Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spore Stats

spore.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 104 posts

Re: Spore Stats

#61

Post by ouid »

guidedlight wrote: post #6

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 tha…

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.

Re: Spore Stats

#62

Post by mattl »

guidedlight wrote: post #6

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 tha…

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

Re: Spore Stats

#63

Post by kevinmchugh »

CoryAlexMartin wrote: post #49
delusional wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There actually were things of note from the early demos that didn't make it into the final game. For example, the way you created your creature had gameplay implications. Things like limb length, limb count, limb placement, center of mass, etc were going to influence the viability and pros and cons of your creature. However, there were philosophical disagreements between team members and ultimately the decision was m…

I've seen it hinted that the ~half dozen designers had pretty different visions and that seems to have caused a bunch of churn and disagreements.

Re: Spore Stats

#64

Post by kevinmchugh »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #19
delusional wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There was a lot of potential, and I think that if they did a sequel where they added depth to every stage it would've been a lot better. I mean the last part of the game is a 4x like Stellaris, other parts are RTS / city builders, etc. On that note, I wonder why there hasn't been anything like it from the indie developer space.

I think the fundamental creature tech was so expensive (time and scale) to develop that indies couldn't possibly replicate it

Re: Spore Stats

#65

Post by smoldesu »

samstave wrote: post #59
MagicMoonlight wrote: post #40

I want a modern sequel for this. It was so good. Making your little wigglebugs and then conquering the other wigglebugs and burning their towns and taking their women.

Spore with Subnautica style graphics would be nice.

Kinda what No Man's Sky is, but with more of an emphasis on creature discovery than evolution.

I guess it's not exactly the same thing, but I always look forward to the shitty RNG-based plants and animals it cooks up. It feels right out of a Will Wright game.

Re: Spore Stats

#66

Post by dougSF70 »

guidedlight wrote: post #6

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 tha…

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....

Re: Spore Stats

#67

Post by Pxtl »

I'm always disappointed the tech behind Spore hasn't gotten more use. I mean, Spore the game was bad, but Spore the system where players could build any kind of animal and vehicle in easy user-friendly tools? Why didn't that take off in other games? The only spin-off was Darkspore which flopped.

Re: Spore Stats

#68

Post by TheCaptain4815 »

People who aren’t old enough won’t understand how much hype this game had. I’m in my 30’s and still to this day no game has been more hyped and flopped for myself than spore.

The interesting part is had they went ahead with the “scientific” and realistic route, I’d bet the game would have sold so much more.

Re: Spore Stats

#69

Post by lightedman »

Hey, the only game I sued over (and won!)

I wouldn't touch that game after the DRM in that garbage screwed with my GPU (9800GTX+ suddenly no longer to utilize 16:9 resolutions) and my DVD drive writing capability was wiped out, both immediately after installing the Spore Creature Creator.

EA got smacked really hard in that courtroom. They settled immediately.

Re: Spore Stats

#70

Post by acdha »

guidedlight wrote: post #6

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 tha…

> 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/

> 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.

Post reply on HN