

draknfyr wrote:In Space (prototype for the Space stage) there seemed to be more depth to the teraforming. Some plants and animals wouldn't survive in some spots but would thrive in others. And if they did thrive they would spread from the point of insertion. And they were also landlocked/waterlocked, ie land animals on an island could not populate other land masses on the planet. I was rather heartbroken when I got to the space stage in the final game and found that all I had to do was put down one tree and the whole planet would be covered in them...

I can see why that feature isn't present in the game. It'd be a major pain to deal with - I for one don't want to waste even fifteen minutes looking for that ideal spot for creatures and plants when I'm teethreeing a planet. No, seriously. I also wouldn't want to have to visit another planet for resource-gathering every five minutes because I've wasted all of my twenty Eyeballtrees trying to guess where to plant them.

No sir, there's scientific and then there's needlessly complicated, constipated and bloody SPORE annoying.

Besides, I like the simplicity and cuteness. Spore is more of a toy than a game in any case, and I personally find it way more enjoyable than GTA, any FPS or EA Sport game. But that's just me...

It would end up as simply another checklist with simply more items on it to beam down. Whilst this may seem more complexity it isn't really. Just more repetitive clicking.

Maybe my explanation of the space prototype made it sound more complicated that it actually is. You should give the prototype a try to see what I mean. The main thing I liked about it was how the plants and animals slowly spread over the planet and developed what felt like a true ecosystem.

Prototypes

As for the game vs toy issue. It is more of a toy than a game. The game play held my interest for about 2 weeks and honestly I did enjoy playing through from cell to space 3 or 4 times but by the end of the 2 weeks its newness wore off. And like most toys this one ended up at the bottom of my "toy chest" as newer and more engaging toys took my interest.

Of course the creators are still interesting but I've built a new comp since I last played and am afraid to install Spore on it due to EA's DRM. But once again, that's an issue with EA, not the game.

Edit: For the game play what I really wanted to see was the ability to zoom in and micromanage every little detail, or zoom out and manage everything at once with a few clicks. As it is there is not much to do with a planet once it is T3 and populated.

draknfyr wrote:Maybe my explanation of the space prototype made it sound more complicated that it actually is. You should give the prototype a try to see what I mean.

I played with it when it first came out. Took longer but didn't do anything particularly special other than you spend more time waiting around and trying to figure out initially what was needed where. Once you knew that it was.. go to planet... terraform.. drop, drop, drop, drop... wait...

i think a good combination of what is there and science would be two make latitudes make a difference. You place some plants wherever and some animals and the planet automatically adjust itself to fit the latitudes, tropical in middle, deserts out more and frozen caps.

This logic, if you'll pardon me MaxisWill, is to quote the kids "Fail." The argument that long legs equals speed can be addressed, but the system adopted in replacement made it yet more restrictive on creativity: instead of long legs, it is "best feet." The restrictions are towards bipeds, period. "Best designs" are little variant from this: I'm sure you've got the resources to look at "play" creatures developed from Cell stage compared to free-creation creatures made in the separate Creature Creator. I suspect you'll find mostly bipeds with either attack or pose hands at high level. Sure, there'll be some variation, but not nearly as much as you'd think, based on the nobody-fails paradigm you adopted.

Seriously, I never thought I'd accuse you of a lack of imagination, but the arguments that you with a run of 4 could never catch a creature of run 5 is not an excuse for gutting any variation. There is, right now, only (marginal) variation in appearance. There is no appeal in going back through the stage. You do know you can make it through without eating. Did you ever think to look to biology for some of the solutions to these problems? Creatures run faster than me. Then I'd better slow them down (webs) or catch them when they aren't running (stalking) or do some damage that will slow them down (venom) or catch them near a common resource (ambush) or corner them where they can't run (corral). That's just for starters. There are spiders that have modified poison glands to spit glue instead of venom. There are predators that stalk prey and remain upwind that can't outrun their prey, but can out-accelerate and out-corner them. Dolphins herd shoals of anchovy up to the surface of the water to deny them one route of escape.

An example of turning some of this to intuitive interfaces, think of movement ability as part of a tetrahedron of mutually exclusive abilities - like here:


This represents a duck, a creature that is not specialized, but is capable of all of these actions at a lower grade of ability. Throw out swim (since nobody can yet) and you'd have a triangle to drag on: climb means more flexible limbs, move is springier tendons and fewer degrees of freedom, and flight is controlled falling without wings (ability to splay and steer). Sure other factors affect it, but this is part of the "internals" - your limb length could be a total of ratio of limb length to torso instead, so that a lot of small legs equals a pair of large legs, but legs too large slow you down (not enough heart to pump into those limbs... but that's a hidden game effect).

Tradeoffs. That's what's missing. It's artificially attempted through the DNA system, but it doesn't work, it limits creativity more than anything, and it doesn't encourage experimentation or "play" with the design.

I doubt you'll read this, doubt you really care, and if anything are trying to take blame simply because you can. I'm not asking for an accurate five-places-of-precision science game, like I am absolutely certain some will accuse.

I wanted a toy,
I got a coloring book.

==============================
Now, to the folks who will flame, downrate, and accuse me of hubris and drub me off the forums for writing the above: I don't care. This game was over for me weeks ago, and downrate all you like. If Will truly wants to know any of this, he can read. To the rest: support the game if you like it. You don't have to care about my opinion either.


Enjoy your crayons.

Gritmonger wrote:The argument that long legs equals speed can be addressed, but the system adopted in replacement made it yet more restrictive on creativity: instead of long legs, it is "best feet." The restrictions are towards bipeds, period. "Best designs" are little variant from this

It really can't be put better than this. In an attempt to avoid the "everyone creates the same perfect variant" problem, it was just recreated in another way. I have seen many requests (and even some attempts at mods) for feet of each type being able to level up, rather than be forced to move up to the "perfect feet." Right now the only way to get around this is to wait for someone to make a decent mod that allows you to upgrade any feet, or wait for years and keep buying parts packs until you have some variety.

The comment on the Wii may be the best starting point to refute that vision, Mr. Wright.

Everybody knows the wii is just 2 gamecubes glued with duct tape. The catch is that it's fun not because of its processing, but because of its interface. Chris, like most of people in the game industry do not see this, because they are charmed by the idea of their own vision.

So instead of criticism about themselves, and real self-improvement tries, reflecting in their work, they have an attitude of imposing the same thoughts they had for years, out of laziness to change.

THAT is what this situation seems like. The game is good enough, with a nice range of creativity allowed? YES. But the the vision that started this game is no more. It's gone, the revolution is done by the half, and although spore is in history of game programming, it was denied it's original place in game playing, as it as fairly quoted as "coloring book instead of a toy".

SivCorp wrote:You've got to chose your target audiance, and then deliver on your own built up expectations.

QFT! Imagine if the developers of Fallout 3 had decided the game was too gory for the average player? The game would be absolutely atrocious. There would be fluffy bunnies running around, and other stupid things. Bethesda knew their targeted audience and delivered wonderfully.
I think SivCorp hits it right on the head here; Maxis and the developers just chose the wrong target audience. They tried to please everyone effectively SPORE most people off.
The game is good, but it could definitely be great. If you look that the threads pushing for a better Spore, you will find legitimate solutions to various problems.
All in all, don't try to please everyone- appeal to the masses or become a more science oriented game. That is the basic concept behind what will be your next success Maxis Team.

MaxisWill wrote:To take a quick tangent let me use the creature design vs. performance as an example. We had competing issues to face. First, we wanted the creature’s design to impact its in-game performance. Second, we wanted the economics of the editor to be simple and understandable and connected to performance. Third, we wanted a high amount of aesthetic diversity. We didn’t want there to be one ultimate design direction that the simulator was forcing all the creatures into. In other words if to be fast you had to have long legs that would have met the first goal, conflicted with the third goal and made the second much more complex.

Instead it's all about the feet. So a monopod with a hoof runs just as fast as a horse four times its size with four times as many legs that are four times as long.

Also, as I noted over on the xSpore.com forums, most of my issues with the game have absolutely ziltch to do with the editors. In fact, it has everything to do with what [b]isn't[/i] in the editors: NOTHING. Outside of one of the...7 editors I can't design intricate monstrosities that blow people's minds (in one way or another).

What's up with the inability to make a fully terraformed iceball populated, by....say...ARCTIC CREATURES AND PLANTS?

Or a scorching wasteland planet populated with CACTUS and SMALL LIZARDS (aka the freaking desert)?

What happens when I heat up a planet or cool it down? The T3 organisms die first, regardless of their environmental traits (i.e. if I freeze a planet, but the "Polar Bear" is the T3 carnivore it dies first, but the cactus at T1 medium plant dies last--seriously, WTF).

There is no "what happens with global warming?" simulations here. In fact, there's no need to even heat the planet up to find out what will happen. You know what a hot planet's terrain looks like, and here you have a little readout of the planet's T1 organisms, voila, no exploration needed. Moving on: wait, there's nothing to move on to.

If the space expansion fixes this, you know I'm not going to buy it right? I'm going to torrent it because then I'll have paid $50 for the game I expected to play the FIRST time. Same goes for any other "phase fixer" pack.

And screw the parts expansions. That's just money grubbing right there. And wasn't that the kind of expansion we weren't going to see because it was "vertical expansion" and "horizontal expansion"? Where are my 3D printed creatures? Where are my t-shirts and mouse pads?

I would like to know what Will's goals for Spore were.

If he wanted to make an open ended sandbox, then there needs to be a slew of changes to allow that -- the ability to add parts from any editor to any creation, a theme tool that actually works, customizing a planet BEFORE playing on it, naming other planets, whatever. If this is supposed to be our own custom toy world, why all the restrictions that modders are slowly "fixing"?

If he wanted to make a game fun to play that uses custom content, why is everything reduced to "beatdown, befriend, or buyout?" MMOs have less pointless grind than Spore.

We're supposed to be using Spore to tell "stories", yet we're restricted from including almost anything necessary for good stories -- individuals as heroes, relationships between individuals, scenes and settings. George Lucas NEEDS Luke Skywalker. Tolkein NEEDS Frodo. And Spore leaves out that key element that the Sims had - personal individuality. It's hard for me to care about a planet of citizens who look like ants from my UFO - whether my own people, or those of potential friends and enemies.

Will talks about "emergent gameplay", especially when defending the game to the lady from NASA, so I'd like to know what version of Spore he is playing, because there's barely any SCRIPTED gameplay in the Spore I have.

It seems to me Spore tried to be too many things, and as a result, failed at all of them. There's almost nothing enjoyable in the full game that the free Creature Creator didn't provide.

MaxisWill wrote:...As the lead designer my goal through most of the project was to make sure the gameplay didn’t end up too complex, which resulted in simplifying many of the level dynamics and editor consequences. I felt like we were already asking quite a bit from the players as we took them through the various level genres. This was totally my judgment call...

You grotesquely underestimated your audience and spent years building a game that becomes boring inside of a week. Even my 11 year old isn't interested in Spore any more. I go back to games like Sims, SimCity, and Civ over and over even though I've played them for thousands of hours now. Your audience is at least 50% people who were playing SimCity in the 1990's (i.e. people who are close to 30 or over 30). Making SPORE a diversion for simpletons was to ignore the very people who have been buying your games for years. And to promote the game as you did was to encourage those very same people to buy it.

I'm a software developer, not a game designer, but I've been gaming for years and I feel like you tricked me, and I am not happy about it. You don't market tiddlywinks as if it was chess. There's absolutely NO WAY I will buy any expansion or parts packs for Spore at this point unless they radically alter the game (read: add SIGNIFICANT complexity)--I don't play with colorforms or Mr. Potato Head any more--I'm an adult. Next time you make a game like this please put "AGES 7-10" on the box.

I note on xfire that Spore is currently ranked at #53 in popularity. Microsoft Solitaire ranks at #37. That's pretty sobering.

Thank you for coming forward and taking responsibility for this farce. I'm going to have to consider very carefully the next Will Wright game that hits the market--wait for (customer) reviews and such. But at least I will consider it. That's more than I was prepared to do before you spoke up. Good on you for defending your team.

Doubtless the fanboys will roast me alive at this point, but I don't care. I'm not coming back to this forum.

PlasteredDragon wrote:I note on xfire that Spore is currently ranked at #53 in popularity. Microsoft Solitaire ranks at #37

I was just looking at that! Solitare has been solidly in the upper 30's since I've started checking. But Spore (full game PLUS creature creator) has been dropping like a stone. Though Spore does get a bit of increased gameplay on the weekends.

But yes, I was also one of those people playing SimCity in the 90's. In fact, I missed my Calc III final because I'd lost track of time while playing it. That sort of immersion simply did not happen with Spore.