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Oh, Spore. That game was hyped so much, given it was designed by none other than Will Wright it previewed like it would be the most amazing game ever made. De

Oh, Spore. That game was hyped so much, given it was designed by none other than Will Wright it previewed like it would be the most amazing game ever made. Despite it being reviewed every well upon release, gamers expected even more. It's a good example of how it is important to temper your customer's expectations regardless if you believe you have a solid product, as you may inadvertently set expectations higher than you can possibly achieve.

DonHopkins 3y ago
Here are my notes and summary of the GDC 2005 talk where Will Wright first revealed Spore, which I asked Will to review and check for accuracy. It's interesting to compare the design he described in the talk with what Maxis eventually shipped. Video of the hour long talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ScRG_reIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ScRG_reIw One of the essential problems with designing a Massively Multi Player Online Game like Spore is that players at different levels of the simulation run at different time scales. Maintaining time synchronization between players is also the reason The Sims Online doesn't have a "Pause" button or speed controls, or automatically pause in build and buy mode, like The Sims. So instead, Spore is a Massively Single Player Online Game. Users don't interact with each other in real time, but instead users can create their own content, and it exchanges that content between users asynchronously. That's also how The Sims Exchange lets players asynchronously upload and download their Sims save files along with web pages describing their house, sims, and photo album. https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-future-of-content-will-wrights-spore-demo-at-gdc-3-11-2005-9eab0cedc583 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-future-of-content-will-wri... >The Future of Content — Will Wright’s Spore Demo at GDC 3/11/2005 >What I learned about content from the Sims. >…and why it’s driven me to procedural methods. >…And what I now plan to do with them. >Talk by Will Wright, Game Developers Conference, 3/11/2005. >Based on notes taken by Don Hopkins at the talk, and other discussions and review by Will Wright. The title of the talk “The Future of Content” was purposefully vague, because Will wanted to show Spore in public for the first time, but he had to flat out lie about the title and send a fake set of slides for the EA executives to review, so they didn’t know what he was about to do. A more accurate title for the talk would be “What I Learned About Content from The Sims, and Why it’s Driven Me to Procedural Methods, and What I Now Plan to Do With Them”. >Introduction >Will Wright started his talk by saying that he wanted to show this to the game developer community first, before a commercial show like E3. [...] Here's my favorite feature that never made it into the final game, which is still a hardcore AI problem ;) : >Procedural Mating >Mating calls. Listen for answers. Approach a compatible mate (same type of body you just created) in a nest. Get a good response. >Procedural mating: Animals squawk and crawl over each other in allkinds of ways, then find something that works, and start humping. >Rewarded for mating by laying an egg. >Player rewarded for reproducing: the currency of the game. Go into edit mode to spend currency to buy features and edit the next generation. You have to start saving up for brains, which are expensive. Think of it as a college education fund. And I love his vignette through the lands of Pokemon, Neopets, dinosaurs, and deep into the star-speckled, rainbow-trimmed, cotton candy, cloud world called “Care a Lot”: >Make the editor a toy. >Make portability of content transparent to the player. Game downloads content automatically, without requiring user to visit a web site or download it themselves. >Most other evolution games don’t make you feel like you own the creature. >Pokemon, Neopets, Care Bears. Give kids a sense of ownership and mastery over the facts and details of the characters. >Loved dinosaurs as a kid. Knew the rock-scissors-paper of different species of dinosaurs, which was something his mom didn’t know. Mastery of facts. >Which Care Bear are you? >Care bears. Started as greeting cards. Found a web app that categorizes your personality: Which Care Bear are you? Each care bear has special abilities. Care bear have cousins, that aren’t even bears. Care bears live in a star-speckled, rainbow-trimmed, cotton candy, cloud world called “Care a Lot”. If they fall out of the clouds, they land in the “Forest of Feelings” (Kingdom of Caring). Forest of Feelings is over the earth. So the Earth must be the “Kingdom of people who don’t give a shit”. Spore is an homage to many other games: >There’s a rule that you don’t mix genres. Always wanted to break that rule. >Homage to many different games at different levels: >Tidepool: Pacman. >Evolution: Diablo. >Tribal: Populous. >City: SimCity. >Civ: Risk/Civ. >20% of the best of those games. 40% of the game experience is really just aesthetic, appreciating the content. >A different editor associated with each level. Also: >Wired asked for an illustration to print in the magazine, anything he wanted. So he made a diagram of Spore that Wired published, but he didn’t tell them what it was. The design docs for Spore have been out in Wired Magazine for a year now. (It’s in the Feb 2004 issue of Wired.) Will’s Secret Diagram of Spore published in February 2004 Wired: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:4800/format:webp/1*6s2pjuNW0_0nkVZNEwXguw.jpeg https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:4800/format:webp/1*6s2... And of course the 1977 film "Powers of 10" was a big influence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 Will's advice for game designers and creative humans in general: >Advice: If you have a weird idea that’s so outside of the box, don’t forget it. You should go back and revisit your weird ideas later, because you can never know where they might lead to. >Epilogue: >For more about how Spore was designed and developed, check out A Brief History of Spore by Chaim Gingold: >A Brief History of Spore http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/02/brief-history-of-spore/ http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/02/brief-history-of-spore... >This essay was written part way through Spore’s development, and summarizes one of the biggest transitions the project made — unknown to many — from what could have been a SimEarth like game/science toy to a capital-G computer Game. It tells how Spore made some of its early, and most crucial, navigational decisions down the branches of design possibility, to use Will’s own language. I feel like a discussion of how Spore turned out versus audience and developer expectations is a whole other story that should be distilled and told, but this is not the place for that. >There’s also the Joystiq interviews Spore’s Chaim Gingold and Chris Hecker: https://www.engadget.com/2006-11-13-joystiq-interviews-spores-chaim-gingold-and-chris-hecker.html https://www.engadget.com/2006-11-13-joystiq-interviews-spore... >On the first day of the Montreal International Game Summit, Chaim Gingold and Chris Hecker presented a keynote on the topic of “advanced prototyping,” specifically as to how it pertains to Spore, the game that currently occupies their time over at EA/Maxis. The same talk, given at the 2006 Game Developers Conference, was rated higher than any other presentation, including Will Wright’s, their boss’s. Before the keynote, Joystiq had a chance to chat with both Chaim and Chris, and discuss their impetus for joining Maxis, the evolution of Spore, and the relationship between Maxis and EA. >And don’t miss Chaim Gingold’s talk about Spore’s Magic Crayons: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/527/SPORE-s-Magic https://www.gdcvault.com/play/527/SPORE-s-Magic
stavros 3y ago
> Despite it being reviewed every well upon release, gamers expected even more. Gamers expected what was presented in the initial demo. A really dynamic world that changed depending on your creature's abilities, a sandbox game where you could affect things by designing different types of creatures. All this was scrapped, and what was developed was very different than what was shown in the early prototype demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8dvMDFOFnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8dvMDFOFnA No wonder gamers wanted the thing they got excited about in the first place.
- grubbs 3y ago
  I remember playing this game quite a bit instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_%26_White_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_%26_White_(video_game)
  - stavros 3y ago
    I really liked that one as well.
  - Levitz 3y ago
    One of the few games in which I couldn't for the life of mine advance, even years later.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    And an other that hugely disappointed when compared to hype. It had entire multi-year series of columns hyping it selling all kinds of various ideas and other stuff. With most of them ending half-baked and poorly done...
- dicytea 3y ago
  I still sometimes dream that someone would leak the demo game (if you let me be a bit more greedy, along with the source code). Hey it might not be that functional, but it would still be awesome to explore what it was actually capable of.
  - 3y ago
FranzFerdiNaN 3y ago
An evolution sandbox was promised in the early demo, a boring railroaded game was delivered.
Krasnol 3y ago
....and then came Star Citizen.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  One day, maybe, as long as whales keep pumping money into hypothetical ships that they might be able to use in a hypothetical upcoming game.
  - geraldwhen 3y ago
    Star citizen is the most obvious money laundering scheme imaginable. I await the documentary in 15 years.
delusional 3y ago
Spore wasn't really a victim of high expectation, but rather a cool ambitious idea that just didn't work as a game. Unlike many others, I think the game they delivered matched very well to what they demoed. The issue was that it just didn't congeal into a game. The sacrifices they did have to make (making it linear and limiting the freeform sandbox aspects) were necessary to make it a game at all. The ambitious "this will make you see the connection between all stages of life" goal isn't achievable if the game you're building isn't going to actually be a good game. There just wasn't any good gameplay loop in there.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  "There just wasn't any good gameplay loop in there. " Opinions differ, to me it was a fun arcade game, with some evolution theme. No more, no less. But I also did not read anything about it before and had no expectations.
  - scheeseman486 3y ago
    Until it turns into an action RPG, then an RTS, then a Civ-like. Which all sounds cool on paper, but usually games that stack on systems and genres like that end up cleanly integrating them with each other. Spore treats them more like they're a minigame collection, it never feels like a cohesive game. The building tools are great though.
    - hutzlibu 3y ago
      Ok yeah, I stopped at the civ like stage, where it was too weird, that I can adjust the evolution of fighting machines and make them fast or strong just as needed in real time. That felt so half baked. And the "action rpg" was also not very thought through, but still enjoyable.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  There were plenty of good gameplay loops, they just didn't get enough time and development. Spore's biggest shortcoming, in my opinion, is that there's not enough of it. The creature stage is interesting and fun, partially because it lasts long and there's an exploration element. Then you get to the tribal stage and the second tribal stage but with cars and honestly I kind of just rush through that. Then you get to the end game which is the most interesting (but least customisable) part. The building blocks for two RTSes are there, but they've been dumbed down so far that there's no fun to be had. With a tech tree and bigger tribes, I think a minor Age of Empires stage could be great. The city stage would have the same benefits, but I can imagine a civ style game portraying the technological and cultural progress from the bronze age to the space age would be a nice intermediate. Instead of your evolutionary tree picking one or two arbitrary flags in each stage, you could keep the tech tree going for much longer. Show me how I got that teraforming equipment, don't just teleport it into the store because I traveled a thousand spots! The end game could do more. Perhaps a Stellaris style unit distant unit control mechanic would allow for a more realistic galactic simulator, with different ships of your empire whizzing around while you go on your space adventure. I have a feeling that if the game were developed by a Paradox or a Firaxis, the later stages would be a lot better. It would be fun if Paradox were to set up a system where you can automatically launch the next game, all the way from Rome Total War through Hearts of Iron, and maybe jump to Stellaris from there. I know converters exist but it's not a perfectly clean process with fan projects needed for some steps.
dougmwne 3y ago
For as ambitious as it was, it just didn’t have any fun gameplay loops. It ended up being a bunch of mediocre and simplistic clones of much better games tied together with a rather academic concept. It was absolutely innovative, just not in any way that made it fun to play.
- ma9o 3y ago
  Off-topic: I really reasonate with with an old comment of yours, ID 32330140. Commenting here as I couldn't find any another way of contacting you, could you send me an email? Thanks
ehnto 3y ago
It's usually not the developers fault, games media exploits hype from ferverent speculation to the point where even the things unsaid become evidence for features that don't exist. It doesn't happen to every game just like not every video goes viral, but if the community picks your game to be next life changing event in their lives you will 100% disappoint them. It's been getting worse over the years and I basically don't pay attention to negative reviews anymore. It feels like an over-centre mechanism, games can't be "good", they have to be the best ever or total trash, no in between.
- acdha 3y ago
  The big game studios set that narrative entirely for marketing purposes. They make hugely expensive games and expect epic profits so they want things to be hyped up “must buy” phenomena rather than slow growing, similar to how Hollywood focuses on the opening weekend sales. If they wanted to change this it’d be easy to fun smaller games (or ones with less expensive assets), release them only when they’re completed, and pitch them realistically to the press … but then they’d be targeting modest profits and their executives wouldn’t be getting yachts. It seems similar to how the VC model encourages failures trying to turn every concept into a unicorn.
SilverBirch 3y ago
It's funny I actually had it in my head that this game was from Molyneux because it so overpromised and under-deliverd. It was a good game, but it essentially had 5(?) sections - amoeba, hunter, community, city builder, and spaceship. Each of those sections can be done as a single stand alone full budget game. Imagine if Spore had released with FTL as it's spaceship stage? And Cities Skylines as it's city builder? The scope was just way too big and the result was very thin.
- lordnacho 3y ago
  That's what I thought as well. I thought it was a bunch of little games glued together into a... little game. I didn't quite understand what you were carrying with you from one stage to the next, and why it mattered. I ended up not playing it much after buying it, such was the disappointment.
  - tharkun__ 3y ago
    Spore is the only game I ever actually sold. It was just so bad and boring. The first stage was the most fun and felt too short. The space exploration part was so tedious and boring I just restarted the game a few times to play the fun parts. Then I sold the game.
    - Etherlord87 3y ago
      I agree, I also likes the first part the most. But it wasn't that amazing either, it was just barely good as opposed to the rest of the game. 1st part: Cell - on the level of free Kongregate/Newsgrounds flash games, except with better graphics. Later an online game agar.io came out which I find better in regards to challenge, fun, replayability. 2nd part: Evolution - Very basic MMORPG, except single-player (the mmo part is being able to see other creations in your world). Animal creation was quite innovative, but also underwhelming, because it didn't affect the physics of the animal… Something like QWOP would be nice, where the computer would try to automatically convert simple controls to animal muscles… 3rd part: Tribe - Again, a simple flash game, boring 4th part: Civilization - again a simple game, I think the most challenging phase and quite fun, but building designing being only decorative was again underwhelming… 5th part: Cosmos - it had a Star Control feel to me, except it was simpler, and Star Control is a much older game!
etempleton 3y ago
It was hard not to let your imagination run wild after SimCity and then The Sims. Both games felts infinitely complex at the time. The Sims 1 in particular had so many hidden interactions and secrets.
qamorgan 3y ago
A professor of mine once succinctly summarized that principle as: Success = Outcomes / Expectations
- ilyt 3y ago
  game that was expected to be shit and turned out to be shit is not a success
deleted 3y ago
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ouid 3y ago
No, it was not a good game, and it was not particularly well received. The nigh universal hatred for the game was not because the marketers did a bad job. It was because it was a bad game that they lied about being a good game. It was a case of fraud, and it was more or less repeated in exactly the same way with Sim City 2013. It's worth noting that these two games bookend the career of John Riccitiello as the CEO of EA, and basically ever since then he has been the CEO at Unity.
mattl 3y ago
I remember the DRM ruining it to the point where it was unusable. Or was that the new Sim City?
- acdha 3y ago
  That was Spore - and the DRM was an issue even when the game wasn’t running. I had an iMac I chose to wipe & reinstall rather than play whack-a-mole deleting its kernel extensions and background processes.
- Tangurena2 3y ago
  It was Spore's DRM. It was the only DRM that was flaky enough to require reinstalling Windows every few months. I finally gave up reinstalling Spore, although I did buy it on Steam this year - but I still have not reinstalled it.
dougSF70 3y ago
Funny story. I worked at a firm that was commissioned to do some market research on Spore before its launch. We were given some videos of game play elements to show gamers and get their response to the game ahead of launch. We hosted the videos on our company server and scripted an online survey with the videos embedded in them. Participants could watch the videos and then answer questions. We launched the survey on a Friday to pick up responses over the weekend. When I got to work on Monday I logged on to my computer and noticed that everything was running really slowly. Wasn't just me, my coworkers were experiencing the same network issue. We got out IT team to investigate...turns out our server (on-prem) was busily handling a lot of network traffic, serving up video links to folks. Someone answering the survey had copied the links to the videos from the survey and posted them on to Kotaku. Since the game was so hyped the post got a lot of interest and our server got a lot of traffic. As you can imagine, the next 24 hours was spent eating *@#t and apologizing to the client....
acdha 3y ago
> Despite it being reviewed every well upon release, gamers expected even more. I don’t think that’s true - this review seems representative: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/09/spore-review/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/09/spore-review/ > Perhaps the whole concept of Spore is just too high, when all is said and done. I honestly had more fun with the rather middlebrow The Sims series. But one also gets the uncomfortable feeling that each phase is now just a shell to be filled in with upcoming expansions and for-pay content packs. Imagine an expansion pack release for each phase, adding in the depth that's sorely missing. It's not a fun thought. There was also a problem with the DRM system being buggy (the iMac I installed it on had to be wiped to return to normal system performance) and the whole game crashing too often. Like others, I think it goes back to massively over-promising: the amoeba game on the iPhone was the most fun because it was a complete game. The full game was like they tried to make 4 separate games and made each one progressively less fun because they just didn’t have the resources to do any of them well. I spent many hours playing Civ, SimCity, SimAnt, Railroad Tycoon, Master of Orion, Master of Magic, etc. so I was expecting a game with similar rewards for spending time on it but never even completed Spore because my completionist drive couldn’t make up for the boredom.
ilyt 3y ago
That game stopped me from being hyped for video game releases after.
ChoGGi 3y ago
> as you may inadvertently set expectations higher than you can possibly achieve The expectations were mostly from the GDC video, I believe? Gameplay starts around 12:30: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ofA6YWVTURU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ofA6YWVTURU
hinkley 3y ago
The lessons from World of Warcraft and Doom are give your users tools to write their own features/maps, then promote the best of the best to be part of the game. Just be sure to reward the winners with something, like a lifetime subscription. Spore tried to make everyone a creator, and “everyone” are terrible people. In the YouTube Era he may have had more options, like taking creations from popular streamers, or highly upvoted contributions.

DonHopkins 3y ago

Here are my notes and summary of the GDC 2005 talk where Will Wright first revealed Spore, which I asked Will to review and check for accuracy. It's interesting to compare the design he described in the talk with what Maxis eventually shipped. Video of the hour long talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ScRG_reIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ScRG_reIw One of the essential problems with designing a Massively Multi Player Online Game like Spore is that players at different levels of the simulation run at different time scales. Maintaining time synchronization between players is also the reason The Sims Online doesn't have a "Pause" button or speed controls, or automatically pause in build and buy mode, like The Sims. So instead, Spore is a Massively Single Player Online Game. Users don't interact with each other in real time, but instead users can create their own content, and it exchanges that content between users asynchronously. That's also how The Sims Exchange lets players asynchronously upload and download their Sims save files along with web pages describing their house, sims, and photo album. https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-future-of-content-will-wrights-spore-demo-at-gdc-3-11-2005-9eab0cedc583 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-future-of-content-will-wri... >The Future of Content — Will Wright’s Spore Demo at GDC 3/11/2005 >What I learned about content from the Sims. >…and why it’s driven me to procedural methods. >…And what I now plan to do with them. >Talk by Will Wright, Game Developers Conference, 3/11/2005. >Based on notes taken by Don Hopkins at the talk, and other discussions and review by Will Wright. The title of the talk “The Future of Content” was purposefully vague, because Will wanted to show Spore in public for the first time, but he had to flat out lie about the title and send a fake set of slides for the EA executives to review, so they didn’t know what he was about to do. A more accurate title for the talk would be “What I Learned About Content from The Sims, and Why it’s Driven Me to Procedural Methods, and What I Now Plan to Do With Them”. >Introduction >Will Wright started his talk by saying that he wanted to show this to the game developer community first, before a commercial show like E3. [...] Here's my favorite feature that never made it into the final game, which is still a hardcore AI problem ;) : >Procedural Mating >Mating calls. Listen for answers. Approach a compatible mate (same type of body you just created) in a nest. Get a good response. >Procedural mating: Animals squawk and crawl over each other in allkinds of ways, then find something that works, and start humping. >Rewarded for mating by laying an egg. >Player rewarded for reproducing: the currency of the game. Go into edit mode to spend currency to buy features and edit the next generation. You have to start saving up for brains, which are expensive. Think of it as a college education fund. And I love his vignette through the lands of Pokemon, Neopets, dinosaurs, and deep into the star-speckled, rainbow-trimmed, cotton candy, cloud world called “Care a Lot”: >Make the editor a toy. >Make portability of content transparent to the player. Game downloads content automatically, without requiring user to visit a web site or download it themselves. >Most other evolution games don’t make you feel like you own the creature. >Pokemon, Neopets, Care Bears. Give kids a sense of ownership and mastery over the facts and details of the characters. >Loved dinosaurs as a kid. Knew the rock-scissors-paper of different species of dinosaurs, which was something his mom didn’t know. Mastery of facts. >Which Care Bear are you? >Care bears. Started as greeting cards. Found a web app that categorizes your personality: Which Care Bear are you? Each care bear has special abilities. Care bear have cousins, that aren’t even bears. Care bears live in a star-speckled, rainbow-trimmed, cotton candy, cloud world called “Care a Lot”. If they fall out of the clouds, they land in the “Forest of Feelings” (Kingdom of Caring). Forest of Feelings is over the earth. So the Earth must be the “Kingdom of people who don’t give a shit”. Spore is an homage to many other games: >There’s a rule that you don’t mix genres. Always wanted to break that rule. >Homage to many different games at different levels: >Tidepool: Pacman. >Evolution: Diablo. >Tribal: Populous. >City: SimCity. >Civ: Risk/Civ. >20% of the best of those games. 40% of the game experience is really just aesthetic, appreciating the content. >A different editor associated with each level. Also: >Wired asked for an illustration to print in the magazine, anything he wanted. So he made a diagram of Spore that Wired published, but he didn’t tell them what it was. The design docs for Spore have been out in Wired Magazine for a year now. (It’s in the Feb 2004 issue of Wired.) Will’s Secret Diagram of Spore published in February 2004 Wired: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:4800/format:webp/1*6s2pjuNW0_0nkVZNEwXguw.jpeg https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:4800/format:webp/1*6s2... And of course the 1977 film "Powers of 10" was a big influence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 Will's advice for game designers and creative humans in general: >Advice: If you have a weird idea that’s so outside of the box, don’t forget it. You should go back and revisit your weird ideas later, because you can never know where they might lead to. >Epilogue: >For more about how Spore was designed and developed, check out A Brief History of Spore by Chaim Gingold: >A Brief History of Spore http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/02/brief-history-of-spore/ http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/02/brief-history-of-spore... >This essay was written part way through Spore’s development, and summarizes one of the biggest transitions the project made — unknown to many — from what could have been a SimEarth like game/science toy to a capital-G computer Game. It tells how Spore made some of its early, and most crucial, navigational decisions down the branches of design possibility, to use Will’s own language. I feel like a discussion of how Spore turned out versus audience and developer expectations is a whole other story that should be distilled and told, but this is not the place for that. >There’s also the Joystiq interviews Spore’s Chaim Gingold and Chris Hecker: https://www.engadget.com/2006-11-13-joystiq-interviews-spores-chaim-gingold-and-chris-hecker.html https://www.engadget.com/2006-11-13-joystiq-interviews-spore... >On the first day of the Montreal International Game Summit, Chaim Gingold and Chris Hecker presented a keynote on the topic of “advanced prototyping,” specifically as to how it pertains to Spore, the game that currently occupies their time over at EA/Maxis. The same talk, given at the 2006 Game Developers Conference, was rated higher than any other presentation, including Will Wright’s, their boss’s. Before the keynote, Joystiq had a chance to chat with both Chaim and Chris, and discuss their impetus for joining Maxis, the evolution of Spore, and the relationship between Maxis and EA. >And don’t miss Chaim Gingold’s talk about Spore’s Magic Crayons: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/527/SPORE-s-Magic https://www.gdcvault.com/play/527/SPORE-s-Magic

stavros 3y ago

> Despite it being reviewed every well upon release, gamers expected even more. Gamers expected what was presented in the initial demo. A really dynamic world that changed depending on your creature's abilities, a sandbox game where you could affect things by designing different types of creatures. All this was scrapped, and what was developed was very different than what was shown in the early prototype demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8dvMDFOFnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8dvMDFOFnA No wonder gamers wanted the thing they got excited about in the first place.

grubbs 3y ago
I remember playing this game quite a bit instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_%26_White_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_%26_White_(video_game)
- stavros 3y ago
  I really liked that one as well.
- Levitz 3y ago
  One of the few games in which I couldn't for the life of mine advance, even years later.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  And an other that hugely disappointed when compared to hype. It had entire multi-year series of columns hyping it selling all kinds of various ideas and other stuff. With most of them ending half-baked and poorly done...
dicytea 3y ago
I still sometimes dream that someone would leak the demo game (if you let me be a bit more greedy, along with the source code). Hey it might not be that functional, but it would still be awesome to explore what it was actually capable of.
- 3y ago

FranzFerdiNaN 3y ago

An evolution sandbox was promised in the early demo, a boring railroaded game was delivered.

Krasnol 3y ago

....and then came Star Citizen.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
One day, maybe, as long as whales keep pumping money into hypothetical ships that they might be able to use in a hypothetical upcoming game.
- geraldwhen 3y ago
  Star citizen is the most obvious money laundering scheme imaginable. I await the documentary in 15 years.

delusional 3y ago

Spore wasn't really a victim of high expectation, but rather a cool ambitious idea that just didn't work as a game. Unlike many others, I think the game they delivered matched very well to what they demoed. The issue was that it just didn't congeal into a game. The sacrifices they did have to make (making it linear and limiting the freeform sandbox aspects) were necessary to make it a game at all. The ambitious "this will make you see the connection between all stages of life" goal isn't achievable if the game you're building isn't going to actually be a good game. There just wasn't any good gameplay loop in there.

hutzlibu 3y ago
"There just wasn't any good gameplay loop in there. " Opinions differ, to me it was a fun arcade game, with some evolution theme. No more, no less. But I also did not read anything about it before and had no expectations.
- scheeseman486 3y ago
  Until it turns into an action RPG, then an RTS, then a Civ-like. Which all sounds cool on paper, but usually games that stack on systems and genres like that end up cleanly integrating them with each other. Spore treats them more like they're a minigame collection, it never feels like a cohesive game. The building tools are great though.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    Ok yeah, I stopped at the civ like stage, where it was too weird, that I can adjust the evolution of fighting machines and make them fast or strong just as needed in real time. That felt so half baked. And the "action rpg" was also not very thought through, but still enjoyable.
jeroenhd 3y ago
There were plenty of good gameplay loops, they just didn't get enough time and development. Spore's biggest shortcoming, in my opinion, is that there's not enough of it. The creature stage is interesting and fun, partially because it lasts long and there's an exploration element. Then you get to the tribal stage and the second tribal stage but with cars and honestly I kind of just rush through that. Then you get to the end game which is the most interesting (but least customisable) part. The building blocks for two RTSes are there, but they've been dumbed down so far that there's no fun to be had. With a tech tree and bigger tribes, I think a minor Age of Empires stage could be great. The city stage would have the same benefits, but I can imagine a civ style game portraying the technological and cultural progress from the bronze age to the space age would be a nice intermediate. Instead of your evolutionary tree picking one or two arbitrary flags in each stage, you could keep the tech tree going for much longer. Show me how I got that teraforming equipment, don't just teleport it into the store because I traveled a thousand spots! The end game could do more. Perhaps a Stellaris style unit distant unit control mechanic would allow for a more realistic galactic simulator, with different ships of your empire whizzing around while you go on your space adventure. I have a feeling that if the game were developed by a Paradox or a Firaxis, the later stages would be a lot better. It would be fun if Paradox were to set up a system where you can automatically launch the next game, all the way from Rome Total War through Hearts of Iron, and maybe jump to Stellaris from there. I know converters exist but it's not a perfectly clean process with fan projects needed for some steps.

dougmwne 3y ago

For as ambitious as it was, it just didn’t have any fun gameplay loops. It ended up being a bunch of mediocre and simplistic clones of much better games tied together with a rather academic concept. It was absolutely innovative, just not in any way that made it fun to play.

ma9o 3y ago
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ehnto 3y ago

It's usually not the developers fault, games media exploits hype from ferverent speculation to the point where even the things unsaid become evidence for features that don't exist. It doesn't happen to every game just like not every video goes viral, but if the community picks your game to be next life changing event in their lives you will 100% disappoint them. It's been getting worse over the years and I basically don't pay attention to negative reviews anymore. It feels like an over-centre mechanism, games can't be "good", they have to be the best ever or total trash, no in between.

acdha 3y ago
The big game studios set that narrative entirely for marketing purposes. They make hugely expensive games and expect epic profits so they want things to be hyped up “must buy” phenomena rather than slow growing, similar to how Hollywood focuses on the opening weekend sales. If they wanted to change this it’d be easy to fun smaller games (or ones with less expensive assets), release them only when they’re completed, and pitch them realistically to the press … but then they’d be targeting modest profits and their executives wouldn’t be getting yachts. It seems similar to how the VC model encourages failures trying to turn every concept into a unicorn.

SilverBirch 3y ago

It's funny I actually had it in my head that this game was from Molyneux because it so overpromised and under-deliverd. It was a good game, but it essentially had 5(?) sections - amoeba, hunter, community, city builder, and spaceship. Each of those sections can be done as a single stand alone full budget game. Imagine if Spore had released with FTL as it's spaceship stage? And Cities Skylines as it's city builder? The scope was just way too big and the result was very thin.

lordnacho 3y ago
That's what I thought as well. I thought it was a bunch of little games glued together into a... little game. I didn't quite understand what you were carrying with you from one stage to the next, and why it mattered. I ended up not playing it much after buying it, such was the disappointment.
- tharkun__ 3y ago
  Spore is the only game I ever actually sold. It was just so bad and boring. The first stage was the most fun and felt too short. The space exploration part was so tedious and boring I just restarted the game a few times to play the fun parts. Then I sold the game.
  - Etherlord87 3y ago
    I agree, I also likes the first part the most. But it wasn't that amazing either, it was just barely good as opposed to the rest of the game. 1st part: Cell - on the level of free Kongregate/Newsgrounds flash games, except with better graphics. Later an online game agar.io came out which I find better in regards to challenge, fun, replayability. 2nd part: Evolution - Very basic MMORPG, except single-player (the mmo part is being able to see other creations in your world). Animal creation was quite innovative, but also underwhelming, because it didn't affect the physics of the animal… Something like QWOP would be nice, where the computer would try to automatically convert simple controls to animal muscles… 3rd part: Tribe - Again, a simple flash game, boring 4th part: Civilization - again a simple game, I think the most challenging phase and quite fun, but building designing being only decorative was again underwhelming… 5th part: Cosmos - it had a Star Control feel to me, except it was simpler, and Star Control is a much older game!

etempleton 3y ago

It was hard not to let your imagination run wild after SimCity and then The Sims. Both games felts infinitely complex at the time. The Sims 1 in particular had so many hidden interactions and secrets.

qamorgan 3y ago

A professor of mine once succinctly summarized that principle as: Success = Outcomes / Expectations

ilyt 3y ago
game that was expected to be shit and turned out to be shit is not a success

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ouid 3y ago

No, it was not a good game, and it was not particularly well received. The nigh universal hatred for the game was not because the marketers did a bad job. It was because it was a bad game that they lied about being a good game. It was a case of fraud, and it was more or less repeated in exactly the same way with Sim City 2013. It's worth noting that these two games bookend the career of John Riccitiello as the CEO of EA, and basically ever since then he has been the CEO at Unity.

mattl 3y ago

I remember the DRM ruining it to the point where it was unusable. Or was that the new Sim City?

acdha 3y ago
That was Spore - and the DRM was an issue even when the game wasn’t running. I had an iMac I chose to wipe & reinstall rather than play whack-a-mole deleting its kernel extensions and background processes.
Tangurena2 3y ago
It was Spore's DRM. It was the only DRM that was flaky enough to require reinstalling Windows every few months. I finally gave up reinstalling Spore, although I did buy it on Steam this year - but I still have not reinstalled it.

dougSF70 3y ago

Funny story. I worked at a firm that was commissioned to do some market research on Spore before its launch. We were given some videos of game play elements to show gamers and get their response to the game ahead of launch. We hosted the videos on our company server and scripted an online survey with the videos embedded in them. Participants could watch the videos and then answer questions. We launched the survey on a Friday to pick up responses over the weekend. When I got to work on Monday I logged on to my computer and noticed that everything was running really slowly. Wasn't just me, my coworkers were experiencing the same network issue. We got out IT team to investigate...turns out our server (on-prem) was busily handling a lot of network traffic, serving up video links to folks. Someone answering the survey had copied the links to the videos from the survey and posted them on to Kotaku. Since the game was so hyped the post got a lot of interest and our server got a lot of traffic. As you can imagine, the next 24 hours was spent eating *@#t and apologizing to the client....

acdha 3y ago

> Despite it being reviewed every well upon release, gamers expected even more. I don’t think that’s true - this review seems representative: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/09/spore-review/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/09/spore-review/ > Perhaps the whole concept of Spore is just too high, when all is said and done. I honestly had more fun with the rather middlebrow The Sims series. But one also gets the uncomfortable feeling that each phase is now just a shell to be filled in with upcoming expansions and for-pay content packs. Imagine an expansion pack release for each phase, adding in the depth that's sorely missing. It's not a fun thought. There was also a problem with the DRM system being buggy (the iMac I installed it on had to be wiped to return to normal system performance) and the whole game crashing too often. Like others, I think it goes back to massively over-promising: the amoeba game on the iPhone was the most fun because it was a complete game. The full game was like they tried to make 4 separate games and made each one progressively less fun because they just didn’t have the resources to do any of them well. I spent many hours playing Civ, SimCity, SimAnt, Railroad Tycoon, Master of Orion, Master of Magic, etc. so I was expecting a game with similar rewards for spending time on it but never even completed Spore because my completionist drive couldn’t make up for the boredom.

ilyt 3y ago

That game stopped me from being hyped for video game releases after.

ChoGGi 3y ago

> as you may inadvertently set expectations higher than you can possibly achieve The expectations were mostly from the GDC video, I believe? Gameplay starts around 12:30: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ofA6YWVTURU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ofA6YWVTURU

hinkley 3y ago

The lessons from World of Warcraft and Doom are give your users tools to write their own features/maps, then promote the best of the best to be part of the game. Just be sure to reward the winners with something, like a lifetime subscription. Spore tried to make everyone a creator, and “everyone” are terrible people. In the YouTube Era he may have had more options, like taking creations from popular streamers, or highly upvoted contributions.