Anyone remember this?

All of these.

One of the first games that truly burned me.

So many broken promises.

So what IS the actual story for why Spore was a letdown? Half the time I hear it was because of the game being gutted, and half the time it's because they just didn't have the ability to actually program the planned features.

Or is it both?

I think people hyped it up to be some kind of sandbox genre messiah and when it didn't have 1,000,000,000,000 different randomly assigned variables and options to pick from at the beginning of the game it drove people off.

Honestly, Spore was doomed to fail. The focus was too broad. There were too many things the game needed to do. I mean it's essentially several games duct-taped together. With unlimited time and budget, sure, it could have been a masterpiece. But realistically, this game was always going to suck. It's like a Veeky Forums homebrew project: too much trying to be crammed into too little.

It's so obvious in hindsight. I don't understand how we didn't see it coming.

Probably a mix. The first one seems more likely, as the initial tech demos seemed to work decently, and the final art style is really cartoony compared to that.

People were expecting a more serious evolution style game where the actions you take influence your traits, and it behaves as such. It was probably never going to be as in-depth as people wanted, but it hardly came close.

Originally there was supposed to be an aquatic mode, an early civilization mode and a DNA builder mode. All that plus a few other things got cut from the final release, I also heard that a bunch of religious nuts forced them to change the name of the game but that was probably just a rumor.

It was pretty fucking bad.

It had lots of potential. If you go back and watch some of the gameplay and stuff they had when it was in creation, it looked pretty good. It looked fun, it had lots of possibilities. Pretty much this , I guess. Random generation, complete customization, and something that wasn't quite as dry as a simulator.

Ended up being a dumbed-down game made for kids, with cartoony visuals and parts of the game that were really, really dry. I wouldn't liken it to Mass Effect levels of disappointment, but close.

What the last guy said to an extent. Primarily, it was a letdown because Will Wright and his E3 presentations of Spore made it look so much better than the final product. They had a fucking fish stage implemented at one point and then abandoned it for Christ's sake. He also hyped up the amount of procedural generation that the game would see, such as having the other animals evolve too, and more complex tribal and civilization stages.

Will Wright buys into his own hype and it infects everything he touches.

Combine that with the fact that the dev team was indeed gutted, and because the concept itself was so vast in scope even if the dev team wasn't trashed, they never would have had time to build and polish everything that had been promised.

So they basically just threw out a half-hearted shell of a game and tried to make a profit from the hype.

I hated the Space section. Aside from a stupid expensive turret you are your species only reasonable defense against everything. You can't explore shit for 5 minutes without having to go back and fix up some messes.

Tribe stage is super boring, my dude. You could at least ignore the colonies and put off shit until you absolutely had to do them. Everything was constantly up your ass in tribal. I liked the city stage the most, I think.

City and tribal stages were both really simplistic RTS games.

I almost would have preferred they just focus all of their efforts on creature stage for an evolution sim.

>Combine that with the fact that the dev team was indeed gutted, and because the concept itself was so vast in scope even if the dev team wasn't trashed, they never would have had time to build and polish everything that had been promised.
Generally you don't gut the resources of a highly anticipated release that looks like it's going to be good. If I had to guess, EA realized they had a turd on their hands and that there was no way this could be good, sell for $60, AND turn a profit, no matter how much hype there was. The game was going to be a huge disappointment with tons of bad press no matter what they did, so they chose damage control and cut the team down as far as they could while still being able to create a functional game.

> Starts of pretty neat
> Evolves into poor 3D action-adventure
> Evolves into even shittier low-scale RTS
> Evolves into horrible, horrible mess of a large-scale RTS that made most people just stop playing.
> Supposedly gets good after that point but probably not and most people stopped before it anyways.

It was a shit game and you have shit taste.

It tried to do many things, but failed at all

I actually got into the community, especially the galactic adventures expansion segment, and made a bunch of fun adventures with the neat AI options they offered and collaborated with others. I eventually got a bunch of my creations featured, and had two on the front page right before they axed community support. The adventures are still there. It was fun, but as everyone said it is a bad game.

Cell stage was ok for what it was but ultimately forgettable and repetitive.

Beast/animal/whatever stage was fun, I was there had been more to it.

Tribal stage was and absolutely terrible chore with almost everything balanced against your tribe.

City stage was fun but you were pretty much constantly under attack and you had to finish it quick or else you were dead.

Space stage was overall the best because of all the stuff you could do, and the attacks/biodisasters became easy to deal with once you had leveled up.

I thought city was fairly easy because all you have to do is go full jew and shill everyone and everything. Eventually you can buy out everyone on the planet. Hardest was probably the religious path.

It had sooooo much potential to be a really good game. Just didn't deliver

Bump

basically this, starts out great and innovative and gets shittier every stage beyond that

idk what you're talking about btw, i reached the center of the galaxy and it was still shit

There was never a DNA mode, you're quoting a screenshot from Veeky Forums.

How was religious the hardest? You didnt make anyone mad at you and you just had to shoot your religio-beams at everyone and you win

>city stage
Militaristic was pretty easy too. You could replace those turrets for really cheap if you just sold them right before they exploded, and after you got a few cities it was a matter of snowballing through all the others.

I also came to hate the space stage because
>galactic empire
>one guy has to keep wiping the colonies' asses every three seconds or else they explode
>gets their greatest and most distinguished captain to move spice, trees, and space-cows
>not like we have merchants or space-truckers to do this crap
>nope gotta make the fucking hero of our species do landscaping like he's a fucking gardener

>Rolling in space-bux and spice, enormous empire
>No serious military beyond that one fucking captain
>Nobody reliable to defend planets

>You are the only hope for this massive dozens-of-planets empire against all the xenos and borg
>You get one ship. ONLY one ship.
>Can only get more ships trough alliance for god-knows-why
>Get an alliance
>Each allied power gives one ship and that's it
>If it gets killed, you have to personally go all the way back to their stupid planet to get another one.

There was a lot to explore and do, but I feel like the game kept pulling me away from the fun stuff for menial crap that really should have been outsourced to some trucker or combat AI a long time ago. Shit I'd have been willing to pay space-bux for those assholes or even let them take a cut of the spice if it meant I didn't have to deal with constant "give us more space trees" missions.

I always ended up getting everyone mad and getting dicked on by the aggressive civs. That was in like middle school, so I wasn't especially focused on the strategy part of the game anyway. Inb4 underage, graduated yesterday

Yeah, space was kinda shit. I had some empire build a colony on my planet's moon without permission and my civ didn't even know them that well. Felt like an overattached girlfriend, or something.

obviously me

Man, you guys remember how there was going to be learning in the game? Like I distinctly remember a preview where your critter would learn to drag food, for instance.

this is the game that gave me my fear of hype trains.
I was riding first class on the spore hype train. I played Spore a lot of Spore. Essentially cell stage was cool, creature stage was cool if you just stayed in creature stage. tribal + civ was awful and space was what ever.
Grievances:
NO aquatics creatures
NO hive creatures
NO strategy to creature creation
NO fur
NO flying creatures
NO non symmetrical creatures
Each planet only has one intelligent species
Giant creatures were basically forgotten after creature stage
NO Deathstars in Space stage
You could not set a planet up to be able to defend itself
Each planet was literally a copy paste
alliances among planets were essentially meaningless

...

>Giant creatures were basically forgotten after creature stage
their was a gizmo that allowed you to make a kaiju from some random creature. And I would rarely run into one I hadn't made on some random planet I was buying. Trade race FTW.
>NO Deathstars in Space stage
again a gizmo, I think it was a bomb, that allowed you to blow planets up. But then everyone else gets buttmad even if you do it on the grox (I think) or some useless tier 0 world.

Couldn't you ally with the Grox? Or am I mis-remembering?

As bad as Will Wright is, he still pales in comparison to Peter Molyneux. Remember the fucking jew cube and the turd that rolled out of it? Or anything he ever touched?

This game burned me good.
I got my money's worth with the creature creator but the rest of the game is so bad.
I waited years for this game to be released and I bought the game before I even had a PC.
I was expecting a evolution simulator that was might be cartoony but still in-depth. Boy was I wrong.

Fucking Grox. I went back and made a special ship just to fuck them in the ass and drove a channel of death right through their territory on my way to the core. I got the special staff, turned off the game and never once restarted it, I was so fucking pissed at the reward.

>not simply burning every planet you meet to a crisp
No hands no colonies no problems

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