What Would You Do To Improve Spore? Based on current information given by EA and Will, what would you do to improve Spore and make it even better?
Will Wright talked about how putting more content in a game may cause less than an equal improvement in the value of the game. "When you're starving in the desert, one apple is a big deal, but when you already have one-hundred apples, the hundred-and-first is not worth that much." But Mr. Wright realized that if the player creates his own content, then he becomes involved in the game. Mr. Wright was involved in his character "Moe" in Grand Theft Auto, because he could customize Moe's look to make Moe his own. Ok, Mr. Wright's involved, but he has to be involved in SOMETHING. He played Grand Theft Auto for doing bike tricks, absolutely NOT for shooting things and stealing cars. Why did Grand Theft Auto have BIKE TRICKS in their game? That's because content sells. Bike isn't even in the title, it's the furthest thing from the developer's mind, but if Grand Theft Auto did not have bike tricks, Mr. Wright would not have become involved, because he would have nothing that he wanted to do. Spore doesn't have the bike tricks, because Will Wright wanted to have "40% of the best of Civilizations, 40% of the best of Sim City, ..." etc. But if players only want a Civ game, then they might find that 40% of a Civ game is not enough, and they want the full thing. I don't expect Spore to have all the content right now. Spore hasn't had 14 years to get content, like Civilizations has. But if Spore does eventually, Spore may win over 100% Civ games. The point is that Spore must have lots of content like the other games, so players can be involved in SOMETHING, even if it seems as totally irrelevant as bike tricks, because that sells. Anyway, I have to say that Spore is AWESOME! All of the info about Will Wright came from his speech about Spore at the 2005 Game Developers Conference http://www.pqhp.com/cmp/gdctv/topic3.htm#aa16-wright
Spore is the first of its kind, and so it will be hard to improve. Thats kind of like asking how to improve doom or Wolf 3D before it came out, eventually it will become like F.E.A.R or Far cry but it will take time. Think of the sims, Spore 2 or Spore Expansion will have more choices for content to add, but i think is will be everyone else who creates inprovments rather then Maxis. This is EVO 2, but better =)
I would like somtimes having an alein species take over your planet and you get to revolt . Tribes VS Citys for the win .
Based on the current information, I think what would greatly improve it is for it to ACTUALLY EXIST. Vaporware is rather useless.
I just want it to be fair. I don't want any corollaries to the sims style programming SNAFUs that involve deliberate time-outs for wait to receive and action being shorter by mere moments than the shortest time the game can fulfill the action ... try feeding smart milk to a toddler with free will on ... how many visitors leave while your sim is still putting the chess pieces away? Dumb dumb dumb. MAXIS! Make Spore FAIR!
There're two types of sims games that I've seen: Completely free form games like Second Life, which have virtually no rules whatsoever, and then there're Will Wright's type of sims games, where the player can still excercise a huge amount of creative freedom, albeit in the confines set by the developers. What I really want, is to have Spore strike the fine balance between the two. What I mean by that is I want to be able to have total and complete creative control over my universe, yet still have the basic sets of rules to prevent it from degenerating into an utterly unplayable mess. A very good example of what I mean is when he shows you the hut and spear rack during the tribal stage of the game. That is the kind of subtley restrictive gameplay that ruined The Sims for me. Just because evolution happened this way on our fair planet, doesn't mean it should happen that way too in my computer, albeit with a different cast of actors a brand new stage. I'd also want them to fluff out the various stages of the game more. This is the inherent danger in cramming so many aspects into a game: they all end up being Lite versions of their source material. From what I saw, every single stage of the game felt like a Flash game that was thrown together in 2 weeks, only with better graphics, especially the primordial and hunter stages. They didn't look like anything that I haven't played before in a simpler form on Newgrounds. Just like a previous poster said: a lot of players are going to dive into Spores with high expectations for their favorite stage of the game, and they're going to come out sorely disappointed. So all Spore is right now, to me at least, is just an interactive alternative Earth history lesson you would expect to see in an elementary school computer, rather than the end-all-be-all simulator game on every gamer's PC.
Digged up my old account again Anyway from what I've seen I'd love to have the space part a bit more expanded. Fleet like stuff, like building space stations and space ships and trading with other species. Because from what I've seen now is that the only thing you can control is one space ship and you fly trough the galaxy a bit. I'd love to be able to do a mass invasion with a thousand ships pouring down on a little alien helpless planet.
I personally think they should make the part where you are a lone creature bigger, on the video conference thingy, Will completes it in about 10 minutes :ermm:
Well duh he uses the dev mode to cheat otherwise the confrence would lastlike 2 days untill we got through to the point he stoped at...
Yeah but it does look pretty short, even though its obvious he cheated. I think they need to develop a story mode for the lone creature, that would be awesome. Like their is a big bad lizard killing everyone, you must advance your creature then fight it out with him. Then a bigger one comes
The one thing that Spore must have is the capacity to develop its physical constraints. It is impossible to conceive that the game could ever ship with the potential to fulfill all possible players' wants, needs and desires. I'd quite like to explore the possibility of evolution in a free-fall environment (see the Wikipedia article on Larry Niven's Integral Trees) The problem with human imagination is that it is too often limited by human scale experience. There are very few examples of fiction where the scope of the idea is almost too immense to grip. Larry Niven's Smoke Ring has to be one of the best and most fantastical whilst still rooted within the relams of the physically possible. That is to say it relies upon the same laws of physics that everything else does ... which is more than one can say for pixies, elves and orcs If Spore became a glorified Dungeons and Dragons, sword and sorcery vehicle (much like I imagine WoW to be) then I shall not be a buyer.
So freedom to do anything excludes killing lizards should the player choose to do so, after paying for the privilige to play the game? I like your logic. And nah, I don't think Will is that kind of a developer, Mirelly. It completely goes against what this game is about anyway. Your first 2 paragraphs summed up my gripe about the game perfectly, however. If me and you can see the path this game is heading down, why can't Mr. Wright the genius game maker see it? I applaud him for bringing to the mainstream the "ancient secret European development technique", but the way he's trying to bridge so many different genres while neglecting to creat enough content for any is going to spell disaster and disappointment for legions of different genre enthusiasts.
Well oink your banned but I am gonna reply anyway. Yes it is there right BUT you are making it as they HAVE to do it like an objective thus destroying the objectivlessness ( well other then evolving) of the game. Objectivlessness is copyright of the ROE assosiation of made up words.
I see your point. That's in keeping with what Will said at the GDS or whatsits summit; he wanted to create a game of the future that only takes up as much space as games of the past, made possible by player-created contents and procedural rendering. I guess Doom's idea of wrapping the game in a predetermined confine would probably go against the premise of Spore. In any other evolution/conquest type game, it would have been a welcome and bolstering addition. But in Spore, all those dedicated role-players and aspiring science fiction writers will just have to make their own stories up, instead of having the developers do it for them. Let's just hope this "free ranged toy" from Mr. Wright will entertain long enough so that the lack of a script can be seen as an asset instead of a burden.