The autosave is the most obvious example. This is a game that encourages players to go through a multi-hour session in a single sitting for one of the easier achievements, and which can easily involve dozens of hours of gameplay time. Meanwhile, the ability to encounter your own beings and/or empire doesn’t really come up often — I ran into my own creations several times through autogenerate, but never had a reason to spend time near one of my own empires. The former is basic; it’s design and important to how players experience the game… but the Feature comes first.

The creature creator (and, to a much, much greater degree, Tribal clothing and Civilization vehicle creator) has similar concerns. Building things from the ground up and having those choices affect the being’s abilities was a Feature, but one that just didn’t work. Instead of abandoning the Feature, the actual gameplay attributes are reduced or removed — there’s no lasting benefits or costs for picking up feathers early on in Creature since you can just add them on while evolving to Tribal, or where your designs in Tribal really change things for Civ or space. The reasons are obvious, but rather than abandon the Feature (and thus either guide people toward certain designs or divorce form from all essential function), the gameplay choices were abandoned or reduced to make the Feature work.

There are places where this works out. I’m not sure this is one of those situations.

(It’s not, as I complained before, that Tribal is *easy* that’s the real problem – it’s that there’s nothing really interesting about it – even the creator options are horrible.)

Basically the main point I made of it in my review of it :P
http://gregwild.livejournal.com/2008/09/12/

Spore Review

I kept getting the impression as I played that they originally wanted to create an evolution-Sim, where if you streamlined or added longer legs your critter was faster, if you painted it green you could hide in foliage, if you added a counterweight tail you could turn easier, and so on… but the complexity of engineering such a system was beyond their ability to create and/or make ‘fun’.

I’m left with a few interesting character and building editors, and if I wanted to edit characters I could boot up 3d Studio Max. :/

But, yeah, I’m disappointed that there’s not more of the spirit of Sim Earth and Sim Life (or even Sim City, for that matter) about the later stages. Surely the point of a game/creator/shareything about evolution should be the richness of interactions?

Alex, Spore was a BIG DEAL. You had a BIG OPPORTUNITY here. You dropped the ball. BIG TIME.

Now if only I could have those editors in Space Ranger 2, StarCon 2, Gal Civ2 and all those other wonderful games that actualy got the space thing right. Also, is it just me or does Spore have nothing to do with evolution or science, I mean I really don’t see how this thing hits any of the marks Will Wright was talking about… far closer to intelligent design.

An elaboration of the hologram scout please, I want to beam an away-team to a planet and have lazer hijinks!

I’m still mad about that, yes.

When I first got to the editors (besides the Creature Creator which was, of course, old news) I was blown away. Instantly, I drew a comparison with Lego – it’s not hard to see why, I hope. Lego is the ultimate sandbox – as everyone knows, the only limit is your imagination. (And, of course, how many bricks you have, and of what kind. ;) ) With Spore, I find the editors to be really quite capable and accommodating – although I would love a legitimate way of building a money-no-object, complexity-no-object spacecraft, for example. Nonetheless, within reason, I can do whatever I want in the Spore editor.

Now take this to the Creature stage. Once you are in a position to mate and therefore evolve, you are given free reign over your creation; you have been given a bunch of Lego pieces, in effect, and they are yours for the playing with. I consider it my responsibility to impose limitations and shape my experience; if I want my evolution to look like ‘real’ evolution, in that changes are small, then I will only make small changes.

If anything, I find that Spore imposes too many limitations for gameplay’s sake – for example, if I want my creature to have all four Social skills at a decent level, my choice of feet/hands/mouth are severely limited. The effect is that, at many points in the future, I will find myself reusing the same few parts in order to make “better” creatures each and every time, providing of course that I actually go through the whole process with them at all – which, obviously, I feel discouraged to do because of this very point. (This is, however, an interesting study in convergent evolution. ;) )

I guess I was merely expecting a different game from the game which most people appear to have expected; in fact, when I got to the Space stage, I was genuinely shocked to see so much potential, and so much actual genuine gameplay. I really was expecting (maybe even hoping for) a lot less – especially after having played through the previous stages.

My main point, though, is that for the most part this is a game limited by your imagination and your rules – at least until the tribal and civ stages, although normal service is pretty much resumed in Space. If the evolution of your creature doesn’t seem to work how you want it – then pretend it does. Impose your own limitations, make up your own stories, set your own goals. It is up to the player to decide how they play.

To this effect, I would love to see the Tribal and Civ stages opened up a bit – made a bit more open-ended, more like the sandbox of the other stages. But we can’t have it all, and they’re really not all that bad… :)

EDIT: HOT CRAPS that is one long post. :( I hereby declare TL;DR